Zach Benedetti: Balance of an OSU CS Student

Recently, I have started my capstone project with 3 other students, Brayden, Yuji, and Jacob. We started to dive into the topic “Leveraging AI for Improved Public Transit”, specifically looking at the Lane Transit District. With help from our sponsors, we’ve been able to start honing in on research for Lane.

We have had a little bit of a rough start with actually making physical progress, but the first part is just data collection. Often people underestimate the amount of time needed to collect data from various sources. As of right now, we are aware of what programs we are using (ie. BigQuery and Malloy), but largely unfamiliar with the data as of right now.

Once we get the data from the Lane Transit District, we will be able to use Malloy to clean up the data. BigQuery will help us find actionable insights in our data, so we can inform LTD of our findings. We are also going to collect data from organizations like CAHOOTS, which is an emergency service that will have good data for dangerous riding situations or weather data we might need.

Overall, the structure of the capstone course we are in is not to our benefit. We haven’t physically been able to do a lot. Even though we’ve done a lot of thorough research, we haven’t had actual data to work with. This week we are working with mock data to be able to have optimal strategies to find as many insights as we can from the actual data we’re going to get.

Hi, my name is Zach Benedetti and I am a Computer Science student at Oregon State University. I currently reside here in Corvallis, but I am from Tigard, Oregon.

I have 2 younger brothers and many cousins, 3 of which went to Oregon State and I have many aunts and uncles that also did, so the choice was easy. I’m historically a duck fan due to my dad, but I grew to like the beavers more and more as I grew up. This created some friendly drama in the household.

I enjoy hiking, watching football, running, weightlifting, and going out. Honestly, anything outdoors is a huge appeal to me. Obsessed is an understatement, but keeping up with the NFL is a huge hobby of mine. I root for the Houston Texans.

As far as my Computer Science background, I have always retained interest in the field. Me and my mom went to the Apple Store at a young age to fix our family laptop and I pointed out I wanted to be one of the help desk assistants one day. Since then, my goals have been a little bit more ambitious than that, but mostly gravitated toward the same track. I was also considering the field of business, since I am very much people-oriented, but I just decided to minor in it.

I haven’t had a paid job for CS yet, but I will have one come this spring (2025) for the MECOP program. I’ve been able to come up with a lot of projects from and outside of school. Most of these are along the lines of front-end website development or smaller back-end projects.

I’ve always liked creating things that are useful and make me more productive in my daily life. This is why most of my projects have been to-do lists or efficiency software. It also translates well to my leadership position for SigEp because I can program things to make everyone’s life easier, even if it’s in a minor way.

I’ll be documenting my capstone project, where I have interest in projects related to AI and Software Engineering. I have a very systematic way of doing things; my projects, my school work, and my daily tasks. I’ll discuss this more in my later posts as the project continues.

This was just a little bit about me, so you can know who I am as the future blog posts come out regarding my project. You’ll eventually learn how I balance my time with leadership positions and outside involvement as well as things I enjoy doing in my free time on top of working on a large project. Stay tuned!