People / Students / Class of 2024
Kate Yee graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2020 with an S.B. in Humanities and Engineering concentrated in Theater Arts and Computer Science. During their undergraduate experience, Kate pursued several internships to practice applying their technical and communication skills to practical problems. At the onset of the MIT Game Lab’s CLEVR project, Kate worked on and scrum mastered a team to design and develop an educational biology VR game using Unity for the Oculus Rift. They coordinated user testing with subject matter experts and target audience members to inform the design of the game, while also coding game play components. Kate continued gaining design experience through an externship at 5 Wits, where they collaborated with a team of five to design and prototype a full-scale, high production value, puzzle room. Intrigued by the ever-expanding uses of data science in their classwork, Kate then took a Data Engineering internship at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, during which they cleaned, integrated, and extracted data from a 7.2 billion row data set for research and development. Throughout their bachelors, Kate accumulated experience working with large code bases, iterative processes, and data literacy. After graduating, Kate joined Secunetics, a network engineering firm, as a consultant, striving to combine their interests in communications and engineering. Kate collaborated with federal clients to optimize their network infrastructures, producing technical SOPs, physical/logical network diagrams, and device configurations. Internally, they developed backed Python modules for Secunetics’ Gobo framework and applications, including YAML schema creation, interactions with the PostgreSQL database, and contract-based credit calculations. While working on these projects, Kate additionally maintained the company’s ETL paths and dashboards for dynamically reporting solution progress to clients. The reintroduction to data in that period spurred Kate’s interest in returning to academia to further engage in the exciting intricacies and universal applications of data analytics. In the future, Kate is interested in exploring multiple new industries, and they are particularly invested in exploring how healthcare data analysis can inform medical research and policy decisions. They are intrigued by the challenges associated with compiling and hosting large amounts of healthcare data due to concerns around collection methods, privacy, anonymization, availability, and ownership. As a member of the mu cohort of Northwestern’s MDLS program, they are excited to learn the skills they need to begin approaching these complex data challenges alongside like-minded students.
