It’s that time of the year again where people and companies alike are given their yearly review such as my personal favourite, Spotify Wrapped. I hope to start my own tradition too of recapping my year in a nutshell.
Summer Holidays (Nov-Feb)
After a gruelling first year of university and having just completed exams, I immediately flew back home to Perth in order to be with my family and close friends. Throughout this time back in Perth there were two major tasks I aimed to accomplish.
R
In line with my goal of learning a new language every holiday, these holidays saw me learn the basics of R with a focus on the all-encompassing tidyverse package. I was able to go through the R for Data Science book and discovered a hidden gem of a youtube channel in Kelsey Gonzalez, a lead data scientist at IBM who taught the tidyverse package at American University which enabled me to quickly learn the language.
Internship Hunt
It’s common knowledge that recruiters prefer penultimate year students because they have the ability to start work only a year following the internship. Having just finished my first year, I was aware of the struggles I would encounter whilst searching for an internship but perhaps was not prepared for the amount of rejections I would recieve. Interview after Interview, Rejection after Rejection. It seemed like an endless cycle that was frankly causing me a lot of stress. However, after getting through an initial resume screening, phone interview, assessment centre and final video interview, I was fortunate to land an internship as a Data Analytics intern at Major Road Projects Victoria (MRPV) during these holidays. It goes without saying, I was ecastic.
Semester 1 (Feb-Jun)
Major Road Projects Victoria
My internship began in January and would run till July which meant I would be working part-time (3 days a week) during semester 1 of my second year. Initially, this was quite the load to manage but as slowly I became more and more comfortable in my work and started thoroughly enjoying the routine I had established. My work at MRPV was simple, complete weekly/monthly tasks in Excel and find areas in our processes to automate using Python. Although the work was quite slow given it was a government organisation, the memories that I made and experiences I took away from my first ever job will forever stay with me.
Some of my personal favourite experiences included:
- Going a tour of the Essendon Fields construction site and having the ability to socialise for an extended period with a lot of the engineering interns. Infact, I still hang out with one of the interns I met during this site tour nearly 6 months after the end of my internship.
- A new advisor joining our team. Two months into my internship, our team added another advisor which I found to be one of the best things that happened because he often worked the same days I was in office and we were able to talk about almost anything from tech, career aspirations and even history.
CCA Sponsorship Officer
Throughout semester 1, I was one of six sponsorship officers in the Computing Commerce Association (CCA) helping to attract and maintain relationships with companies who provide services or products relating to Computing and/or Commerce. The workload in this role was more than manageable and I’d highly encourage anyone looking to dip their toes into university clubs to try out a sponsorship team in order to gauge the atmosphere of a club whilst having relatively little commitment in terms of club work throughout the semester (if that’s what you’re after).
Units
I will attempt to provide a more comprehensive review of all FIT (Faculty of IT) units in a future blog post but for now I would like leave my two cents on the units I took in semester 1 of 2023:
- Intro to computer systems, networks and security (FIT1047): This is a good unit introductory unit run by tutors that I find genuinely care about your learning. As a double degree student who took FIT1008 in the prior semester where we learnt MIPS, the content in FIT1047 was much simpler with MARIE and Logisim used to understand the fundamentals of computer systems, Wireshark for networking and cybersecurity. Overall, I found it not awfully challenging but I suspect first years taking this unit in their first semester might have had a different experience if they had no prior knowledge of computer architecture.
- Intro to data analysis (ETC1010): I found this unit enjoyable, especially given it is effectively a unit that teaches the basics of R (which I learnt over the holidays). I found some of the assignment and examination questions a bit ambiguous and littered with spelling mistakes but overall, the unit was enjoyable and quite easy.
- Algorithms and data structures (FIT2004): The infamous FIT2004… An essential unit needed by any good programmer which really stretches your thinking cap and expects you to fail ALOT. Proficiency in Python is expected and no effort will be made to teach you any Python. I was personally very challenged by this unit as it introduces a new bucket of problems to solve and definitely is a problem solving class. In saying this, I found it really rewarding and was still able to barely manage a HD by dedicating countless hours every week solving all the tutorial problems, asking a plethora of questions and starting the assignments as soon as they were released.
Winter Holidays (Jun-Jul)
NYK Failure Project
As an avid NBA and New York Knicks fan, I’ve been pondering my life choices over the past 8 years watching the Knicks play. Following our relative success over the past 2 seasons, I was inspired to take a dive into what has made us such a horrible NBA team over the past decade which can be found through my report here.
