Reflecting on College

With school online, I moved to Maui, and I guess wasn’t the only one with the idea cause I’ve met a good number of remote engineers at the cafe near my house.

My first quarter at UCSD I took dance and music composition project classes lol… I’m overachieving now but I feel like I’ve definitely paced for what I genuinely feel like doing. I also got pretty good at surfing! I’m pretty sure my next step is to try either a motion planning or perception project to get back into robotics, as well as something with Hive for distributed computing.

Reflecting on Internships

  • In high school I was on a tight knit robotics team that beat NASA-funded teams all the way to world championships from our garage! There are many stories from that, but ultimately it got me my first internship at Applied Medical when I was 16.

  • I was obsessed with quality plastic injection and extrusion molded parts at Applied Medical. I worked with the manufacturing and assembly with open eyes, mentored by Ron Surya and Minsoo Chun. The robotic manipulators and fixtures I built were popular enough that my job changed to where I got assigned the most challenging problems, and could wander the shop floor looking for things to improve. I’ve done work in UX Design and a Designathon here at UCSD for practice in team building, while learning how to justify and scale my intention with complexity science in my coursework.

  • My internships at Endura Technologies showed me how I could use the same mindset I had at Applied to improve and automate processes with software. My efforts helped save the engineer I worked with full weekends of hours by improving a testing algorithm’s run time and by using python to write java code inferred from the excel sheets we received from across the hall. Then I worked with several engineers to start writing a test software that wouldn’t need to be scrappily rewritten for every single chip we develop. I also had an internship where I developed and filtered features from audio signal data, and did things related to deep learning and the pipeline that team was working on. It was a great transition into the reinforcement learning and software engineering I’ll probably be doing in the future.