Computer science – CA Work Experience Program

5/31

Today, after we worked on our presentation to the school and Mark, the CIO of Gilead Sciences, we did a dry run presentation to Mike, one of our mentors. He gave both me and Matthew a lot of helpful tips for our presentation. Not just things about the slideshow, but also about how we, as people, present. He pointed out some of the unconscious fidgets I do while presenting and how I can fix them, and gave Matthew some pointers on how he could improve his speaking. I think this was really helpful, not just for the presentation but also for going anywhere in the future. Here’s a photo of our whiteboarding process for creating the slideshow.

5/27

We worked from home today since most people do not come into the office on Friday, including our mentors for this program. We started with a zoom call with Deepti about what we would be working on from home, but after that it was free reign to complete yesterdays work. I asked some questions while I was on the zoom call, but I had more during my work, so I did some research and went to geeks for geeks and managed to solve my bug. Here is my final product of that day’s assigned work! I’m pretty proud of this one, it took a lot of work and I think it looks nice.

5/26

Today we learned how to use R (a programming language for statistical analysis) to analyze and graph covid data, and I really like this language. It’s intuitive, the commands make sense, and the stuff you can do with it is really impressive! Here is some of the example work created with the data, this specific data set is about heart disease correlation with cholesterol levels, but our work today was focused on trying to graph covid data from the WHO. I can share some of my progress tomorrow.

5/25

Today, after getting feedback on our graphics from yesterday, we learned how to use PowerBI to create a dashboard with statistics. PowerBI is a very efficient tool to create graphs, as it automatically creates charts when you combine two columns from excel, using whatever type of graph it thinks fits best or you manually select. I really like using PowerBI to display information, it is an excellent tool and I think it will help me in my career to be proficient in PowerBI. Here is the first dashboard I created, with the same WHO covid statistics.

5/24

Today was our first day in the office, and what a great way to start! We began by meeting the other two people who would be most involved in our internship, Mike and Depti, and learning more about their jobs and what the company does as a whole. The fun part was after lunch, when we were given COVID data from the WHO and had to answer questions about statistics from the countries and regions using excel to create pivot tables and pivot charts. We created graphics to show answers to these questions and will present them tomorrow morning for feedback. Here’s a graphic I created to show the vaccination statistics by region.

5/23

Matthew and I had a zoom call with Mr. David Ungaro, our mentor for this internship, to discuss the expectations of our internship and what we would be doing over the next two weeks. I had the opportunity to discuss where my interest in computer science started with him, and explain why I wanted to intern at Gilead sciences. We talked about what the focus of our work would be, and that we had a lot of freedom in terms of what we wanted to work on.

I also researched the location, and apparently their building in NC is relatively new, built within the last year.

6/6 Last Day!

During our final presentation for our clean water video!

Today was our final day at SAS. Our bittersweet final day was still a really fun one, and it started with meeting one of the product managers in the CI360 product. Meeting him was really cool because his story about how he ended up at SAS was very interesting and unique. After one final pizza lunch, we had our presentations for our clean water videos. Seeing everyone’s presentation and having a real corporate presentation was super rewarding in learning how corporate presentations work.

6/5 Day 7!

Day 7 was probably my best day so far! We met with Caitlyn in the morning and got to see how a bug was fixed and how collaborative SAS is. Caitlyn also hurt her leg playing softball, feel better soon! Later in the morning, we got to meet with Jerry and learn about development in a different product. It was super interesting to learn about life at SAS and he helped me with career ideas and my vision for college. After another fantastic lunch we got to see Dr. Goodnight’s famous gemstone collection. It was amazing to see so many cool gemstones just in the public for all of SAS to see. After that we had another meeting where we talked about where technology might go in the future and how that will affect working and the workforce. All in all a fantastic day!

Dr. Goodnight’s famous gemstone collection!

6/4 Day 6!!!

On day 6 Shon and I transitioned to shadowing Caitlyn Holland, a tester in a different product. She worked on CI360, a product that allows businesses to track advertisements and other cool features. We also got to talk to Scott Kell, a longtime developer who talked to us about all sorts of things ranging from his job to college decisions to life in the workforce. It was super rewarding to talk to him. Unfortunately, I had to leave after lunch for personal reasons, so I missed the second half of the day. I am super excited to meet more amazing people tomorrow!

This model showed Shon and I how the branch code structure works and how it makes coding much easier!

6/3 Day 5!!

The outside of building C, the building where I spent the day.

Today my group and I worked in building C to finish the project we started on Friday. We finished our recording and editing and asked a small group for feedback. We then were able to use the feedback and improve our video. We will present the final product on Thursday! Tomorrow I am off to see someone new in building C!