Summer with Big Data

Anna Kong had no plans to take the summer off from her studies.

“I really wanted to do research,” she says. “As a data science accelerated master’s student, I had worked with big data before, but I had never done my own research. I saw this as a good opportunity to get that experience.”

So when she was notified that she had earned a prestigious REU stipend from the National Science Foundation, she jumped at the chance.

This academic year she is continuing to pursue the work she began in the summer, advancing the project while learning about the process of conducting research.

“It was really difficult,” Anna says. “Sometimes it takes time to realize you did something wrong, or you took the wrong approach, and you have start it all over again.”