Data Engineer Intern at Geneva Trading (June 2026-August 2026)

I am happy to say that I have accepted a data engineering internship at Geneva Trading. I am excited to see new types of problems and meet great people!

Prefect (Teaching Assistant) – (January 2026-June 2026)

I have prefected for CS 252 (Algorithms, Winter) and STAT 230 (Regression Analysis, Spring). This was my first big teaching position – where I was expected to help students understand material in class, organize study sessions to go over homework or class material, and produce exam prep material to help students review for their exams.

CS 252 was my first prefecting position. I was very lucky to have been offered the role to prefect Algorithms because I love the class a lot and am very confident in the material (since I had been practicing algorithms all Summer for job applications). As such, I was able to quickly overcome my initial fears of teaching others and became helpful to all in the class. I was able to effectively communicate to my students on review session times, and was able to successfully explain hard concepts and algorithms to my students.

STAT 230 was my second prefecting position – although is a bit more challenging to me due to my lesser confidence in the material and the fact that many students in the course are beginners in statistics. Despite this, I still get a lot of enjoyment from helping students, even if the problems is on R syntax rather than hard problems like Algorithms. It makes me happy to see my students do well.

Research Assistant in ML Research at UChicago (June-August 2025)

During this summer, I worked under Professor Hae Kyung Im with two other undergraduate interns. The lab is named Im Lab, and they specialize in genomics research, specializing in gene expression data. Over the course of the summer, I created two AI assistants to help with the lab. The first was for the International Genetic Epidemiology Society (IGES), using historical data to train an AI assistant with answering questions about its history and events. The second was for the lab’s tool MetaXcan, which is an open source tool that uses either GWAS or genotype-level data in order to identify significant differences in gene expression – which can be used to target treatment and identify places in the genome to upregulate or downregulate. I worked with this tool as well in order to gain a better understanding of it, and conducted a transcriptome-wide association analysis on a chromosome 11 of hippocampal cell with/without alzheimers. My final project spanned almost half of the internship, which was to create a gameified onboarding tool to help with introducing new labmates to different technologies of the lab – ranging from biology basics, technology like R, Python and Unix, statistics basics like machine learning, and the lab’s own tool MetaXcan. I drew from an open source project, and expanded on it greatly to create DuoImGo – a Duolingo clone with added features that would improve the onboarding process and give a place to practice questions/topics the student got wrong. The website can be found here: https://duoimgo.com/ 

Boot.dev 2025 Hackathon – 2nd Place (July 2025)

In the middle of the summer, boot.dev ran a virtual hackathon – where we were able to build anything that we wanted. My friend Warren and I happened to both be in Chicago working so we decided to spend a weekend in person staying up to complete CodeDuel. CodeDuel was inspired by TypeRacer and Jstris, we wanted a platform where people could quickly get on and play a match with their friend. We made the project with a React frontend, a Flask + Postgres backend, dockerized and deployed with nginx on a Google Cloud VM. Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to safely execute code written on the browser as we were (rightfully) afraid of people running malicious code and nuking our server. We countered this by creating a temporary docker container every time a person submitted their code to run the test cases – this would prevent the entire server from going down from a forking program. There is still a lot of improvements we can make to the product and efficiency-wise and I am currently refactoring the code base and creating tests to ensure the website is stable. I am working on improving the reliability of the website, making efficiency improvements like pooling database connections + creating a lasting docker container for each player in the match, and adding new features! Also we won second place out of over 500 participants. Exciting stuff – still waiting on an SSL certificate. http://codeduel.io/, https://blog.boot.dev/news/hackathon-2025/

Undergraduate Researcher in Adaptive Tests at Carleton (March-Present)

I am working with student researchers and Anna Rafferty in studying Machine Learning applications in Adaptive Tests, particularly in the BOBCAT model, building an Oracle for it, and investigating possible extensions.

I am currently working on experiments for a paper on a new metric for validating knowledge tracing and adaptive testing methods. Exciting!

MinneMUDAC 2025 Data Science Competition (March-April 2025)

Placed 3rd place at the 2025 MinneMUDAC Data Science Competition, hosted at the University of Minnesota, alongside my teammates Aiden Guan and Joyce Li. It was a great experience getting dirty with large data and transforming our findings into a short and convincing presentation. We were able to present in the finals to a large audience of people – it was a very nerve-wracking experience but I learned so much nonetheless.

