I interned at AltusLearn for a year, from summer 2020 to summer 2022. This Madison based startup provides online continuing medical education for medical professionals and medical providers. I was tasked with developing, and testing, a web API for a new feature on the website: the wallet. Joining the team with little web development experience, I was required to learn PHP, MySQL, and WordPress development as I began the roll. This internship was a one of a kind experience to work with a small, tight-knit team of driven individuals, mentorship, and plenty of new tech skills that I was unable to gain in the classroom. I then interned in a business operations role at AltusLearn; getting an introduction into the business side of marketing and project management. I have spearheaded many projects related to digital badging, a leadership program, and marketing campaigns. Very blessed with this opportunity as getting business experience while being a computer science student is an asset for the future.

After 8 months at AltusLearn, I was placed on a brand new project: Shared Decision Making (SDM Analytics). This project required me to work tightly with my superiors designing, planning, and developing a project from scratch. I was tasked with initiating the MVP environment for account creation, and creating SDM tools from the perspective of a content creator. From working at the startup, to starting a new project from scratch, AltusLearn provided me a startup technology feel which kickstarted my desire to engage in entrepreneurship.

For summer 2021, I was a Genomic Algorithms Intern for Ancestry.com based in Lehi, Utah. The team is one of the first at Ancestry to receive the genotype data from customers, once they are processed by the lab partners. We develop pipelines that calculate ethnicity estimates, DNA match relationships, and trait predictions for Ancestry DNA customers using algorithms written by the Ancestry DNA Science team. Joining the team, I was introduced to working in an agile environment, and new developer tools such as Docker, AWS, and genomic file representation. Using these tools, I was tasked with starting a new DNA pipeline, which was chosen to showcase in front of the executive board at the end of the internship. The experience was incredible, with outstanding leadership from my manger and mentors, as well a productive, and diligent development environment in the company as a whole. This internship sparked my interest to continue pursing software in places that are more niche.

Currently working full-time with the same team, and have accomplished moving the intern project forward to the production environment which is a critical step in our pipeline to understanding parental inheritance of our existing DNA products, with parental matches being a project that I was on. This matching algorithm is more intelligent in not only finding a customer’s matches, but also predicting the parental side of the match. This effort took extreme understanding a new coding language called Nextflow, scalability of infrastructure, scalability of code, firm handling of edge cases, and cross team communication. I’m confident in my understanding of the pipeline and pride myself in being a critical piece of the management and integration of the new pipeline pieces. We are continuing to integrate new pipeline features, and optimize performance of the underlying design and code.