 It sounds almost cliche to say it, but all of, you know, the world has run on data. It's powered by data today and having a better understanding of what to do with our data and why, making our data more important or making it more useful to people, that by itself was the main hook for me. I just always kind of found myself leaning towards those computational skills just in high school and coming into college knew that that was something I liked working with and saw kind of the power of being able to leverage statistics and mathematical tools with computer science knowledge and ways you could take that and how it could be beneficial to learn both. To me, data science, at least as a major, is really sort of this hybrid of computer science and statistics. I liked kind of the breadth of topics it covered, introducing you to a lot of different fundamental concepts of computer science while still getting at some of the more math and statistics that I was interested in. One of my favorite projects that I worked on was in my machine learning class. We did a project classifying different dog breeds. That was really cool just using all the different things we learned in class and then also a blend of basically any information we could find and then trying to incorporate it into our project. It was also kind of a competition against everyone in the class. So it was really cool to see what other students were doing, what research was already done and how to build the most predictive model we could. Data mining, that was a great class. That was one of my favorites. I was able to take what I learned in that class and apply a lot of the methods right away. I was working with a professor here and then a doctor at the Kellogg Eye Center and we were doing a research project in order to predict whether or not a certain individual is susceptible to certain types of eye disease. I was taking what I learned in that data mining course and then applying it directly to this project, which we worked on for about a year and a half. Next year I will be working a full-time engineering role in industry and a big issue I guess in the country right now is data privacy. My hope or my intent is to work on a data privacy or data integrity team. Following my graduation, I'm going to become a software engineer and even though that is initially sounding like a computer science field, a lot of the teamwork I'll be doing is data intensive. My coursework and my undergraduate studies have prepared me not in just the hard skills but also in the ability to adapt and learn on the job.