Open Source Internship - Azis Toktobaev

        I am combining the last three days of work into one blog post as they were all focused on one issue. In the span of the last few days, I analyzed over 6 different database websites and over 500 different datasets; I was confident I found a good dataset for Chapter 2, however, soon had to scrap all of our work. On day 10, I moved on to analyze other parts of the book. Chapters 3 & 4 discussed important parts of the process, however, they did not need any major changes nor additions. Chapter 5, however, turned out to be the single most important part of the book as it introduces Pandas and NumPy libraries to students who may have never had a computer science course prior to reading this book. This is, of course, a major problem as we are expecting Business major students with no coding experience. I was tasked with reading, analyzing, and taking notes on the ideas introduced in the chapter and its complementary readings. This was in preparation fo...

        If I were to break down the experience into different stretches, I would categorize the last week and a half to be the orientation process and yesterday to be the start of the more mundane part of the internship. I feel as though I finally have a grasp of what we are doing and feel a sense of comfort with my duties as a research and open-source developer student. Previously, I was tasked with finding the dataset for Chapter 2 of the How to Think Like a Data Scientist textbook. My goal was to analyze different opensource databases and find a dataset that would resemble the original chapter dataset, World Happiness Rankings. The new dataset needed to be  more relevant to Business students as the class we are working on is a dual perspective between Business and Computer Science departments. I analyzed many databases, including Kaggle, data.gov, Google Public Data, Awesome Public Datasets, opendata.aws, datacommons.org, and Public Data of the City of N...

        It is Monday, again, and I am pleased to report on my adjustment to the routine, which I talked about on Day 2. I have always been in awe of people for whom it is natural and easy to wake up early in the morning, for some, having only slept 5-6 hours. This was never the case for me. I always had a hard time waking up early and needed at least 8-9 hours of sleep. In retrospect, I believe that since I was a kid I have been involved in all sorts of non-routine activities, from dog handling to volunteering on different projects, that prevented me from learning about proper commitment to a sleep schedule. And while this non-stable regime worked all throughout high school, it definitely affected my college career, especially, in the beginning. I learned to pay close attention to my physical and mental needs, studied about sleep from a point of view of neurobiology, and accepted that my brain may simply need more time to recover than some of my friends' 5-6 clo...

          The last few days were a bit stormy for me as I was adjusting to the new workflow and the new team. It was particularly difficult because we were not given what we felt like enough directions at the beginning. This, however, was out of the hands of our instructors who are doing far more than what they had panned out for their summers. Many of the students interning at Berea, including myself, had plans to travel for work/research opportunities at different companies and research institutions across the country. When COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a shutdown of our campus and the end of the internship program, the Computer Science department created emergency spaces in our summer internship and research programs for all students who had been affected. Thanks to the department, I am dealing well with the implications of the pandemic during this instrumental summer on my path to graduate school. I am learning more about what it means to be a research ...

        My second day of this internship/research experience. From one side, today's experience seemed easier than the one on Friday, my first day, as I had an idea of what this process was going to look like. On the other hand, for people with standard 8-5 jobs, Mondays are generally harder than Fridays, and I truly felt it while getting out of bed at 7 am. While seemingly mundane, this learning curve is very important for me to mention as this is the first time I truly got to recognize the dread that the word Monday had been bringing all these years to the office workers in my life. All of my previous labor experiences were on a flex-schedule. With this knowledge, I plan to be better prepared for the next Mondays to come, of which I only have 7 left. Time flies.          We started off the day with some group members rearrangement, during which some teams lost while others gained members. The Data Analytics group, my group, welcomed my...

          The first day of my summer experience with the Berea College Computer Science department has gone by very quick. I felt nervous prior to today as I have never had an internship in Computer Science - all of my past experiences were within the fields of Teaching, Digital Business and Community Organizing. I really surprised myself with  my ability to stay focused and motivated throughout all the hours of coding. To be fair, the experience was really well organized and facilitated to make sure that I fuel my energy levels taking proper breaks from the computer screen. In fact, our group leader Rebekah insisted that we step away from the computer to get some blood going. In the moment I felt like I could work for longer and did not need a break. Now that I reflect on the day, I am realizing that taking breaks helped me to deliver at my best ability.        Today I had a deeper dive into bash commands on a Linux terminal, downl...