Fall 2021 - Summer 2022

Varis

During the 2021-2022 academic year, I worked part-time as a Software Development Engineer 1 at Varis, which was a continuation of my internship at Office Depot the summer prior (Varis split from Office Depot at the end of my internship). This was an amazing opportunity to gain real-world experience alongside my fall/spring coursework, as well as create stronger connections with my coworkers. The workload was not as intense as it was when I was an intern since I only had the bandwidth for about 10-15 hours of work a week, but I still learned some useful technologies and gained experience that will serve me well in future roles, which it already has (see Confluent)!

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Honors Student Council

I served as the Vice President of Social Programming during this school year, but I like to say that I unofficially served as the Vice President of Computer Programming as well. Likely my largest impact on the organization was when I created a web application that allowed Honors Student Council member students to track their event participation status with just a few clicks. Over nine months later, this remains my proudest software project. The app asks users for their last name and their UIN, and displays a list of each event they attended so far that semester (date, title, category) and whether they were meeting requirements or not. Before this app existed, members had to email the HSC president to inquire about their membership status and whether they met the requirements for that semester. This app saved members and especially the president from unnecessary email correspondence, and it also facilitated participation management for individual students, which increased active membership in the organization by 30%. At peak times (near the end of the semester), the web app handled up to 400 requests per week.

The project was an amazing opportunity for me to showcase my passion, motivation, development skills, and my ability to execute a project from start to finish, to future employers during interviews. I strongly believe that talking about this project in my interview landed me my internship for the upcoming Fall semester (see Amazon)!

I am excited to continue serving Honors Student Council, this time as the President for the 2022-2023 academic year. I believe this role will strengthen my leadership skills by focusing on public speaking and overall communication while also allowing me to give back to the larger Honors community.

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Confluent

This summer, I took my career up a notch by joining Confluent as a Software Engineer Intern. I strongly believe that one of the primary reasons I got an offer to intern for this company was because I had used Confluent's data-streaming product while I worked at Varis. Since Confluent works on a niche technology, the interviewers must have been impressed that I was familiar with it despite still being an undergraduate student. Regardless, the role I am working in at Confluent aligned very closely with my future career goals and computer science specialization (distributed systems and cloud computing). This internship enabled me to work with cutting-edge technology alongside seasoned industry professionals creating a product that I am passionate about. This experience was extremely valuable not only because it looks great on a resume, but also because it allowed me to refine my specialization interest and learn more about what problems exist in cloud computing.

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Amazon

At the beginning of the summer, I received the unexpected good news of an SDE internship offer from Amazon (more specifically, Amazon Web Services) in Seattle, WA for Fall 2022. Working for one of the largest and most renowned tech companies in the world is a dream come true and for the most part, fulfills my early career goals sooner than I anticipated. In large part, I believe this is due to the value I brought to Honors Student Council via my events tracker web application, which most likely reflected positively in my interview.

The ability to work on one of the most popular cloud computing technologies (AWS) will provide me with the most valuable experience I've had to date. Working at AWS will unlock many doors in my future and it is difficult to overstate just how career-changing this opportunity is. It truly is the culmination of everything I have worked so hard to achieve throughout my college experience.

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Undergraduate Research

To fulfill the University Honors Capstone as well as Engineering Honors requirements, I will be participating in the Undergraduate Research Scholars (URS) program by joining a research group under Dr. Aakash Tyagi in the CSCE department. The research is led by a doctoral student who is studying the application of Machine Learning to help Verilog RTL writers design computer chips faster by providing real-time power & timing feedback on their designs. Part of the research project involves creating an actual software product to demonstrate the usefulness of the research, which will require software engineering work using technologies I am somewhat familiar with. However, I am also interested in learning more about the ML aspects of the research. Overall, participating in this project will allow me to utilize my past experiences in software engineering in addition to expanding my horizons into the field of Machine Learning, and as a result, I will have a thesis to show for it by the end of college!