During the spring semester of the 2023-24 school year I ran into a past teacher of mine. I had his class Calculus class a few years back and, in my usual fashion, I became known to him through random, somewhat esoteric emails, and we ended up talking for a little bit. At some point in the conversation, he mentioned that he was going to try to get funding through the UR-STEM program for a project that some local groups were interested in. The project was the collection of air quality data from multiple sources and building an air quality dashboard that would display all of it together. He mentioned that, if I were interested, and the proposal were approved, I should definitely apply. When both of those conditions were proven to be the case, I did apply.
The day of the interview was a day I didn’t usually come up to campus, and the traffic situation was worse than I expected. I specifically recall hurriedly running down the sidewalk towards the building, nervous out of my mind because the minutes were ticking down. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect but I felt as if being late would count against me a lot. It turned out that it wasn’t really a big deal at all and I got along really well with the people interviewing me (previously mentioned teacher and a teacher I had never met before). I believe it was probably a week or two after that that they made me aware I was selected.
The project officially began May 6th, the week immediatly after the school year ended. We met in a conference room in the math building. There were four of us: the two research advisors/teachers, another student, and yours truly. For the first meeting I was more than a little anxious, I had never met the other student before and I struggle with people sometimes. It was a worry without any negative payoff; he was a perfectly nice guy. In the first meeting we discussed when we would meet and specific ideas that we had for our dashboard project. It was determined that we would meet twice weekly in our conference room and that our project would be broken into frontend and backend.
When talking about software, if something is frontend it means that it’s user-facing and will be used by people who probably aren’t software developers. The backend is something that’s not going to be interacted with by end-users. When discussing how to breakup the project, we decided that the other student would program the frontend and I would do the backend. Another thing we talked about was the technologies we intended to use and it led to us demoing a few of them to make the choice best for us (and the people who would take over after us).
My role in the project was mostly just data collection. We wanted to get data from the government’s AirNow website and also a company named PurpleAir’s local air monitors and transform them in a way that allowed them to be combined. The PurpleAir data was less accurate so we needed a bunch of historical data for both of them in order to be able to correct it, so I had to a lot of data (multiple times because the fields we wanted changes). One aspect of it that was a problem was downloading data from PurpleAir had a cost associated with it, so it always felt very painful to pull data from them.
One thing that I feel is important to emphasize is that the project wasn’t just us. There were people who were environmental scientists, local organizations, and also community members that we regularly met with to show our progress to, ask for feedback, and also to try and understand their specific requirements. Of all of those people, the ones we worked with the most were employees at a local data company called DataBloom1. The reason we worked so closely with them is they’re really involved in data visualization and also making dashboards, and also they were the people we ended up handing our project off to after the internship ended. We met once a week with them and regularly showed them our progress and got their advice because we chose to use tools that they were very familiar with since we were handing it off to them.
I actually struggled a lot during the project. The work wasn’t that hard and I really enjoyed doing it, but I still had problems with motivation and constantly worried that I was letting other people down. It actually became really difficult for me to just check my email because I worried that other people had tried to get into contact with me and that they were upset with me or that I wasn’t good enough to have been chosen. It was a really difficult aspect for me, but I think that I succeeded at the project.
Another aspect of the research project was giving presentations. We ended up giving a presentation to NKU’s Math & Stat department, then also in Indianapolis, IN at Mathfest 2024 in July, and, finally, I presented a poster at NKU’s Heather-Bullen Ball in August. I think it was the part of the project that I was the most worried about, but ended up enjoying quite a bit. I don’t think I’ve accepted that I like being up in front of other people and have them pay attention to me yet, but I definitely do, and it makes me hesitantly excited to do more presenting.