People are an invaluable resource! Never underestimate the value of who’s on your team & in your network.My passion for entrepreneurship began in high school as I put my creativity to work, building inventions with Rasberry Pi’s and basic code. In seeking a group to belong to, I became part of the Entrepreneur Society my freshman year at SDSU and have been hooked ever since. The speakers, workshops, and network of driven individuals at all levels of experience became essential to my growth.I was elected Vice President my sophomore year, and President for my Junior year. I’m fortunate to lead such a talented group of executives and members through 2020. So far, we've increased our event turnout 10x, our social media following and interactions 4x, and hosted esteemed speakers such as Noel Lee of Monster Cable and Beck Bamberger of BAM Communications. Our members have gained invaluable connections with each other and the talent we bring in - everything from new friends and coffee trend discussions to interviews and job offers! Additionally, the workshops have been essential to keeping our members up to date with relevant skills such as Search Engine Optimization with Power Digital and utilizing LinkedIn as a space to market personal value and result-proven skills. To give these students a chance to pitch, we had 25 students quick-pitch their ideas to 170 attendees and a panel of judges. This built interest for our VentureStart Competition, where Business Model Canvases were submitted to become a finalist - who then presented their pitch decks to established entrepreneurs and investors for nearly $1K in prizes. So far, it's been an excellent year to be an entrepreneur at SDSU!...and remember, "It’s not what you know, it’s who you know."

Due to interning during COVID-19, I was a remote intern and didn't participate in the usual "intern project" style internship, where interns form small teams and take on their own projects. Rather, I was able to integrate directly into the Security Engineering team and - with the help of some incredible mentorship - I worked on 2 amazing projects: project ABCDE and Scorecard, detailed below.Project ABCDE - Automatically Build a Complete Development Environment - was something I took on after experiencing a difficult onboarding process. I created a system for new team members to use to quickly and easily launch a customized and complete development environment in AWS with a one line command. It built an EC2 instance using Cloudformation, Makefile automation, and pre-loaded team-ready setup. This EC2 instance became a personal sandbox for development and testing, allowing anyone to easily spin up and tear down sandboxes at will - so there was less wait time and no fear of "breaking" the environment! Storage and additional computing power became easily toggled, and toolstacks were preloaded and ready to go! This was easily the most interesting and challenging project I've done so far, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I worked with my team to improve an internal product called Scorecard, which we use to score the security adherence of teams' products across the company. I conducted customer interviews, worked on the backend code, and contributed to team sprints. This was an amazing learning experience to acclimate to scrum workflows, become familiar with our codebase, and get lots of facetime with product owners and managers!Thank you Viasat for an incredible summer!

Immersion in the fast-paced growth of iHerb's new Supply Chain Solutions company provided an invaluable opportunity to learn from the best. As part of the Warehouse Execution System, my responsibility was to research and implement a path planning algorithm to direct the AGVs that would service our warehouses.Through my research, I found that A* with a few modifications would be our best bet. Starting with creating a basic Dijkstra algorithm and working towards a turn optimized A*, I learned the in's and out's of path planning. I cut calculation time down from minutes to milliseconds while maintaining all path requirements, but only after learning about the inefficiencies my first attempt contained, designing quality tests, and immersing myself in algorithm design.Along with learning better coding practices, how and when to unit test, and how to research effectively, I also learned some less-technical skills. I was exposed to Agile software development, learned to ask productive questions, and was fortunate to be a part of a team that truly operates in sync. This experience taught me an immense amount of hard and soft skills, and what I learned from the bright people on my team will stay with me as I return to school and beyond.

The overarching goal of my project on this team was to understand the user journey of iHerb customers to make better product recommendations.Splitting my time between the two sides of this project, I worked with our Catalog team to create tracking attributes to collect data on the user journey on the iHerb website, and with our Data Science team to set up a pipeline to funnel that data into our database. Once complete, I was excited to query some of the data and see the variety of improvements that could be made from this customer data, as well as the potential to provide a more personal experience for our users across platforms.Skills: Javascript, CSS, SQL, Git, Google Tag Manager, Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, Agile Software Development, Sprint Planning