People / Alumni / Class of 2023
Shirley graduated cum laude from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in Statistics & Computer Science and a minor in Business. The interdisciplinary coursework she took at UIUC and several internships she participated in throughout her undergraduate studies sparked her interest in data science and made her realize it is a powerful domain applicable to various industries. Therefore, she was inspired to explore this field further and cultivate a solid understanding of data science through her MSiA* journey at Northwestern. Over the past few years, Shirley had the opportunity to develop her professional experience through multiple internships. During her first internship at Nokia, she designed and implemented the automation of a manual certificate management process using Python, which improved workflow efficiency significantly. The following summer, she gained full-stack experience as a software engineer intern at State Farm. She utilized SQL and Python to optimize the company’s database by executing expansive database manipulation. In addition, she reconstructed the team’s website with additional features and functionalities to enhance the user experience. She was then exposed to machine learning through a machine learning engineer internship at State Farm in her senior year. Throughout the internship, she actively applied analytical skills to adjust her ML model and interacted with Amazon Web Services(AWS) frequently to perform model training and deployment tasks. During her most recent internship at Meta, she was able to further apply her machine learning skills by building a reinforcement learning model to help maximize the impact of the team’s ranking system. She completed the workflow involving data preprocessing, model training, offline evaluation, online serving, and A/B testing. The process she took in utilizing different evaluation metrics to measure her model performance again triggered her desire to continue exploring how to use data science techniques to facilitate business decisions. As a candidate for the MSiA program, Shirley hopes to strengthen both her analytical and business skills to deliver findings across various audiences. She looks forward to interacting with real-world data and solving unforeseen problems by actively collaborating with other students, faculty members, and industry partners. She aspires to equip herself with all the essential skills to leverage the application of data science on a broader horizon.
*later renamed MS in Machine Learning and Data Science
