Practicum Reflection Essay

My practicum site was the NIST Information Technology Laboratory. I found out about the site and the site supervisor through a previous internship connection that allowed me to connect with Dr.Sarala Padi at NIST. For future SGC Scholars I would recommend being as active as possible in contacting possible practicum mentors and connections via email, LinkedIn, or other professional connections. On site I performed a lot of data analysis tasks with audio, visual, and text data working with python packages and tools to create multimodal representations of data for training and testing a machine learning algorithm for emotion recognition. This experience taught me how intertwined computer science is with many aspects of society and how much impact computer science can have in the future with the rise of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. Emotion Recognition is just a facet of coming technologies that can change the world in a number of ways, which became more clear to me throughout my time working. This experience made me appreciate the impact computer science has had on society and how much the technology can still change the way people live their lives if applies correctly. This experience made me start to consider attempting a masters degree with machine learning as a focus and has definitely helped solidify my interest in this scope of computer science which I would pursue as I enter my career. Overall I think my practicum was a great experience that taught me a lot which I really enjoyed.

Last modified: 2 May 2023