Pace University – Page 3 – Seidenberg School News

An inside look at a student internship with IBM

Tianyu Wang, a Ph.D. Candidate studying Data Science at Pace University, is a cybersecurity specialist and financial professional in the making. The Seidenberg student has obtained not one, but two Masters of Science in Computer Science and Financial Management as well as a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Now he’s on the path of getting his next Ph.D. in Data Science. His extensive education has brought him numerous roles tailored to his professional career, but his latest role might just be his most impressive: Data Scientist Intern at IBM.

The Westchester campus student worked his way up from the position of Coach for National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) at Pace University to Lab Course Instructor, Teaching Assistant, Research Lab Network Administrator, and finally to where he is now: Graduate Research Assistant. Tianyu has held positions at Mount Sinai Health System as a Data Security Intern and at Human Rights Watch as an Intern in the Department of Finance Operations. Now an internship at IBM is adding to his extensive resume of knowledge and experience. Tianyu had a lot to say about the opportunities he scored through this dream job.

First, it’s important to note what data science is all about. According to Tianyu, the career route consists of three things: math/statistics, coding, and research. While at IBM, he notes that his day-to-day job tasks included “obtaining data, cleaning it, analyzing it and communicating actionable insights for decision making.”

“My impression from data science is that the work is highly intellectually satisfying and the results of your work are highly tangible,” he explains. “It means that there is faster feedback and a highly tangible connection between your work and outcomes.”

Tianyu explains that there are differences between coding for school and coding for work. He notes that “framework should not only solve the problem for a current project but also provide a potential capability to address a similar problem for other teams in the future. For example, codes should easily be extended and adapted for the new functionalities. It should be able to maintain reliability, safety, or security of the new application for the whole team.”

Tianyu explains that being proactive is important, and that “opportunities always come with risks, but it is worthwhile for young people. Continue learning something new [and it] will absolutely lower the risks.”

He also recommends that students should look into the Career Services system: “students would learn a lot from [their] career counselors. Then, get a job and start the path with what you learn from it. Keep refreshed with latest technologies, and keep researching the market requirements. It will help a student stay off [their] comfort zone.”

So stay proactive, learn from your internships and classes, and stay refreshed with the latest technologies and research. There’s a lot that one can do to score that coveted internship with a top tech company. Tianyu’s advice is useful for anyone looking to dive into a high-end technological or financial career. We’re happy to share Tianyu’s story and helpful advice to further your story as well!

Learning to love through astrology and putting color back into the world: software engineering class presents final application projects

While finals can be a stressful time for students each time they come around, they can also be the perfect time to work with classmates on projects they feel passionate about. The season for cramming and test taking can also be an opportunity for collaborative innovation. When the Software Engineering (CS389) class presented their final projects in the Seidenberg Lounge on May 15th, it seemed as though that innovative energy was thriving.

The leading professor for the class, Dr. Shahed Mustafa, reviewed the team projects with assistance from Professor Avery Leider and Dr. Christelle Scharff. The eight groups of undergraduate students presented software applications they created to tackle real-world problems and generate an environment of positivity.

The students worked with Android Studio, Photoshop, Firebase, GitHub, and numerous other applications to bring their ideas to life. The teams created apps in a Scrum framework starting from an idea. Their ideas ranged from a game featuring adorable bartending kittens to a chat room app that helps groups of friends and coworkers find the perfect meeting location. After their ideas were solidified, student groups identified their backlog (the load of work to be completed in the future) and completed a series of three sprints.

ClassGo

The application created by Jacob Hiban, Vivian Ng, and Stephanie Okereke titled, ClassGo, is a buying and selling platform tailored to Pace students. Users can buy or sell used classroom supplies like textbooks, lab materials, and more. The application features a homepage, search bar, selling and buying pages, and a capability to “favorite” the items the user likes best. Future improvements for the application include an updated user interface, homepage, chat, commenting section, and notification settings. These computer science mavens hope that their app can one day be a service that Pace students will choose to use over eBay, Mercari, or even Poshmark.

