Haesue Baik

Honors Engineering - M-Portfolio

BSE Computer Science 2026
BSE Robotics 2026

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Hi! My name is Haesue Baik!

I’m a sophomore pursuing a double major in Robotics and Computer Science at the University of Michigan.

Robots have fascinated me for years. The way they interact with each other to solve problems together as well as how they interact with people and the world around them leaves so much to learn. My focus is robotics research, specifically in swarm robotics.

I’ve always been a STEM girl, loving my science and technology classes in my K-12 classes. This evolved into a love for engineering at the end of high school.

Recent Impactful Learning Experiences

ROB 311 - How to Make Robots and Make Them Move

I felt extremely under qualified for this class when I started. I felt as though I was lacking background in many areas and experience with the tools we were using. Due to this, I was forced to connect with many more of my classmates than I do in most of my classes. One of the people I worked with was my teammate. Together, over the course of the semester, we built a ball-bot, a robot which balanced on top of a basketball and drove it around. We spent our time going through the entire engineering process and pulling skills from various areas. We designed, fabricated, and built the robot. In addition wired, coded, tested, and tweaked our robot to improve.

From this class I learned a lot about communicating and how important a community is. If we didn’t work with other teams, none of us in the class would have done well. In addition, we improved our risk management skills. We had to decide between a guaranteed 80% or a chance at 90% depending on how we configured the robot.

REUSE - Research Experience for Undergraduates in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon

The REUSE program was my first research experience. My research was creating and evaluating the possible applications of a configuration-based performance fuzzer. I expanded the JQF fuzzing library on github by creating a new performance fuzzer, which compared the effectiveness of a program with different configuration settings. The fuzzer would create “random” inputs and assess the difference in runtimes between two configurations. Based on that, it would then decide whether or not to create more inputs similar to the input that was just run.

From this experience, I learned more and got more comfortable with git repositories. In addition, as my first research experience, I learned more about what research is. I learned how to find and read research papers effectively, communicate with a professor about progress, and what problems I should solve on my own vs as my professor, among other things.

It was also learning how to communicate in a group and reporting to someone. I learned how to give regular updates, the best way of communicating information, and what content to leave in or cut out of an update.