Experience

My Tolmas Scholar award brought me invaluable experience during an internship working with Dr. Benjamin Samuel and Extell Farve. The aim of this project was to invoke empathy in the player by having them nuture an artificially intellegent hero's quest. The player is in control of environmental elements such as enemies, resources, and non-player characters.

My work began with rapid paper prototyping and code iteration. The successful mechanics were integrated to Phaser2 game engine using JavaScript, but we soon converted to C# and migrated the project to Unity as the scope became more ambitous. Our team would meet weekly to discuss progress, share feedback, troubleshoot, and set goals for the next phase. Agile and Scrum development practices helped keep things moving smoothly.

Inverse RPG was still in progress when I left the University of New Orleans. I presented the progress and methods at a research symposium (InnovateUNO) to the public and a group of judges from the computer science department. The poster created for the project can be viewed (see next block).

Organization: rapid prototyping and agile workflow
Effective Documents: AI decision trees, logic diagrams, and technical descriptions
Problem Solving: debugging, error handling, testing

After completing my internship with Dr. Samuel, I presented my results at the InnovateUNO Research Symposium. Students awarded with student worker positions have the option to present their work to the public and a board of judges. This helps the community gain insight to the research done at the university while allowing professors to learn more about their colleagues' work.

Near the end of the internship, I synthesized the information taken from the project and documented the development process. This was translated into a poster (see outcome tab) displayed at InnovateUNO. Students explained their projects to spectators and judges passing by.

Here is the poster I made! (for desktop click to expand)

Communication: presentation of research material to a scholarly audience
Research: extensive reading into project material and construction of final report
Networking: meeting with experts in the field, as well as students with varying acedemic research backgrounds

The Cyber Sleuth Lab's purpose is to introduce digital forensics, cyber security, and high level data concepts to minority students and girls in primary education. The system works by joining a facilitator with teaching experience, professionals in the industry, and higher education councelors to effectively teach students. Everyone works together before and after camp days setting up material that will be presented in the next lab.

My job as a camp counselor was to ensure the students felt comfortable and engaged with the material. Councelors are relatable role models who can address difficult questions the students may have about joining the field of technology. Many of the students from the camp had asked if it would be difficult for them to succeed in a technology department due to their background or education. It is vital to reassure students and offer them so they feel confident enough to enter the field.

Due to the success of the summer camp, I was later asked to help create material for future coursework. This included fabricating accounts, communication, and "hacking" into the fake accounts to create a metadata trail students will follow. Once the camp and associated projects had come to completion, I presented results at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome Core Element STEM Fest (see next block). Parents, teachers, students, and guests could view our findings and see why it is importnant to get students involved at a young age.

Software Setup: Installed and configured environments for student work stations such as MagnetAxiom and JPEGSnoop
Communication: Met with team daily to ensure the next day's lab material was ready and functiong
Agile planning: daily meetings include evaluation of student progress, discussions of what should be changed, and design of new modules

The Greater New Orleans Stem fest is a way to connect the local community with educators, scholars, and professionals. After completion of the Cyber Sleuth Lab, our team participated in the showing at the Mercedez-Bens Superdome. We set up games for kids to learn about metadata in their mobile phone images. Meanwhile, parents and local teachers could talk to us about the importance of teaching children how to protect their data. The parents could sign their kids up for a summer camp, and teachers can work with Cyber Sleuth to set up classes at their schools.

The primary focus for presenters was to distribute as much information as possible. I often had in depth conversations with parents about the career paths their children could take in computing and technology. Most of the teachers did not have a background in technology, so I explained how the labs are set up and gave an overview of the training they would have access to. My job was to gather contact information for those interested in future coursework and connect them people that can help them get started.

The GNO Stem Fest was overwhelmingly successful considering the amount of people we talked to interested in our project. New Orleans is a newly emerging tech center, so it is crucial to build a knowledgable population of science and technology students in the area. This project helps fortify the future of the industry.

Interpersonal: Explaining material to people with varying backgrounds and understanding of technology
Mentorship: Teaching children with rapidly fluctuating attention, promoting interests in computing field
Networking: Connecting local students, parents, and teachers wit a national organization

The game developer coding camp is designed to younger kids (middle school and Jr. High) how to code using javascript, Phaser3, and html. While some of the students had experience with block coding, many had not been exposed to programming before. During the camp students learned about the development process (planning, coding, art, packaging, presentation), debugging, and hosting games on a server. The camp encourages shildren to enter tech field by relating their hobbies to possible career paths.

