During the summer of 2019, I was lucky enough
to participate in a Summer Team Impact Project (STIP) mentored and led by Dr.
Louis Roduriguez, Dr. Tyrus Barry and Shanshan Cui whom all respectively
mentored their own team. The project revolved around creating a novel and
intuitive web tool that analyzes genomic data using statistical analysis. The
whole project workload was split up into three distinct groups all working on
three important parts divided up into the front end, middle-ware and back end.
I
personally worked on the back end portion of the team helping to design, create
and write algorithms for the web tool. What first got me interested was the
opportunity to work on an exciting project with fellow students, researchers
and mentors. This opportunity allowed me to work in an environment which
closely mirrors real world experiences, expectations and feel by having the
freedom to solve problems however the team saw fit. This unique experience will
be extremely beneficial to my long-term employment goals.
On a weekly basis all
the teams would concurrently work together on certain problems related to
creating the web tool whether that be how the site looked or how fast
algorithms ran and on Friday we would all get together and give an update on
how what we worked on and any ideas that we could add on.
One thing I
discovered was how challenging and rewarding it is to work on a project of this
size with multiple people as you encounter a lot of things you would never have
thought about.
