The DIYA internship experience, put in simple words, was a pivotal experience in my life. Much of the internship experience was about self-learning, with both machine learning techniques and yourself. Throughout this internship, I had to fix my own technical and conceptual problems. These problems ranged from simple coding errors all the way to internal data issues. Solving these problems taught me a lot about myself in terms of what methods work and don’t. In previous experiences I had never had the opportunity to work so independently on such a large-scale project with just the right amount of leadership and guidance. This correct blend allowed for me to experiment and decide what work efficiency methods were best. Along with the independent learning and work, the given guidance was very useful and concise. The weekly meetings with all the mentors gave insight from various minds in both industry and academia, giving me an overall view of how I did and what I needed to do for the next week. Finally the weekly office hours with our TA, Teja, were really helpful as well as we got technical advice as to how to solve specific problems and long-term advice as to how to approach a larger problem. all the mentors throughout the project had a perfect mix of hinting at what the issue might be, and not solving the problem for you. This was very pivotal for me as I learned to solve many problems on my own, and learned how to be resourceful with what I had.
From week one, consisting of all the courses and prior work to understanding data science and machine learning, to weeks 3 and 4 which consisted of.exploratory analysis and unsupervised machine learning all the way to the final weeks which consisted of intense predictive model analysis and supervise machine learning, this internship was very very full. Lastly, writing the 16-page report that summed up my entire research experience was very rounding and made me realize how much I actually learned, which was a lot. I would highly recommend this experience to any high school student who wants to explore a new topic or specialize in an interest, as I benefited very much from it.
The biggest takeaways from this internship are the sheer amount of independent learning I did, learning how to solve problems efficiently in my way. That along with simply the large amount of content I learned about data science and machine learning and such a short amount of time allowed for the quick processing and condensation of information. By having one assignment after another back-to-back, my thought process was never broken allowing for me to run with any idea I had with no hesitation or break.
