Reflections on Summer 2025: Anh Nguyen

Anh Nguyen is a rising senior at Mount Holyoke College. She completed a summer internship with The Learning Partnership to explore the use of Large Language Models for scoring the kinds of assessments that The Learning Partnership uses. Her work will serve as a foundation for future development of auto grading programs for Learning Partnership assessments. Anh sat down with The Learning Partnership’s Cat McGee to share her reflections on her summer experience.

Cat: What was your experience with The Learning Partnership like this summer?

Anh: My experience this summer was great. With my background in computer science and statistics I came to The Learning Partnership wanting to work on real-life dataset and problems and that’s exactly what I got over the summer. It was a really cool environment. I always felt like I had a lot of support within the organization and I like that it’s a smaller place and everybody knows each other. I felt like the problem I worked on was very interesting and the scope of it was interesting. It was also my first time working in education research, so overall it was exactly what I hoped it to be.

Cat: What was your most significant accomplishment this summer?

Anh: I’d say creating something that I feel is pretty complete, which is my final report. My work for the whole summer was documenting and creating a workflow that isn’t currently usable yet in a real life setting, but is pretty complete. I think it’s in a good place to build upon with future projects. Overall, I feel like it was just really cool how I can see the things I’ve learned and the progress I’ve made and it feels polished.

Cat: What would you say you learned over the course of the summer?

Anh: I think I learned both technical skills and soft skills. That’s how I’m trying to contextualize my learning this summer. Technically my project was also working with large language models to score a lot of the computer science exams. This was my first time working extensively with large language models, so that was definitely a very cool technical skill that I learned. Also, working with real life data, processing that, and brushing up on my Python coding. Soft skills wise, I got to meet a lot of folks from Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and explore the field of education research and the intersection of that with computer science, which is a new field for me. I got to learn from many people and see what they do and how they’re incorporating computer science into education.

Cat: What did you learn about working with the school district as a researcher?

Anh: This is my first time working in education so meeting people from CPS was a very cool experience because I think it’s always cool to see how much people care about their job, the students they’re working to serve, and overall how CPS work as a community. I think it’s awesome that CPS is so open to having research partners, and it’s very cool to see that it really is a collaborative process and that I actually get to meet with them weekly and seeing that they really do value research. It makes me feel that I have a place within their work as a researcher. I hope it’s getting more and more common among school districts.

Cat: Can you talk a little bit about the kind of mentoring you received over the course of the summer?

Anh: Both Willow and Steven were amazing resources for the technical stuff. I felt that I worked independently over this summer because a lot of it’s also part of the project. I get to decide a lot of the time which direction things go in and I get to sit down and really figure out the problem myself. But it was really good to have guidance whenever I got stuck because I could ask for help. I always received very good recommendations. Steven helped me reach out to other researchers in the field and learn from them as well. So it always felt like even though I worked independently for most of the time, if I needed help, it was available. I really appreciate that style of mentoring.

Cat: Can you talk about some of the highlights of your summer in Chicago?

Anh: I really like Chicago Summer. The city feels very lively! I just love walking around in different neighborhoods because I really do think that they all feel very different and they all have very diverse architecture. One of my highlights is definitely walking along the lakefront area. I walked all the way up north and visited Navy Pier, Grant Park and also the Adler Planetarium skyline on the lakefront path. All of them were really pretty, and I really liked that the city has that big body of water accessible to it. I was able to even have a beach day while I was here.

Cat: Would you recommend this internship to other college students and why?

Anh: I definitely would. I found out about this opportunity through Willow because Willow was a Mount Holyoke alum. She reached out because she had such a good experience with The Learning Partnership. I think it is a very valuable internship for college students because again, you have access to great real life data and you get access to real life problems. You really get to both take ownership of your work and also have a support system of people who really care about their work. So if you enjoy education, research, computer science research or anything in between, I think it’s a great opportunity to get to apply some skillsets and learn some new ones.