Kitten Klub

The makers behind Kitten Klub ask, “kittens and alcohol!? Who knew?” Well, they did! The application is a time management game set in the world of cats which was created by Samuel Gellar, Nicholas Vallarelli, Sammy Chen Li, and Anna Marinina. Targeted users play the game by creating drinks for the kittens they are bartending for. The game, which is only available for Apple devices at the moment, has nine levels that increase in difficulty.

EzAttend

The goal of EzAttend is to simplify the attendance taking process. Contributors, Edward Gervis, Raami Sharif, and Ian Groombridge worked together to make a one tap attendance app using Bluetooth. The application allows the teacher to create a class and take attendance, while also allowing students to see their attendance record.

Royal Closet

Royal Closet is tailored to the user. The fashion application captures user information, user market recycler view, avatar choice, and measurement comparisons to show the user what a chosen item of clothing could look like on their body by placing a version on their tailored avatar. Krutika Wadha, Tiara Hammond, and Yunting Yin designed this app to help individuals make fashion choices. They hope in the future to make it an inclusive e-commerce app with customizable avatars.

Lumattica

Lumattica is all about “putting color back into the world,” according to creators Austin Halper, Justin Sciglimpaglia, and Aayan Jalal. The app targets people who suffer from color blindness. The app works for both yellow-blue and red-green color confusion. Features include a field view, self-diagnosis, camera, and color quiz.

Lovescope: The Astrology Dating App

Lovescope: The Astrology Dating App is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a dating app specialized to each astrology sign. Creators Margarita Dominguez, Nick Krawczeniuk, Jennifer Rhau, and Minying He created the application to give users explanations of all planets, houses, and signs. The app integrates user profiles so users can create their own birth chart (gender options include non-binary) and uses a compatibility algorithm to see which users match together best!

translatAR

Yuliya Daroshka, Ivan Tang, Brandon DeLuca, and Jeffrey Cruz are the minds behind translatAR: an app that has the potential to be a direct competitor to Google lens. Its target audience is English speakers who travel abroad each year. The straight forward visual translator app is capable of helping users find the correct word for any object they take a picture of in 26 languages!

Fuse

“Meeting up with friends just got a whole lot easier,” according to the minds behind Fuse. The app helps groups meet up at a central and convenient location for all users. Creators Stephan Reyes, Manan Thakkar, Stephanie Philip, Kito Beriens, and Vincent Ajodhia created this app with multiple APIs to incorporate map and group-chat features. Whether a group wants to meet at a restaurant, bar, or park, this app helps them find the best option. This app solves all of those “where should we meet” problems by giving a solution that fits everyone’s needs.

These projects are all products of hard work and collaboration. Make sure to check out each app to fully experience how they function overall by scanning the QR codes on each poster. We’re proud of these software engineering students and what they created in just one semester.

Seidenberg Junior wins the Northeast-10 Conference Women’s Swimming and Diving Sport Excellence Award for the second year in a row

Swimming and computer science don’t have much in common, but when a Seidenberg student wins an award for academic and athletic success, they intersect quite well. Jana Ciric is a junior Computer Science major and Division II Swim Team member on the Westchester campus. She just earned the Northeast-10 Conference Women’s Swimming and Diving Sport Excellence Award for the second year in a row.

The third-year student explains that she started swimming when she was in the third grade; “when I was a little kid, my parents would take me to Greece every year and all I wanted to do was play in the water. They helped me make the right choice and choose swimming when I was ready to take on a sport.”

Growing up, Jana was on Serbia’s National Swimming Team for four years. During that time, she participated in European regional meets, like the Balkan Junior Championship, where she won the silver medal in the 50-meter freestyle. She was also the captain of the “Sveti Nikola” swimming club in Serbia for six years, helping to coach and organize a team of ten swimmers for practices and swim meets.

She notes that her time swimming for Pace has been excellent, but it definitely differs from her experience in Europe: “at Pace, we have dual meets every week, but very little championship meets (one or two per year), whereas in Europe we have championships more often but have no dual meets.”

https://paceuathletics.com/roster.aspx?rp_id=4224 — Jana Ciric from Pace U Athletics website

The amount of time she spends with the Pace Swimming and Diving team has allowed her to form close friendships that she considers the most important part of her experience.

