During my geology field trip, I told my professor that I wanted an internship in the summer. So told me that she knew some people that might be able to get me an internship, and asked for my resume. Meanwhile, I applied for many planetary science and astronomy internships for the summer.  

One day in January, my professor told me that my resume is in Los Alamos, New Mexico. She also said that the people reviewing it worked on Mars, but she couldn’t guarantee that I would get selected. I was not expecting anything, but I thought that it would be great if I could get this opportunity even though Los Alamos is far from home.

In March, I got an email informing me that I can work on a project involving rock coatings on Mars. I was very surprised that I got an offer. I read some papers that were sent to me and the project sounded interesting. The project was about identifying rock coatings that have a similar composition at the rock itself using the data captured by the rover on Mars. In a few weeks, I had a video call with my mentor and co-mentor. People seemed like they would be good to work with, so I said yes to the opportunity.

I was pretty nervous about starting a new job with new people but I convinced myself to be confident and prepare for the meeting. I made a list of questions to ask my mentor. Our first meeting went well. My mentor seemed nice and caring. After that meeting, I felt less stressed about the job. I also met one of my coworkers and had lunch with her. She showed me how it was like to work at LANL as a student.

At the end of summer, I needed to present my project. I worked with my mentor to make a poster explaining the project and my findings. It was a good experience learning how to communicate technical material clearly. Then I wrote my speech and practiced it many times. I was a little nervous presenting in front of new people but it was good that I knew my speech very well. I also created a list of commonly asked questions. I printed out my speech and a list of questions and planned to hand out a copy to everyone I was presenting to. The presentation went well and people liked my poster. 

I learned how to adapt to a new environment and communicate professionally. I had a good relationship with my mentor and she gave really good advice. I learned what to do for the future like career development. It also confirmed that I wanted to double major in physics and earth and planetary science. 

Harvard and MIT – I have been dreaming of going to these colleges since the beginning of middle school. Even though I had aimed for these colleges since then, I did not think that I would actually get into them until the be precious evening of December 17, 2020, when I had gotten my Harvard acceptance. All of my hard work had turned into an amazing array of opportunities and experiences for my future. The more I read about Harvard, the more I loved it. Shortly after, I received a beautiful Harvard certificate highlighting my acceptance to Harvard that made me feel on top of the world. Then I got admitted to MIT on Pi Day (March 14, 2021) I was tremendously excited because I have gone to MIT quite a few times, and have had a great experience there, so I can only imagine how fun it would be like to study over there. A few weeks later, I received a beautifully organized gift box from MIT with a cool project, coloring supplies, a warm and cozy hat, and even a stuffer beaver that resembles the MIT mascot.

Each college has its own pros, so I decide to attend the virtual programs before I commit to either college. Stay tuned for my decision 🙂

I was thrilled to present my project, ‘Machine Learning based Speech Recognition App for individuals with speech disorders’ at the Massachusetts Junior Academy of Science Symposium. This project won the first prize in Massachusetts Science and Engineering Fair, $500 Foundation Medicine award, US Air Force Academy Award and US Naval Science award. It is very close to my heart, since it is a step in a direction that helps me and many other people like me that have a speech disorder.

I prepared for the virtual presentation and the questions. I was never sure what could be asked but I knew that I had to be ready to answer as fast as possible. So, I practiced and practiced.

Once the presentation finished, I was sure I did good, but I was still nervous. It is a tough competition, one has to be nervous, right?

Two days later, I got an email saying that I came second in the symposium. YAY!!! I was so excited. The comments from the judges were also so encouraging and motivated me to work on the project more so that it can impact the lives of many more people with speech disorders. I thoroughly thank them for the feedback which is below.

First of all, we would like to say that your presentation was quite clear in communicating the problem you wished to solve, your approach to solving said problem, your implementation of your solution, and next steps. In a problem with something like machine learning, this is difficult to communicate, so we applaud you!

Second of all, we believe that the problem you had chosen is extremely impactful. While you have implemented a first attempt at classifying your own voice, we foresee an application to many people who have speech disorders. 

Third of all, we believe your approach to solving the problem is a great first start! For some critical feedback, we believe that considerations about scalability for application of this idea to people with varying speech disorders would be necessary. With any type of machine learning model, it is necessary to have a large amount of data, and different people with speech disorders may require a completely new set of data. With this in mind, considerations of ways to mitigate this need for large amounts of data might be useful. A useful method for streamlining data collection would also be useful. Additionally, with the data that you replicated, adding a bit of noise to said data could be beneficial to making the new samples unique enough that it benefits the training of the model you have.

