Week 3 & 4

The past two weeks have been about shifting gears - wrapping up one role, stepping into a new one, attending workshops, and diving deeper into classes.

One highlight was attending the National Transportation Data & Analytics Solution (NTDAS) workshop, led by Lavanya Sayam, Senior Manager of Data Analytics at IEEE. The platform combines robust transportation datasets with advanced analytics tools like mapping, visualization, and in-depth analysis (AND it’s free for anyone at CU). Seeing live demonstrations and real-world use cases made me realize how versatile NTDAS can be for research projects. I walked away with a much clearer sense of how tools like this can expand the scope of academic work.

I also wrapped up my Data Engineering role at CU Libraries. Over the past few months, I worked on cataloging nearly 4,000 high-resolution TIFF images of historical tsunami marigrams. That meant writing scripts for metadata extraction, duplicate detection, hashing, OCR pipelines, and YAML/CSV structuring - all documented here: Tsunami Marigram Metadata Extractor. Thank you to Erik Radio and Aaron Sweeney for their patience and guidance throughout. I’ll continue collaborating on publishing an article about this project, since the work has meaningful implications for tsunami research and forecasting.

At the same time, I started my new role as an Impact Intern at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Research & Innovation Office (RIO). Thank you to Dr. Tanya Ennis for this opportunity, and to Gabrielle Dunn for guiding me through the first steps. Definitely big shoes to fill. The name itself carries weight: impact. I’m excited to contribute to this team and explore the ways data and research can drive meaningful change.

This semester, I’m also taking three classes:

I’m especially looking forward to digging into the math behind neural nets and exploring Jurafsky & Martin third edition of Speech and Language Processing. Also, a skill I want to sharpen this semester is to learn how to communicate findings clearly to stakeholders.

Outside the classroom, I’ve been practicing showing up in new spaces. I attended the on-campus job fair, not because I was looking for a role, but to practice my elevator pitch with hiring managers. It turned out to be fun, and I got to refine how I introduce myself.


     


I also went to the Be Involved Fair, where CU’s clubs and societies set up stalls. Some stood out to me: the AI Club, Women of Color in STEM, T9Hacks, Society of Women Engineers CU Boulder, HackCU, and CU Women in Computing. It reminded me that there are so many ways to stay engaged beyond coursework.

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