“I consider my team to be the closest thing I have to home since I am really far from home,” she explains.

Even with the homesickness that she endures, Jana found time to rack up quite a list of accomplishments. She holds six (out of over 20) of Pace University’s swimming records, earned Dean’s List First Honors for Fall 2018, completed a spring internship as a Junior Programmer/Analyst at Central National Gottesman, and lined up an exciting internship at AQR Capital Management for this summer. She also did all of this while working as a Tutor the Pleasantville Tutoring Center and a Student Assistant for the Athletic Department! Maintaining those records, grades, and workload is not easy.

“I have always had a really good work ethic and determination. Once I set my mind on something, I work really hard until I get it,” Jana notes. “I have unconditional support from my family which has been pushing me to do better every day. Even though they are almost 5,000 miles away they are always with me, helping me to achieve my dreams.”

How does it feel to earn her second straight NE10 Swimming and Diving Sport Excellence Award? Jana says that it “feels amazing,” and rightfully so.

“I am really proud to have won that award again since I put a lot of emphasis on my education. I am a student first and an athlete second. I wouldn’t have even come to the U.S. if it weren’t for my passion for academics and education (as well as swimming). This is why I think this award is so important to me – it really celebrates why all of us are here at college: to get a better education.”

Jana’s success is a success for all of Seidenberg. Her hard work showcases just how possible it is to obtain friendship, accomplishments, and a degree while being a student-athlete, intern, and employee. We’re proud to show off all that Jana does within the Pace community!

Jana would like to note that she really appreciates that Dean Hill and Andreea attend her swim meets and cheer her on. You can always check the swim team schedule to see when Jana will be competing. We’re sure that she’d love to have a crowd there cheering her on.

Student Spotlight: Rebecca D’Agostino attends TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019

Rebecca D’Agostino, a Graduate Assistant and student graduating in May with a Masters of Science degree in Computer Science, is a very accomplished student of the Seidenberg School. In early March, she traveled to California to attend the TensorFlow Dev Summit, a top machine learning conference.

Rebecca was able to attend the 3rd year of this annual summit thanks to a travel grant paid by Google’s Women Techmakers program. The event focused on the release of TensorFlow 2.0, the newest form of the machine learning library created by Google.

According to Rebecca, the two-day summit program consisted of “a lot of talks, programming on the fly, demos, and just meeting the community. Sitting and programming together with the TensorFlow team was pretty cool.”

Rebecca said that one of the best parts of the conference were the gifts attendees received: “we got a really cool gift box that included, among other things, an Edge TPU and a new microcontroller board.”

The gifts will allow Rebecca to extend her knowledge of TensorFlow and Machine Learning in general. While the gifts were a bonus, Rebecca gained a great deal of educational experience at the summit, and she noted that the two days she spent there was a great time.

“I think the whole thing was amazing,” she explained. “Just meeting the team and the community that uses TensorFlow overall, and learning new things I wouldn’t know that were out there [was amazing].”

Rebecca’s time at the summit gave her a chance to further her education and network with other technologists. Seidenberg students have some wonderful opportunities for education both in and out of the classroom. Scholarships are a great way to attend conferences, summits, and much more that lie beyond the classroom. You can check out more scholarships from our previous blog post to find opportunities for yourself!

Meet the front desk staff in PLV

It’s likely that you’ve seen the faces of the student staffers who work the Seidenberg School of CSIS front desk if you’ve ever traveled up the hill to the Goldstein Academic Center. The building on the Westchester campus is a center of hardworking, tech-savvy individuals. All of the student staffers—who assist the Seidenberg School while also completing their studies and extracurricular activities—are the helping hands that make everything run smoothly. Today we’re putting names and stories to the faces of the front desk staff!

