Playing semi-pro basketball for the Alamo City All-Stars under the guidance of Spurs great Johnny Moore as well as coaches and managers with military experience has profoundly shaped my professional demeanor and performance in workplace settings. The disciplined approach instilled by these mentors has honed my work ethic, teamwork skills, and ability to thrive under pressure. Being the youngest player on the team, I have had an amazing opportunity to learn from those who have years of experience that can help me in many aspects of professionalism. Whether it be from my coaches or my teammates that have professional experience playing overseas in different environments, there is something to learn every day.

During the summer of 2024 following my junior year, I was fortunate to have worked a 10-week internship at the iHeartMedia office in San Antonio, Texas. The main "project" of my internship was to help construct a ChatBot that would help users to solve basic issues rather than submitting a ticket to a physical service desk worker. The first step was to analyze an Excel workbook which featured the chats from 2023, and my job was to figure out which ones were the most common. With the help of others in the same department, we then searched for Knowledge-Based articles that could be linked in a potential AI chat dialogue that would efficiently assist the user. I then used the Zia platform in order to write chat dialogues for the most common issues, and unfortunately, we ran into a back-end issue where the output was not being displayed properly. Solving this problem required extensive teamwork, where we had to involve engineers and software developers. After about a week or so, we were able to solve the problem, and up until the end of the internship, I continued to assist with more Zia chat dialogues. While the final product will likely not be achieved for at least another few months, I was able to kickstart the process by analyzing real-world data and drawing conclusions from it. From this experience, I learned the importance of efficiency in the workplace, as real-life service desk agents are constantly tasked with tickets that could have been solved through AI. In addition, I experienced a live conflict in the workplace where we needed to work together as a team in order to solve an IT related issue.