In order to build this report, I spent close to a month obtaining NBA data through web scraping/APIs, wrangling the data using R, uncovering patterns in the data and building meaningful visualisations using the beautiful ggplot2. I often failed and restarted through the inability to find anything worthwhile to talk about or struggling to tidy the data into a format I could use. I restarted about 3 times and had to spend countless hours procuring the internet for suitable datasets which I eventually found through Sportrac and the NBA API.
In the end, I was very happy with the report that I had built as my first beginner project with hopefully bigger things ahead in the future.
CCA Retreat
The CCA committee took on Phillip Island as roughly 20 of us looked to enjoy a weekend of action packed fun. We started by meeting up at Monash University before heading off to Pings Dumpling (highly recommend) for lunch. Then we departed for our accomodation in Phillip Island where most of us stayed up and played card games, walked along the beach where we saw actual shooting stars and talked all night. The next day was even more action packed as some of us went bouldering, some baked cakes and some enjoyed cooking dinner which fortunately for everyone else, I didn’t participate in. That night I got about an hour of sleep as we talked about life before I had to drive home the next morning. For many of us, this was the first time we were able to talk for an extended period with many of our fellow committee members which really built a stronger and more tight knit committee.
Semester 2 (Jul-Nov)
Internship Hunt v2
As my internship at MRPV came to a close and a majority of companies began opening up applications for their summer internship programs, once again I began seeking an opportunity to taste more real world experience. This time I was eligible for a lot more internships and applied to roughly 40 places, from which I was fortunate to land an offer from Newcrest Mining as a Data Science intern. It felt surreal as this company and position was at the top of my list of those roughly 40 companies I applied for.
Throughout this process, the many rejections taught me a great deal. Firstly, I definitely need to work on my technical interviews through practicing relevant technical and non-technical interview questions with a particular focus on data science questions. Secondly, a particular weakness of mine is psychometric tests which I will certainly need to work on through UCAT resources. Finally, I will need to add to my resume throughout next year as a majority of the places rejected me during the initial resume screening.
CCA Treasurer
In September of this year I ran for the position of Treasurer in CCA. This was a position that I had long desired because of my interest in managing finances and for the ability to be in a ‘top 4’ position in a university club which would afford me the opportunity to leave a significant impact on one of the largest university clubs. So far the executive team for 2023/2024 has been amazing with everyone genuinely seeming passionate about bringing new, innovative ideas to further develop our club.
Units
In semester 2 I went back to a normal load with what I considered to be a moderately difficult semester in terms of the units I took. Lets have a look at what I thought of each unit I took this semester.
- Databases (FIT2094): Personally I loved this unit, especially in the second half when we were finished with database design and moved onto database queries using SQL. I found it truely enjoyable to work on the assignments, especially considering the teaching staff were all so friendly and quick to help. A major bonus of this unit is that it’s highly practical with no exam!
- Introduction to data science (FIT1043): FIT1043 is widely recognised as an ‘easy’ unit with my tutor even complaining about how easy this unit is. It should come as no surprise that I found this unit enjoyable as it not only covered the basics of machine learning including regression, classification and clustering but also as a much needed non time-consuming unit.
- Statistical Thinking (ETC2420): This unit is essential in that it unlocks machine learning units that have it as a pre-requisite which made me take it as soon as possible. The content itself was difficult to comprehend at times, especially Bayesian analysis but I found it highly rewarding when I eventually grasped the concepts through lots of well … thinking. The name of the unit really resonates when you take this unit as you need to really ‘think’ of how to interpret the data given the statistical concepts taught including permutation tests, bootstrapping, bayesian inference, maximum likelihood estimation and more!
- Introductory econometrics (ETC2410): I found this unit challenging not because of the concepts but rather the sheer quantity of content that was covered. I enjoyed learning hypothesis testing, quadratic regression, autocorrelation, heteroskedasticity and time series analysis but the amount of notes I took was absurd. In the end the exam was much easier than anticipated and I felt the teaching staff did a good job of preparing us for the final exam. As a core unit for both Econometrics and Finance majors, I can definitely see the necessity in taking this unit.
Concluding Remarks
There is a lot more to my year than what was mentioned such as my experiences volunteering at Monash Open Day or the Melbourne United Basketball Club but I thought that I’d bring to light some of my most memorable moments, achievements and failures (the biggest of which is not having a girlfriend yet) throughout the year.