I am very excited to say that I will have successfully made my career transition!

I left my internship at a laboratory a few weeks ago, where I focused on data science work for battery research. I was able to learn a lot and use the skills from my first degree, Materials Science and Engineering, as well as those from my current studies at Oregon State’s CS program.

I started working at the lab last August on a part-time schedule. My work was primarily focused on automating graphs with excel and .csv files. I used Python most of the time in this job, utilizing many of the libraries for data science work. I also did some work with Arduino while I was taking CS344, so that was not too bad to get a hang of. One of my frustrations with the Arduino work was using packages from the internet. Many of them had instructions that weren’t organized in the same manner that I have seen with my CS studies. The last thing that I worked on in this position is graphic design. I used Adobe Illustrator for 2D designs, as well as Blender for 3D designs. With the 3D designs, I used Adobe Dimension for rendering.

During my break the past two weeks I have gotten back into bouldering and video gaming. I belong to a bouldering gym in the town I live in and currently go up to V3/V4 difficulty. It took a few weeks to build my skills back up, but this time I have a group of friends to go with! It is great to have support of others, as well as having other people to cheer on! I also have been playing a lot of Overwatch 2 the past few weeks. I enjoy this more than I enjoyed Overwatch. I feel like the reduction of players from 6v6 to 5v5 really helps make the gameplay more engaging and less of a struggle.

I will be starting my new job in a few days. I am ready to reach the end of my (second) academic career. I have had a mostly good experience at Oregon State University. I am very thankful that I was able to pursue this degree remotely while working. Trying to find a full time job the past few years has been stressful for me, so I am very happy to be able to enjoy my free time more. If any of you are still pursuing employment, don’t give up!