My experience at STEM Away has been fruitful, fulfilling, and conducive to my personal growth

Description: My experience at STEM Away has been fruitful, fulfilling, and conducive to my personal growth. There was just the right amount of great resources for me to independently do good work - whether that be Colin recording a video explaining a concept or if there is a good explanation in one of the forums. More importantly, at no time did the work I put in feel forced. It was the environment with a great mentor which motivated me to put in a lot of late nights and consistent work into my bioinformatics ML project. Overall, everything was clearly well thought out. One thing I absolutely loved was that the structure of the internship was very practical and had efficient allocation of resources. For example, self assessments are a great way of transparently self documenting your work. It was not political at all, and that is a refreshing experience. I can tell STEM is something Debaleena lives and enjoys - and she would spend time to create highlight videos. As for the mentor, I cannot say enough good things about him. I love when I get to talk about ML with somebody who is equally or even more passionate than myself about this content, and the discussions we have only reinforce my conviction for the work that is involved. He has a way of making complex content relatable to many audiences. He was also able to frame his teachings effectively and find salient connections of the material that would only come from somebody who has deeply internalized the content and can recognize the channels of value effectively. I learned a lot from him, found genuine connection in our conversations over the personal experiences/realizations that he shared, and will definitely stay in touch.

STEM Level: College Senior (4th year)

Year: Summer 2021