My College Research Career
My research experiences as an undergraduate and now graduate student at UMass Amherst have helped me shape my career goals and apply the knowledge I’ve gained in my courses. I initially became interested in research through the Honors College and the research project option for students doing departmental honors. Over the summer before my junior year, I connected with several CS professors working in various labs to express my interest in working with them on an independent study for my honors research. Through discussing my interests, experience, and goals with them, I decided to work with Professor Edward Rietman in the Biologically Inspired Neural & Dynamical Systems Lab.
The project we decided on involved working with a hospice organization in Italy to predict the type of treatment that would be provided to hospice care patients. This was my first taste of a real-world applied machine learning (ML) problem, which was completely different than projects I had done in any of my classes where we were given perfect data sets. Instead, I was given a raw data set in Italian with non-uniform and missing data. Through this project, I was able to learn about the entire ML project life cycle, from data preprocessing to modeling. This helped me to identify which skills I still had to develop as a data scientist to be ready for full-time jobs in industry.
During my senior year, I joined the Physical Activity & Health Lab to work with Professor John Sirard. At this point in my college career, I discovered that I was most passionate about working with health & fitness data and this lab provided the perfect interdisciplinary experience I wanted.
We decided to work on a project to predict the type of exercise being performed using accelerometers, devices used to measure position. I was also able to collaborate with a graduate student in the lab, Robert Marcotte, who mentored me by sharing his extensive experience working with accelerometer data and advising my project. My experience working in this lab helped me decide to come back to UMass for my Master’s in CS as a Bay State Scholar, so I could continue learning and doing the research I love.
Currently, I am extending my work on this project with the goal of publishing my research by the time I graduate. My time as an undergraduate and graduate researcher has helped me figure out my future career and I am excited to get other students involved in research too!
I also work as a CICS Career Developer so feel free to book an appointment with me to talk about your research interests and how to get started. You can learn more about research opportunities through our CICS page as well.
