Vikram Rangarajan's Three Semester Review

In SGC, we focused a lot of time on the hypothetico-deductive method of science, which involves testing falsifiable hypotheses. Because this is such a generalized method, I have applied it in many instances in the past few years. I'll focus on how I used it during my current job. I used this method to debug code for one of the workflows which queried a database and saved the result to a file which was to be used for other purposes. Since the tables were quite large, this process had to be done in chunks. The method I was originally using was working almost all the time, but it was giving strange errors for a few tables, so I investigated. In debugging, I made a few hypotheses as to why the script wasn't working. I tested these hypotheses by modifying the code for each one of the possible problems (independently). Finally, I found the true cause of the error. The schema of each of the chunks were slightly different, like a column in one of the chunks could have a float data type instead of an integer data type, and this was causing problems in the creation of the parquet). When I was debugging, I thought back to learning this method explicitly and it gave me a methodological way to test different potential solutions.

One of the news related items I saw which was related to the topics covered in SGC was Hurricane Idalia. This was shown to me by my AOSC200 professor (this class had a lot of overlap with SGC). The storm suddenly increased in intensity in just a few hours and caused hundreds of millions in damages. None of the weather models we had predicted this outcome, and it cost us dearly. The article I read also mentioned that events like these are becoming more and more common due to climate change which lines up with what we learned in SGC and AOSC200.

I think that the most effective topic we had in colloquium was the proxy assignment since we got to deal with actual data and see how it worked, and that related to me since it's more STEM related. Also, in general, the lectures with slides which contained graphs and other visualizations were a lot more educational for me. The in class assignments that we had third semester were not the same, though. They had very vague values and unclear instructions, and it felt like I was just putting random numbers without much evidence into the spreadsheets.

Two of the significant SGC supporting courses I took were AOSC200 (again), and PHYS121. In physics, we actually used the hypothetico-deductive method directly when we wrote our lab reports. I could see the significance of it and how things like error are taken into account in an experiment. We also used excel to do a lot of the work and that kind of related to my major. In AOSC200, my professor related a lot of the content to the real application and referenced the calculations/computing involved, which gave me a lot of interest in the subject that I wouldn't have otherwise had.

I think the SERC trip helped me understand the biological side and field work part of science. Actually catching a fish to show us how sampling is done in the Bay taught me a lot. Some of the trips, like the ones to museums, didn't teach me much. They were fun, though. My favorite was the NASM trip since I haven't been there for many years.

I think my contributions to SGCs were primarily in the discussions, projects, and field trips. I tried to actively participate in those, with the prominent ones being the NASM trip and the global change project (my topic was rising sea levels in Bangladesh).

One thing that Scholars gave me was a different view of the role of people in climate change. The requirement of resources that people have is often forgotten in talks of climate change, and it was brought up a lot (like the fact that we will need to use more and more resources regardless since our population is and will keep increasing). We just need to minimize the effects of growth on our planet.

I think one of the things that SGC has helped me with is learning a little about research and academia. There was a lot of discussion about how research is conducted, where it is done (businesses, colleges, etc.), and this is something that I hope to do in the future, as I plan to go to grad school. Also, I feel like the practicum credit really motivated me to find an internship over the summer (I don't know if it helped me actually get it, but maybe it did something subconsciously). In this way, it's helped my professional career.

Last modified: 10 December 2023