As a mentor, I was responsible for guiding and assiting the teams to complete their games. There were a total of 30 students who were in paired together, and each team made two games. I was available to explain programming concepts and debug code.

At the completion of the course, all code was successfulloy implemented without errors. Students had high morale and surpassed their own expectations. They presented the games to parents and explained the development process. Parents were surprised what their children could accomplish with a technical project. Many participants were interested in further pursuing an education in programming.

Self Management: chose work alternation based on most critical jobs to have all games functional by deadline
Situational Awareness: kept students focused on lecture and mediated conflicts within teams
Debugging: debugged student code using Sublime Text and Chrome Developer Tools

ITExperience gave a 4 week workshop for students to earn a certificate in Python. The students learned about data structures, and data analytic packages (seaborn, pandas, numpy, scikit-learn, SciPy, and TensorFlow). The final class was dedicated to a presentation of projects completed in groups. My group investigaed data from diabetes patients.

Work consisted of weekly homeworks, quizzes, and one final project with two team members. It could be any applicatoin, algorithm, or game related to the course material. We chose to make a user friendly interface for data on diabetes patients. We cleaned a dataset to exclude points that had no values. Graphs were created to show the raw data correlations. Machine learning algorithms were implemented to determine which variables had the highest correlation. Finally, I made the GUI for users to visualize the data in graphical form. The results were presented at the end of the course.

From this course I learned to use python as a tool for data manipulation. I was able to use various mathematical functions and packages to create a project with my team. The final video presentation can be viewed here (my part starts at 4:07). The code is available in my github.

Time Management: consistently completed work before deadline while working and studying in class full-time
Persistance: continued working through obstacles during software setup and final presentation
Flexibility: team quickly adapted to changes in project scope and requirements

As part of the ACM-Women's chapter at University of New Orleans, I was given the oppurtunity to participate in a professional development workshop with General Electric and Baker Hughes. The workshop was aimed at helping women in the computer science department network with professionals. View the article here.

The workshop began woth introductions from the professionals and students attending. At the time I was intimidated, but everyone was very kind and encouraging. Once everyone fealt comfortable we heard DeCarla Hodoh's story about her balance between personal life and the workplace. Afterwards, we toured the working floor of the company and met with several employees that helped us build our resumes and portfolios.

The workshop was very helpful in raising confidence for the women in the computer science department. I was asked for comments on my experience in an article for the university:

"I am typically nervous around people with high levels of experience and seniority. I tend to compare my achievements to theirs and feel very insufficient,” she said. ”But in just the first few minutes, so many of these women affirmed that they were in the same position once. Hearing this raised my confidence quite a bit, and I became more engaged for the rest of the experience."
-me

Active Listening: absorbing important information and applying it to specific situations
Perserverance: consistently adapting to a difficult situation in order to achieve a favorable outcome
Empathy: taking time to hear someone's story and understand their perspective

I adopted Eva (the cat) in the summer of 2016. Eva has been an exceptional boss, and I cannot stress how grateful I am for her. When I want to sleep in Eva reminds me there are more important things in the world, like feeding her. If I am feeling down she persuades me to lift myself up, right over to her food bowl and feed her. The work environment has tought me crucial team building skills. For example, my housemates and I work together to feed the cat. This requires a lot of communication to ensure the cat is always fed. We work in an agile environment to optimize each cat feeding sprint. The client, Eva, has provided us with wonderful feedback. Our team is now building a framework for an automatic cat feeding device.

My role in Eva's life has been to feed her. I typically feed her twice a day. This has yielded acceptable results. If the client changes her requirements during a sprint I will develop treats using the Tuna API to appease her. I have built many alternate feeding schedules throughout the lifecycle of this project.

While the project is still in progress, we have analyzed numerous datapoints. Our finings are that when the cat is fed, she is happy. We advise against not feeding the cat as this causes many error messages to appear.

Fast Paced Development: This position requires quick decision making in a constantly changing environment
Disatser Prevention and Analysis: Ability to analyze potentioal catastrophic events, such as an empty food bowl, and handle the resulting calamity (an angry cat)
Code and Framework: Mastery of MEOW, Purrr, Tuna.js

Dean's List

Awarded Dean's list over the span of my computer science career from University of New Orleans and University of Houston - Downtown [2019-2021]. My final GPA is 3.9.

Honor's Society

After recieving invitations from various honor societies, I accepted the National Society of Leadership and Success.

Tolmas Scholar Award

That's me! Tolmas Scholars are students selected from a pool of interested applicants to work on a research project with a professor. See my work on IRPG with Dr. Samuel and the resulting presentation at Innovate UNO for more information. You can check out the article from UNO here.