About
Education
I graduated from the University of Central Florida in the Spring of 2024 with a B.S. in Statistics. I majored in Statistics because throughout high school I was pretty good at math, and when I took AP Statistics my junior year I felt like it came naturally to me. I “decided” on a new major every few months in High School until I landed on statistics, and I’m very glad I chose it. At UCF I was able to participate in the 2023 Big Data Symposium where I got the opportunity to learn about different jobs that used statistics and machine learning. I mingled with a lot of professors where I heard about their research and found out what it was like doing statistics in academia. I believe I got to do a lot of fun experiences in college just by simply majoring in statistics, which is very cool!
During my time at UCF, I was a part of three clubs: The Association of Computing Machine, Knight Hacks, and AI@UCF. Through these clubs I was able to hone my coding skills and learn about different subjects within machine learning like reinforcement learning and deep learning. These clubs allowed me to attend seminars on different fields within math computer science, and I got hands-on experience with a number of data structures and algorithms. Knight Hacks, for instance, holds one of the largest Florida Hackathons each year, and I was able to attend it every year where I had to make small projects under a time constraint, constant pressure, and a lack of sleep.
Courses that I have taken include statistical methods, statistical theory, nonparametric statistics, calculus, linear algebra, machine learning, and time series. These have all helped me grow my knowledge of statistics and machine learning and apply it to case studies and numerous projects. One thing that I was shocked about was that statistics, a math degree, required a lot of presentations, so I was able to obtain a lot of experience with explaining data and results in both technical and non-technical ways. I have also covered other areas like Bayesian statistics and mathematical methods for artificial intelligence, but these have been spread out through some of my classes.
Skills
Coding wise, I mainly have used Python and R for machine learning, and R I have used the most for also conducting statistical tests. With R, I am able to create visualizations using ggplot, manipulate and clean data, and using different libraries I can do many machine learning functions to solve problems within data. For Python, I have used matplotlib and seaborn for data visualization, and I have used sci-kit learn for shallow machine learning. I have used Keras and TensorFlow for a natural language processing project, but I want to learn more about both languages, and hopefully PyTorch soon. When I need to communicate with databases, I use SQL to write and have used SQLite and PostgreSQL for database administration.
Data visualization has always interested me since I made my first “pretty” plot using ggplot in R. Since then, I have gotten very good at powerfull and aesthetic visualizations in R and Python, but now I am focusing a lot on Tableau and Power BI for their interactive dashboard capability.
Feel free to check out my projects tab where I showcase some of them! If you want to check out more, or the source code, then be sure to click on the GitHub icon in the navigation bar.
Hobbies
When I’m not trying to learn new things, I like to play video games. Minecraft is an oldie but a goodie, and I sometimes like to play Hearthstone because you can multitask while playing the battlegrounds mode. I also love watching movies, even ones people say are “bad”, but I especially like watching them in a movie theater. I feel like it’s a lot more immersive and fun that way.
I’m not sure if this counts as a hobby, but exploring new areas excites me. Everything is new and interesting, and you get to feel what it’s like to live in that area. When I still lived with my family, we would travel a lot, and I got to experience national parks, loud cities, and nature that I don’t get to experience a lot here in Florida. One thing I’ve learned recently is Florida has a lot of natural springs and, to me, that feels like traveling because they’re far from where I live, and they all feel different from each other. Yes, they all have water to swim and kayak in, but the surrounding areas are unique in their own ways.
Cats
My girlfriend, Kristina, and I have 2 cats. A cranky, 7 year old tabby named Gnocchi (left), and a super hungry 2 year old calico named Ube (right). Gnocchi is a difficult cat who likes to decide that she doesn’t like her fancy wet food anymore, and request different food. She also happens to be a yapper if you don’t give her enough attention, so she gets played with a lot. Ube, on the other hand, is a purr-fect cat. She plays with toys and whatever random wrappers she can find, and likes to cuddle. The one thing about Ube is she can eat, eat, eat. Take her to a buffet and she could probably clean the whole place out.