Github: https://github.com/noazlee/1_minnemudac

Link to post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danalytics_carleton-college-shows-their-stuff-in-this-activity-7318693957272489985-suBE?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAADZw6TYB5Gq0lanas8JhZjlzZJYbLhT_A1Q

Assistant Data Scientist at DataSquad (August 2024- June 2025)

Updated the DataSquad website and worked on moving data from the website from bitbucket to github. I worked on a long term project spanning two terms which involved communicating with and analysing data on five upper level Spanish courses and their respective student assessments. I made visualizations, wrote reports and performed data analysis in R.

App Developer at Project Friendship (August 2024-December 2025)

I learned a lot about AWS and found resources to find out how to use my existing ReactNative and Expo skills with AWS. I was able to create a fully functioning authentication page (sign up, sign in, sign out) using Amplify and storing users on Cognito. I then worked on designing and coding the frontend of the app (authentication page and home pages).

Data Science Intern at GradientX (May 2024-August 2024)

Super grateful to Peter for taking a chance on me as a relatively unproven Freshman. Coming into this internship, Peter asked me if I had any experience in AI or Machine Learning. I told him I had none. Turns out, the majority of my work would be on AI for this internship – so I had to learn alot, and learn fast.

My first weeks in this internship were really scary for me. I was reading on so much, trying to learn about LLMs, while also learning a complete Data Science bootcamp covering the basics of ML, Deep Learning and Python EDA libraries. There was just so much knowledge to pick up that I felt pretty overwhelmed – at times thinking I was too underqualified or dumb to do this internship. I would read research papers and listen to AI podcasts to pick up information, having to pause every couple seconds just to look up basic AI jargon. This was not what I was used to, as I typically love learning and the theory of CS, so it came as quite a shock to me when I saw signs that I was burning out.

The Chatbot Projects:
The turning point for the internship for me was the chatbot projects. I was assigned to make a Telegram chatbot, using RAG, Voice Integration with Whisper and later DeepGram, Image integration with DALLE, and function calling. I was finally seeing an outcome out of my learning – and it was also pretty cool to make my own chatbot. I also then created a whatsapp version. My supervisor, Eric, then asked me to make a whatsapp chatbot fine-tuned to be on the AIX website. I thought it would be better for the user experience if the bot was integrated onto the website, as a WordPress plugin, and although he was hesitant to let me, an unproven intern, work on a project of that scale, I pushed for it and I started working on it.

The chatbot was a great project because it combined AI engineering with Full-Stack Software Engineering. I started with the Flask backend, which was really similar to the script of the Telegram chatbot. This was relatively easy and I had a fully functioning backend in a small amount of time. I then made the frontend, using basic HTML, CSS, and JS. This also did not take too much time, and I was able to deploy the bot locally. The most challenging part of this project was learning how to deploy my project on a cloud service. I chose Google Cloud Provider and used Cloud Run. It was quite a challenge reading documentation to try to deploy it on the cloud and also automate it to re-scrape the website for RAG every week; a lot of my backend had to be edited to accomodate for the GCP ecosystem. It was honestly a struggle fixing one bug and running into the next but when the deployment was successful it was honestly one of the best feelings on earth. The final step was creating the wordpress plugin which was also pretty hard as I had to figure out PHP (not fun). I also wrote a lengthy documentation, ensuring that the future generation will be able to maintain my chatbot.

Final Weeks:
The final weeks saw me working on more projects and making some finishing touches. I finished the DS bootcamp I started at the beginning of my internship and finally got a data extraction and modelling project in the form of a real estate client for GradientX. I also adapted the Telegram chatbot and wrote up documents so the code could be used in GradientX’s AI engineering bootcamp.

Overall, a lot of lessons learned! I learned the importance of good communication, making my opinions heard and I learned a lot about the field of AI and Data Science. Great experience. 10/10

Board Member and Program Director for PF (April 2024-Present)

I was selected to be both Board Member and Program Director for a three year term. In this position, I have the role of attending regular board meetings, being the sole representative of Carleton mentors while being a mentor myself. I also take part in helping with Project Friendship events with the Northfield community, regularly communicating with Holly (Project Friendship’s lead) and the mentors, and helping with recruiting new Project Friendship mentors – being a guide to them as well.

To view the Project Friendship website: Click Here

Digital Humanities Associate (January-June 2024)

Overall, this job has been a great experience in using a wide variety of skills to help introduce technology to humanities classes. I have learned a lot about working collaboratively with others getting accustomed to working on a schedule and talking in meetings. Click here to see my end-of-year blog post

To view the DHA website: Click Here