Graduating from Illinois

Today I graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a BS in Statistics & Computer Science and a minor in Psychology.

I came in expecting to spend four years writing software and left with a much stronger pull toward research. The turn happened in the labs. At IRisk Lab I worked under Dr. Runhuan Feng on quantitative risk modeling and smart contract prototypes — my first real taste of building something to answer a question rather than to ship it. Then at Yu Lab I spent a year on the role of astrocytes in learning, developing neural activity classifiers and behavioral models and helping with in-vivo experiments. That combination — statistics, code, and brains — is what I want to keep doing.

The rest of it mattered too: interning on the Bag Manager platform at United Airlines, building domain-specific language models at PuzzleLabs, winning HackIllinois 2022 with the Construct Energy app, and serving as pledge director for Psi Eta Mu. Somewhere in there I also wrote a five-part NLP tutorial series that I still get occasional email about.

Next stop is Austin, for a master’s in neuroscience at UT.