MBI REU Summer Fellowship

This is the recording of my talk, “Modeling Hair Cortisol as a Biomarker of Chronic Stress” from the Summer Research Fellowship I did in summer 2017. The research and talk experience was fantastic. I’m proud of the analytics and collaboration we accomplished, and glad to have the recording of this talk. This talk was given at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Capstone Conference. My slides can be found here.

CAS Summer Internship

The 2018 CAS Intern Analytics team

The 2018 CAS Intern Analytics team


This summer I was a Technology Intern at CAS. I was the data analyst on the five person intern team, which was tasked with looking at social media data and CAS’s publication data. Working with 3 computer science majors and a chemical engineering major, I got to do all of the statistics and visualizations for the team. I enjoyed using Agile and Scrum methodologies with the team, and learning from lots of knowledgeable full time CAS employees.

One of the things I learned while completing my STEP project was that I enjoy and am better suited for data analytics work than computer science architecture. We were working on a project where all we were given in the beginning was a question, and no previous work or architecture to build off of, so all of our team members, include me, got to work to different degrees with setting up everything we need for the project. In the process of using so many new tools to solve the problems we faced, one of the most valuable things we learned was when to stop investing in a solution and move to a different approach. I also really enjoyed the decision making and problem solving element of the summer. Strategizing when we hit difficulties, like when Twitter still hadn’t given us API access by half way through our internship, was a point of growth, as was communicating with many different industry experts. Now, I know much better the ways in which analysts and computer scientists work together to build projects, and have a better understanding of the way different views play into the success of a whole.

The key events of my STEP project experience included bi-weekly intern luncheons, weekly sprint planning, demo, and retro meetings, and presenting to our CTO. Every other Friday of the summer, the Intern Planning Team brought the 20 CAS Technology interns together for lunch, and someone gave a themed talk. We heard from our CTO, got and shared updates with the other interns, gave feedback on the intern program, and heard from several members of the Intern Planning Team. It felt good to be invested in, and to see that the people who brought us to CAS were still present throughout our program. Every week we had a planning meeting on Monday, and a demonstration of the week’s work as well as a time to think retrospectively on how we worked as a team that week on Friday. This agile process helped us to catch our failures fast and often, get feedback from our stakeholders, expand on our successes, solve problems before they became large, and pivot our perspective when necessary. The last week of our internship, we presented in a meeting to our CTO, and in a poster session to other CAS employees. The CTO’s recognition of our work and interest in it being continued, and the opportunity to communicate to CAS employees about 12 weeks worth of work was exciting.

The key relationships of my project included getting to know and work with our product owners, and being introduced to employees in the Tech division who did very different jobs from me. Our product owners attended our weekly sprint planning, demos, and retros, along with our team Scrum Master, and it was cool not only to get to know them, but to see how they interacted with each other and us, and learn from their example. During mostly the second half of the summer, I got to know and was introduced to one of our product owners and a couple of other employees in the Tech division, and got to chat with them individually over lunch. It felt good to take my own initiative to expand my network while surrounded with so many experienced professionals at CAS, and to hear their stories and advice.

Overall, one of the biggest interactions I got to grow from was the casual everyday teamwork that developed within our intern team. Our skills were different enough but our investment and desire to grow strong enough that we fit well and pushed towards our goal of addressing the question we were assigned. Working in an open area, we had the chance to talk to each other, ask questions, and collaborate more than we would have potentially in cubicles, and with the same daily schedules, spent nearly all of our time together and got to know each other well. Having not collaborated on such a large project before, it was a valuable experience to have so much time to invest in the work and the collaboration.

This change was significant for my life immediately because I am now more equipped to be a junior in data analytics. After having done real world industry work, I better know how to approach my more specific analytics coursework and tasks. I got the context that surrounds analytics which I hadn’t previously had, and strengthened technical and soft skills that we don’t get to exercise as often in the classroom. In the future I plan to become a full time data scientist, and would love to work in user experience research. The skills I strengthened this summer focused me on my path, and the interactions with more established professionals showed me the paths I may take to get there. I know the value of hard work and diligence, but also know the flexibility life requires.

Originally posted at u.osu.edu/stepinternships18