Being the last week of my internship, I spent most of my time finalizing my code and learning how to upload it to their main database. I finished both my projects and the fixed all the changes suggested to me by others at Armorblox.
This whole process was a huge learning experience for me and I wanted to give a special thanks to Ms. Visa and Mr. Sampath for helping guide me through this and also to Ms. Belcher for helping organize the whole senior project and making sure I stayed on track and dedicated. I learned so much about machine learning and natural language processing from the very basics such as part of speech tagging to the more complex softwares such as word2vec and RAKE. Without this project, I don’t think I would have ever got a chance to explore the field of NLP in so much depth until my last year or two of college. Even non-academically, I was exposed to a whole new world. Working in a start-up, I learned the importance of communication and teamwork while working on such large scale projects where numerous components have to work in perfect unison for the product to work. The daily stand-ups were one way I saw Armorblox stay in sync and I also saw how no one hesitated before asking questions or clarifying anything to make sure everything worked out perfectly.
For me, I was fairly lucky in that, I didn’t face many non-technical challenges during the course of my senior project. I think this was because I made sure I followed my schedule and that I would work extra to make sure I met deadlines if I was going to miss them. The major thing that went wrong for me was during the middle couple weeks when my code for the threat insertion project deleted itself…twice. This meant I had to rewrite it twice but in my opinion in turned out to be a good thing. I wasn’t 100% sure how my code was working or why, I just knew it was, but after I had to rewrite it twice, I knew exactly how everything worked.
My final product will be the code I wrote for both projects along with examples of them running. Although I haven’t created a visual representation of that yet, I will be working on it for the next couple weeks leading up to my presentation on May 22 at 7pm at the DoubleTree Hilton Hotel in San Jose.
For those of you reading this that are considering a senior project next year, I highly recommend that you do. It may seem like a lot of work (and it is) but if you pick a topic you are interested in, its a lot of fun and you learn valuable lessons that you wouldn’t learn anywhere else.
I loved working on my senior project and interning at Armorblox! It’s an experience I’ll never forget!