Hello again!, it’s been quite a while since I last updated the website and I am eagerly going into my junior year of university.
I just wanna talk about this past summer. It really was a wake up call to the competition in this field, frantically looking for internships had me stressed and what I ended up with was sort of a stroke of luck for me. That isn’t to say it was a way to cheap out, but it was a great lesson learnt, and starting at the end of my first internship I’ve already started to apply to different places. It’s an odd experience for me, I did not think it was this early of a window, but with how saturated things are becoming for tech and how easy everyone says it is on tiktok to drool your way into making riches, I cant be too surprised.
Life lesson aside, my internship was quite pleasant. It was a nation science foundation sponsored research site with a focus on computer systems on my campus at the University of Louisville. I was pretty astounded when I found out there was such a thing so near, it had me questioning both my skills to search for these opportunities and the outreach methods employed. Anyway, it was a ten week opportunity that really filled a gap in my lifestyle. When originally joining, I had the idea that all ten of us chosen to be there would be working together but never really connecting like in groups that intend to build a community but everyone there is just for some self gain and it comes off a little awkward. Thankfully, I was pretty far off. I was assigned to work with Professor Olfa Nasraoui of the knowledge discovery and web mining lab, a mentor who’s contributions to this field were pretty lost to me for the first couple of weeks. I had a graduate student mentor there at all times in the lab and a student peer I became and still am very fond of. Additionally, the professor had also gone on to give teachers in the area the fantastic opportunity of learning alongside us and continuing previous research to my knowledge. Their end goal was to carry what they had learned into their future teachings and hopefully inspire those that they work with, pretty heartwarming to hear personally. At the end of the day though, we were all there to make personal advancements in the sub field of machine learning.
The first weeks were a little rough as all things are. Just the natural growing pains, as I had never been in such an opportunity, much less under a mentor and what was essentially a team and community of people trying to help one another this closely and this constantly. I lament to say there were various times I tried to stay in my comfort zone, working silently away with a written guided schedule like I would in university. That is what I wish I did differently sooner. By the half-way mark of the program I became well acquainted with my peer and student mentor, people I see as friends now, along with the professor. Things really got interesting as soon as I ditched that closed off demeanor, and tried to not only communicate more with them but also to trail off of the provided guide as it really was only something recommended to me in the end. In these weeks of the program, I really found a lot of enjoyment. A lot of us really look for community and aside from opening my mind to this knowledge, I also found that in the other students involved in the program but mostly from those I interacted with daily in my lab. I learned a lot from them and was able to work with them to be better in my workflow, my thinking, my final project. Going out to eat with them even was not something I had expected but again thoroughly enjoyed.
Aside from the community aspect, I feel that I was really able to push my experience further in machine learning. Essentially going from nothing to a research poster I could present, complete with results, experiments, future planned work, points that all went to back to everything I had learned be it directly or indirectly. By the end of the ten week program, I could explain black box and white box models, how the LIME methodology worked in different machine learning models, and how the numerical results I got fit into the historical context. This was another eye-opening experience to me, being able to connect the technology to the real world and seeing how it could really help us in data analytics and the end-user in general. This focus on “explainability” wasn’t even a possibility in my original realm of knowledge and that alone just wowed me. Although I was not able to make it as far as I wanted to with explainability, the positive feedback from my mentors really lifted me up. According to my student mentor, I made it to the concept of explainability pretty quick given our short timeline and previous experience. The talks that I had on our final day with people about my work was the culmination of all of that work, and man was that satisfying.
Something I really could not have expected was that I wished for more time. I really felt like I was doing something meaningful and interesting with a community I cared about. More time with these people and more time to do more work is something a lot of us at the REU wished for. I will say, I think I got quite lucky getting such a cool student peer and mentor, but especially the professor as my mentor as she really pushed me to put my best foot forward until the last possible moment. Some of the REU students had little to no contact with their mentors, making me even more appreciative.
The final takeaways that really stick in my mind from this experience is that I could really pursue research and be happy. Research universities was not something I understood before the summer, where faculty will partly teach classes and commit to research with the other portion of their time. With the experience I was provided however, I think I would like to be similar mentor, giving someone else an experience they can look back on fondly and take their learnings with them moving forward. I still plan to find an internship in industry in the coming summer, but being a teacher, a mentor, and a backed up with work researcher doesn’t sound too bad to me anymore. If the industry thing really doesn’t fit me, I know I have graduate school to look into seriously.
To the people I had the chance to work with, it was truly a great time, thank you! I hope to be back soon.