Freshman Year: 2020-2021

Wow, what a year! I can’t believe how fast my first year of college went by. It feels like I was moving into Bradley Hall just yesterday and now I’m back home and calling myself a rising sophomore, crazy! Though time flew by, when I reflect on this unusual year I am astonished to see how much I have accomplished and how far I have come. To start, let’s talk about the first semester. 

Going from living at home in quarantine to living on campus was a massive and exciting change. As soon as college started I knew I would love OSU because of the extraordinary people and the beautiful campus, but I had to break the poor habits I created in quarantine to succeed academically. Thus, I quickly had to adjust to the college and online lifestyle which took me a week or two to get the hang of. This included a lot of prioritization and time management skills to make sure I was on top of the constant bombardment of work. With the new changes I made to my habits, I was able to take on a greater workload outside of classes and joined several clubs, which were Engineers Without Borders (EWB), the Big Data Analytics Association (BDAA), and D3. I had a fantastic start to the year but just when I started to settle in and make new friends, I soon made a choice that would change the rest of my semester: I decided to go home because of covid. This shift from college back home was a very difficult adjustment for me because I left all the new relationships I formed back in Columbus. 

To counteract my isolation, I focused on my classes and clubs and soon fell in love with EWB as it combined three things I was very passionate about: engineering / science, travel, and service. In EWB, I joined the international committee that was working on finishing a project oriented around irrigation in The Gambia. Within this project, I was able to help work on a MATLAB script that modeled the optimal time for the pump to collect water for the village. Though I enjoyed the project, what really made the club special was the people. They were extremely kind, passionate, and fun individuals that really supported each other. Since I had such a great experience with EWB, I plan to be involved in their projects for the rest of my career at OSU and hope to take a leadership role at the start of next year. 

Though EWB was a fantastic part of my first semester, the highlight would have to be my participation in the HACK O/HIO competition. This was a 48 hour event from Friday night to Sunday morning challenging the participants to create something to solve a problem. Since HACK O/HIO was my first hackathon I had no expectations on winning. Heck, I didn’t even have a team. I went into the competition knowing absolutely no one and then out of the blue got contacted by a student named Ryan Ziegler asking if I could work with him. From there we started the competition and found we worked really well together. Earlier on in the competition, Ryan and I decided to create an app that improved upon google maps or other routing applications by taking into account the type of car you have, the urgency of your situation, the types of roads, and other factors that influence travel in an attempt to reduce the chance of being routed to traffic jams or dangerous routes. While Ryan worked on the software behind the app, I worked on the algorithm to solve the routes. In the end, our project won the Nexient Challenge, the Honda Challenge, and even earned us a Second Overall finish out of 400 participants. With all the success our project had, it even landed me an internship with Honda R&D for data analytics in the second semester! With such a great weekend, I was hyped up for the approaching finals and closed out my first semester on a high note.

With a great start to my first year of college I was really excited for my second semester, especially since I was moving back on campus. The first few weeks went great until I took my first exam in biology class. Going into college, I had always studied for exams the night before and relied on my participation in class to learn the content. Since focusing on zoom classes was hard for me I was unable to learn effectively through lectures, which meant that most of my learning would have to come through studying. Leading up to my first exam I relied on my high school studying tactics which soon proved to be ineffective with the amount of content that I needed to learn for my midterm. As one would expect, this caused me to drop a low grade on the exam. Though this may seem like a bad thing to discuss in a year-in-review summary, it may have been the best thing to happen to me as it motivated me to change my inadequate high school habits. As soon as the results came back I was determined to improve my study habits and learn the material in small chunks over time rather than cramming for the exam. As the course of the semester went on, my study habits gradually improved which allowed me to learn the material more efficiently, take notes more effectively, and perform better on the exams. Ironically, the exam that I learned the most from was the exam I did the worst on.

Aside from improving in my habits, I was also able to greatly improve my skills as a data scientist through my internship at Honda. Overall I was extremely fortunate to receive this opportunity and couldn’t be happier with how the internship turned out. In the semester I spent with Honda, I gained exposure to SQL, which essentially is a coding language for databases, learned how to create visualizations from raw data, and was introduced to the field of Machine Learning. Though I can’t speak to explicitly about the projects I carried out, they were extremely beneficial for me as I got hands on experience with actual data collected in the field. Aside from all the learning opportunities, I was able to meet some pretty awesome people. Both my internship advisor and data science mentor were extremely kind individuals who always supported me. I really enjoyed this experience and would definitely work with them again if the opportunity arises.

Using the skills that I learned from my internship, I was able to compete in the Data Fest competition, which is a competition to produce a useful visualization from a data source, run through BDAA. During this competition, I worked with three other peers and was able to apply my knowledge of SQL and visualization creation to generate a graph showing the relationship between unprescribed sedative usage, age, and anxiety rate. In the end, our team was a finalist out of 35+ teams. 

With my first year in the books, I have much more time on my hands to complete projects and learn new skills this summer. In a nutshell I would love to continue learning machine learning, get more proficient in app development, continue practicing my guitar, and help progress our class eminence projects. Overall, this year was a great foundation for what’s to come in the next six semesters at OSU and I can’t wait. Go Bucks!