Work
May - August 2020
Amazon Insights is a market-research program that helps brands selling on Amazon grow their businesses.
As an intern, I built the internal email notification system, which will be integral as the program continues to automate its services.
This system is triggered when any major actions occur on our web-service, and deliver key information to internal teams via email.
This required full-stack development: from creating an API in the back-end, to modifying and parsing requests in the front-end.
Additionally, this required learning and extensively using the following AWS services:
- AWS SQS
- AWS SES
- AWS Lambda
- AWS Route53
- AWS CloudWatch
- AWS SNS
- AWS DyanmoDB
Each email is projected to save at least 5 minutes of manual work per person per notification.
In a week, this system is currently expected to trigger 10-20 emails per week.
So, this system will save at least 50-100 minutes per week for the department.
Moreover, this workflow created is highly scalable and fault-tolerant.
So as use cases are added and the internal team grows, it will result in exponential time savings without sacrificing quality.
Spring & Fall 2020
Capstone Research
I began doing research for Professor Haiyeng Shen at UVa in order to learn how Distributed Systems can help solve meaningful problems.
In my research, I am in charge of processing location data to figure out better better bus routes for cities in Virginia.
In the Spring, my objective was to learn about Spark & HDFS, and use it to create a basic geolocation sorting algorithm.
In the Fall, I will dive deeper into the research proposal, and my responsibility will be to create actionable results.
Relevant Experience
- August 2020 - Present
CS 2150: Program and Data Representation | Teaching AssistantThis fall, I will be a teaching assistant for the UVa course, CS 2150. Students in this lab-based course implement data structures, such as LinkedLists, Stacks, and Heaps, and learn and use IBCM (UVa's mock Machine Language), and the x86 assembly language.
My responsibility will be to help students via weekly office hours and labs, and assist the professors in the management of the course. - August 2020 - Present
VA Text | Software Developer
VA Text formed in Spring 2020 as a class project, and has now become a Contracted Independent Organization (CIO) at UVa.
The team's mission is to make a centralized marketplace for textbooks at UVa via a webapp created through Django.
I joined the team in August 2020, and I will be helping roll out and refine key features till our launch in Spring 2021. - Fall 2019
CS+Social Good - Madison Hall Scheduling Program | Software Developer
An organization at UVa, Madison Hall, runs a volunteering program where students sign up to volunteer at schools in Charlottesville.
However, setting up this program is time consuming - Madison Hall had to manually schedule dozens of volunteers with teachers, and ensure that students can be transported to schools. This was because matching dozens of volunteers to schools, and volunteer drivers to students, along with individual time constraints was challenging.
So, CS+Social Good at UVa picked up the project, and I joined the development team where I helped design an algorithm in Java to automate scheduling, and create a GUI to allow ease of use. The final algorithm was able to iterate over 1,000 permutations in seconds, and reduced the time to schedule by an hour with 75% accuracy.
Misc. Experiences
- Fall 2017 - Present
Copy editor on the Cavalier Daily - edited over 50 articles so far
- Fall 2017 - Present
Member of UVa's chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery
- Fall 2019
Took HackCville's Source semester program, where I learned the basics of React through weekly lessons and assignments.
- September 2015 – May 2017
Saturday Learning Lounge | Tutor, Co-founder & Student Coordinator
The Saturday Learning Lounge is a tutoring service at George Mason High School which takes place on Saturday mornings throughout the school year. The objective of the Lounge is to provide an after-hours resource for students where they can independently study, or have 1 on 1 time with a qualified, volunteer student tutor for a specific subject.
I started tutoring for the service in 2015, but the turnout was fairly low. So in 2016, my friend and I took the responsibility from the teacher running it at the time and revamped the program. We made the program completely student-run, which helped in making the program more approachable. We were then able to signficantly increase turnout through better advertising, and made the process more efficient by creating clear timelines and resources for tutors and students to use. Before graduating, we ensured a smooth transition to the next student leaders, and as of writing, the program still continues to help students today.
Though my role grew to a more administrative position in 2016, I continued tutoring throughout my time at the Lounge.
Over the span of 2 years, I:- Tutored over 50 students in physics, computer science, math, English, and Spanish
- Contributed to helping students yield better test scores which were as high as a 20% grade increase from their last assessment