Spotlight: Anh Nguyen

We are excited to be hosting Anh Nguyen as an undergraduate summer intern. Following the footsteps of Willow Kelleigh, she is our second undergraduate intern from Mt. Holyoke. The Learning Partnership’s Cat McGee interviewed Anh about her expectations of the summer experience.

Cat: Can you tell me a bit about your education background and your interests?

Anh: I’m currently a computer science and statistics major at Mount Holyoke. As a kid, I have always liked math and I’ve always enjoyed it. I think I really decided to pursue it when I was in high school. I had some really amazing math and computer science teachers who really made an impact on me. I think that both of these fields have so many applications and they’re very interdisciplinary. You can use it to work on many cool projects in different fields, and it doesn’t feel constrained. So that’s what I really like about both of them is their ability to be applied and be integrated with other subjects. And I’ve really enjoyed my college undergrad courses so far, and now I’m here!

Cat: Can you describe the funding opportunity that Mount Holyoke provides for summer internships?

Anh: It’s really cool! It’s called Lynk Funding which for every undergrad in Mount Holyoke, you are allowed to use this funding for one summer. If you find an opportunity that you really like, but it is unpaid or low paid, the school gives you a grant. When you find an opportunity, you write up an application, and then if it meets all the criteria, you can get this grant to fund yourself for your summer internship. So this summer I used it to be here.

Cat: What attracted you to the learning partnership as a host site for your internship?

Anh: I found out about The Learning Partnership through Willow Kelleigh (TLP’s current Data Analyst and Mount Holyoke alum). She sent out an email to the Statistics department at Mount Holyoke saying “Hey, I did this and it was really great. If you’re interested, let me know.” I think I’ve always had an interest in education, education research, and education technology, but there aren’t that many opportunities for it. It’s a little bit of a niche field. I kind of stumbled upon this opportunity, but then I read more about The Learning Partnership and the work you guys are doing with Chicago Public Schools and your other projects, and it just seemed really interesting. So I thought that maybe there’s something cool that I can do this summer here.

Cat: What project are you going to be working on or projects are you working on this summer?

Anh: Mainly I will be working on trying to assess different ways to auto grade the exams that The Learning Partnership has collected from CPS from AP Computer Science Principles. There are a couple of ways. Willow tested out potentially using BERT, which is a specific machine learning technique to grade them. But the disadvantage of that is you have to have a lot of data. You have to have a lot of past manually scored data, feed it to the model and then the model learns from that past data and then grades new exams. I am personally exploring large language models where you don’t really have to feed it a lot of past data, it can just generate more language. So I’m working on assessing that as a potential way to score exams, which could cut down on a lot of time and effort that is always required to score these exams.

Cat: What are you looking forward to most this summer with your research or participation in the research?

Anh: Definitely the development of technical skills. I’ve taken machine learning or AI courses at school, but this would be my first time getting to work with real data on a pretty significant machine learning project. I think that is the cool thing about summer internships that you actually get access to real data, which is really exciting. I’m also just excited to learn more about education research and technology. I am in my first week and I’ve already met so many cool people and everybody seems really friendly and passionate about their jobs. I get the opportunity to know more about this as a potential career path, which is really useful.

Cat: What have you liked about Chicago thus far and are there any bucket list items that you’re looking to cross off while you’re here?

Anh: I’ve heard a lot of good things about Chicago, especially Chicago Summer! I have been very excited to visit and so far I really enjoy it. I think it’s a special city for sure. I haven’t spent that much time in it, but I’ve be able to walk in a couple of the different neighborhoods and downtown. Overall, I feel like it’s very friendly and it feels like you can always find things to do. I am especially excited for a lot of restaurants and to try out all the art museums– I’m big fan of art museums. So I’m really excited about getting to enjoy and get to know Chicago a bit more as a city. I think there’s a special vibe here that I am excited to explore.