June 30, 2021

Last Friday, at 10:00am, I hit submit on my last final exam of the summer term, and was officially done with my undergraduate education, something I still haven’t fully processed. As I prepare to step away from the campus of UMich, I can’t help but reflect on everything that’s taken place over the past four years. Between a Final Four appearance for the men’s basketball team, a College World Series appearance from our baseball team and, most recently, a national title for the women’s gymnastics team, it really has been great to be a Michigan Wolverine recently (we can ignore the football team’s struggles, for now). More importantly, I am grateful for all the knowledge and skills I’ve acquired throughout my studies, and I can’t wait to put them to use as I begin my professional journey.

About 18 months ago, I thought I had everything figured out for my remaining semesters at school. Back then, I was only majoring in statistics, and just a few electives away from being ready to graduate. I was setting myself up for a career as a data analyst, and I was really enjoying what I learned in my electives, especially my Data Mining and Computational Methods in Data Science classes. After realizing the importance of having a solid computing background in the world of modern statistics, I decided to declare a minor in computer science, to strengthen my programming abilities.

After taking the introductory programming classes, however, I discovered I had a passion for coding. And though I was content with the skills I had picked up, I wanted to go deeper with my learning. Suddenly, I was faced with a choice: do I continue with my current path and settle for a minor, or do I change things up and upgrade to a second major? To accomplish the latter, I would need to take many more classes, and postpone my expected graduation date. Ultimately, I was willing to accept those conditions, and I declared the major in computer science, a decision I am very glad to have made.

After two straight years of summer classes, and packing the majority of my final semesters with programming courses, I am eager to apply everything I've learned with my two degrees into the real world. Many of the projects I completed over the years got me interested in the applications of these tools I had known little about previously. In my machine learning course, a dog breed image classification assignment enlightened me on the pace of development in research surrounding neural networks, which drives many innovative technologies that will soon become ubiquitous across society. My database management systems course helped me understand there is no one-size-fits-all solution for storing information in a database, and I learned about many factors to consider when designing a data schema. And in my web systems class, implementing a small MapReduce framework akin to Hadoop gave me a hands-on demonstration of how powerful distributed systems are in making computationally-heavy tasks more efficient.

Overall, my statistics background has made me a better computer scientist, and my computer science background has made me a better statistician. I hope to utilize this diversity of skills to build meaningful projects, and I can't wait to share some of my work on this site.