Student Ambassador Spotlight: Maegan Jennings
My name is Maegan Jennings and I am a senior Physics major with a concentration in Astrophysics at Towson University.
I officially became a Wolfram Student Ambassador in 2019, but I’ve been working with Wolfram Language (WL) for a while.
Since June 2018, I’ve been doing research under Towson University and the Maryland Space Grant Consortium. My research is to create a model for the brightness of the extragalactic background light, and I’ve been using Wolfram technologies to do my entire project. Through this, I’ve learned a lot of coding skills in WL that I would not have learned otherwise.
Outside of my research, I also use Wolfram to complete my homework. At Towson, many professors encourage us to use WL, but other students aren’t as confident as I am with using this technology, which makes it hard for them to integrate it into their schoolwork.
As the new Wolfram Student Ambassador at Towson, I’m really excited to share all of the tips and tricks that I have learned over the years. I want to teach the students in my classes how to use WL in their homework, and help them understand the computational power of Wolfram Language more broadly. Eventually, I would like to reach out to all of the students at my university, but my own department is a good place to start.
HackUMBC
One of the opportunities that being a WSA has given me is that I was able to represent Wolfram at HackUMBC, a 24 hour hacking marathon at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Many students that I talked with had never used WL, so I had the opportunity to teach them, and how to make amazing things happen quickly.
One group of students were astounded by the 3D plotting functions I showed them, which helped them in their project at the Hackathon. Another group asked me about the real word applications the program had, and I was able to show them some of my research, and tell them how helpful I’d found Wolfram technology.
Even though I’m confident in Wolfram Language, I know I have a lot to learn. I feel as though I have just scraped the surface of Wolfram’s capabilities, and I’m really excited to learn all I can as a Student Ambassador.