Understand that you are doing amazing work, and at the age you are now, we cannot imagine where you will be during your undergraduate or graduate degree, if you decide to pursue one. Congratulations, and keep being curious! It is paying off.

It was a warm, clear night on a Friday evening in July 2018, we were just about to go on the Freedom Trail walk in Boston when I first checked my grade for the AP Computer Science Principal’s Exam. It was a 2 out of 5. I could not believe my own eyes – a 2 in an AP test was considered a failing grade, which meant that I had failed my first AP test in my life. During the entire walk, I felt so sullen and dejected that I could not enjoy any of the trail attractions and I needed to force myself to smile in every picture. During dinner, I asked my mother to buy some AP Computer Science A books, which I elected for next year because I absolutely did not want this result to be repeated in any of my other AP tests. I had such a restless sleep that night, due to the memories of my previous programming experiences that raced in my mind.

 I started programming in Scratch on my 9th birthday because both of my parents are software engineers and I wanted to learn how to program too. I enjoyed it because it was very easy to learn and I could make fancy games and animations with it. I learned that computers only follow the directions which I gave them and I needed to give extremely specific directions. I also learned how to use the x y coordinate plane. However, now that I have revisited Scratch after getting a beginner’s programming experience, I realized that there was a lot more in that program that I had not fully explored during those early parts of my childhood and wished that I had spent more time on it back then.

When I was 11, I got introduced to Khan Academy. While exploring the website, I saw the programming section. From what I remember, it had only four computer courses back then: Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation, Intro to HTML and CSS, Advanced JS Games and Visualizations, and Meet the Professionals. I had heard about the JavaScript programming language from my parents and wanted to know more, so I decided to start the Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation course. The structure of the course made it very easy for a beginning programmer like I was. I loved doing the computing challenges and did not move on to the next lesson until I finished it. Occasionally, I would take a break from the course material and make animations on my own. I made my first animation when I was in sixth grade, even before I learn how to write if statements in JavaScript. I even made an animation for my parents’ anniversary. The biggest difficulty in this project was getting the rectangle to go from the sides to the bottom. I originally had a single conditional from my if statements, but then I realized that I needed the put multiple conditionals. By the end of the course, I learn the basics and JavaScript as well as some object-oriented programing. I also learned several techniques for debugging and to never give up when the program doesn’t work. Most of all, I got interested in programming and computer science in general, which, as I believe, is the first key step towards finding the right career. Since I only worked on the course two hours per week and implemented several other programs to accompany the course, it took me two years to finish it.

Then I took CS50 which I have already talked about my CS50 course in another post: https://anikanath.com/cs50-a-passport-to-college-level-computer-science/my-achievements/

The summer before my freshman year at high school, I wrote some automation test cases for the Everbridge mobile app with a group of 3 other people. I learned a lot about automation testing which I thought was a really cool feature because of the large amount of time it saves while testing products.

At the end of the weekend, I checked my AP score again and I was over the moon to see that I earned a 5! I spent the rest of the day celebration by ordering dinner from outside and even cutting cake.

At the end of 7th grade, my parents told me to try something new since I now know the basics of programming. They found an introductory computer science course for me through edX called CS50. Honestly, I was more apprehensive than enthusiastic about this course. I was worried that it would be too advanced and I would not be able to get a good score in some of the assignments. However, I decided to take it because I knew that until I take higher-level courses, I am not going to find out whether this is a good career path for me. The course was divided into 11 weeks. Each week had two one-hour long lectures, supplemental videos for each concept, and a problem set with programming exercises requiring you to apply and tie in all of the concepts. I watched the lectures with my parents, who are both computer programmers, and the supplemental videos on my own. For the problem sets, I first tried the exercises on my own and then took my parents’ suggestions if I needed them. The course started with Scratch, went on to teaching programming concepts with C, and ended with applying various programming languages and other concepts in computer science to produce more complex programs such as an application like Google maps. Apart from doing Scratch again, I also enjoyed producing complex applications. However, my favorite part was when they introduced different computer science-related careers such as robotics and game theory. CS50 gave me a taste of what studying computer science for a major was really like. Although it was not as much fun as JavaScript (which I had absolutely loved), it was definitely worth all of my hard work. I even wrote this as my best accomplishment when my sophomore English teacher gave us an introduce yourself worksheet.