对临床的思考

诊所, the senior capstone project for engineers and computer scientists (plus joint math-computer science majors and a few others), captured a lot of my time and attention senior year. 诊所 is a chance to work in teams with other students, 教务顾问, and liaisons from a company to investigate a problem that that company has brought to Mudd! 今年, computer science 诊所 sponsors included the Caltech Cai Lab, DIRECTV, 易趣, 联邦快递, and my personal favorite – Clean Power 研究 (my team). The official summary for my team’s work reads: 

“Solar utilities rely on accurate sunlight forecasts to determine how much power they will produce on a given day. Clean Power 研究 provides these forecasts, but existing methods take too much time and computation to forecast for a given location immediately. To explore machine learning solutions, our 诊所 team constructed a pipeline to retrieve and transform data, train predictive models and evaluate their performance. We used this to investigate new data sources and the viability of two different machine learning approaches.” (诊所过去的项目).

全年, I learned a lot about processing data (we processed more than 12 terabytes in the end!), building models, and exploring really open-ended research questions. 然而, 诊所 also taught me a lot of other skills – interpersonal teamwork skills, 沟通技巧, 以及规划能力. 在秋天, I worked as the Project Manager for the team, which meant I served as the point of contact between the team and both the faculty advisor and the liaisons. 这意味着要发很多邮件! It also taught me organizational planning skills–how to write a meeting agenda, 如何发送摘要邮件, how to write all of this down in my planner so I don’t forget…

It’s not just me either– when I asked other seniors what the most valuable thing they learned from 诊所 was, a lot of the replies were about those types of skills! Anya Porter ‘23 cited “How to keep track of deadlines far in the future” and “How to break up large tasks into smaller more manageable parts” as two of the most important things she learned in 诊所.

The culmination of 诊所 is Projects Day in early May, when all of the different teams give a presentation and attend a 帖子er session to share what they’ve been working on. It’s set up kind of like a conference – lots of seniors who did thesis or underclassmen show up too! 整体, 诊所 is a great way to get real-world experience solving real problems during your senior year.