Student Spotlights

Time is the most precious thing we can spend. Our choices dictate how that time is spent and invested for our future. For most of my childhood, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life or career. Being naturally analytic and mathematically-minded I focused my early studies on math and science. I started pursuing a data analytics major here in 2018 after receiving my Associate’s degree. I chose the computation track because of the appeal of the class options and my interest in optimization and high-performance computing. Luckily, I fell in love and haven’t looked back. Due to the track’s focus on math and computer science, I was also able to complete a minor in both while pursuing my Bachelor’s. During the summers I sought out internships to give me real-world experience and to develop my network. My first internship was at Lockheed Martin where I worked with SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) technology. I assisted in the development of a radar simulator for pilot training and developed a program to find the optimal registered SAR image based on certain criteria for ground-truth registration. It was my first opportunity to work on a real team and helped me gain confidence and new skills in the business world. My second internship at Prime Solutions Group also focused on SAR technology. However, it was oriented more toward machine learning capabilities with SAR imagery. I had the opportunity to develop military capabilities by applying neural networks to real and curated datasets. I was also able to work closely with another intern in developing a Java+Python full-stack web interface tool for machine learning. Working on real-world machine learning projects opened my eyes more than ever to its endless capabilities. My most recent internship at SEL was a drastic change from radar technology since most of the work is power system focused. I’ve got to work on several exciting and challenging government-related projects involving machine learning, anomaly detection, optical character recognition techniques, and more. After graduating I will be seeking a data science career, the fields I have my eyes on are medicine, government defense, logistics automation, and finance.

I started school at Everett community college and got my AA in computer science. I then transferred to the newly built WSU Everett campus and decided to do data analytics, which was the first year they offered it. The reason I chose WSU Everett was because it was local and it was the closest school at the time that was offering data analytics. It also had amazing mentors like Nella Ludlow who gave a lot of advice on the industry. I liked the idea of data analytics because I felt it would offer a lot of opportunities to work with machine learning, and it’s always been a dream of mine to do something in AI. The journey wasn’t easy though. For the first couple of classes I was alone, and the only student in the program at the campus. I didn’t have too many people to study with, but this helped me branch out to other students in other disciplines. I believe it helped with my communication skills and taught me how to explain what I am doing at a high level, which becomes useful when working with people in other fields. It was a unique experience and could be challenging at times, but the struggle was worth the payout. My senior year I got an internship with EagleView where they use computer vision and machine learning to pull information out of aerial imagery specifically for roof reporting. This then turned into a full time job as I graduated in 2019.