JEANA COSENZA

Jeana Cosenza, a Staten Island native, is a senior Computer Science major and Student Assistant at the Seidenberg School of CSIS. She’s the student coach for Pace’s National Cyber League (NCL) team, the secretary of the Seidenberg Tech Collective, and is currently in the process of starting the Pace University Women in Cyber Security (WiCyS) Student Chapter.

“WiCyS is the only non-profit membership organization with a national reach that is dedicated to bringing together women in cybersecurity from academia, research and industry to share knowledge, experience, networking and mentoring,” Jeana explains.

When she isn’t working on one of her many clubs, she’s working on her computer science career.

“My main goal with everything I do, that I hope I can integrate into whatever career I end up in, is to be able to help as many people as I can,” Jeana explains about her future career goal.

She will be working on that goal soon since she’ll be entering the cybersecurity field upon graduation!

KAITLYN HOULIHAN

Kaitlyn Houlihan, a Political Science major with a minor in Pre-Law, is a junior looking forward to graduating in December 2019. While she finished high school in Poughquag, New York, she’s originally from Massachusetts. Kaitlyn is also the Head Delegate for Pleasantville’s Model United Nations (Model UN) team and Secretary of the Political Science Association.

She may be the only non-Seidenberg student assistant, but Kaitlyn states that “future lawyers need to know about tech, too!”

When the future lawyer is not doing needlepoint or watching the Food Network, she’s working with her Model UN team which recently went to Washington, D.C. and won the Distinguished Delegation award. That award won them a feature in the Westchester Business Journal.

Kaitlyn has been working at Seidenberg since late 2016 and notes that she has stayed on the staff thanks to the positive office environment: “I love the office culture! Everyone is so supportive, kind, and funny. I’m always happy to come into work every day.”

As for her future, Kaitlyn is going for a career straight out of a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode: “I hope to eventually become a judge for Special Victims cases. I just took my LSAT and in the meantime, I work in the shelter for Safe Homes of Orange County on weekends.”

LINDSEY GILL

Lindsey Gill is a Bronx resident and Computer Science major, as well as being a Front Desk Student Assistant at the Seidenberg School. The freshman student was a photojournalist for the Pleasantville campus newspaper, The Pace Chronicle, during the fall semester. Now she’s looking out for new clubs to join.

“In the future, I would love to join a campus club, since there are so many interesting ones to choose from,” she states.

As for why she chose to work at Seidenberg, Lindsey explains that she knew that it would end up being a great opportunity.

“It was a goal of mine to have an on-campus job and when I was offered this job I knew how beneficial it would be,” Lindsey explains. “Getting to know the staff and faculty and making connections is a great experience and I am grateful to have joined this fantastic community.”

LAINA POSNER

Last but not least is Pleasantville front desk staff member, Laina Posner. The North Jersey native is a junior Computer Science major. She’s a part of the Phi Sigma Sigma sorority, Seidenberg Tech Collective, a Peer Leader for UNV 101 classes, Seidenberg Ambassador for the Student Government Association, and part of the Design Factory PDP course.

When she’s not busy being a leader or sister for her sorority, she’s applying to attend prestigious conferences. Laina explains that she won a scholarship to attend the Grace Hopper Conference—a huge accomplishment.

The scholar chose to work at Seidenberg in order “to be closer to the faculty and staff.”

As a Junior, she will be entering the workforce soon, and she has a great goal in mind. She aspires “to work for a company that will allow for [her] to make a difference upon the community.”

Our front desk staff on the Westchester campus are leaders, innovators, and goal-driven scholars. We’re proud to have them in the Seidenberg community.

Fran Berman talks self-driving cars and data stewardship with Women in Tech

Fran Berman visited the Seidenberg Lounge in NYC on April 9th to discuss self-driving cars, data stewardship, and her latest projects on the social and environmental impacts of IoT. She spent time with the student-led Pace Women in Tech club, then sat in conversation with Professor Cathy Dwyer.

Fran Berman is an Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, and a Fellow of the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

Fran discussed her latest project which focuses on the social and environmental impacts of IoT. Her focus is on maximizing the benefits of IoT while minimizing risks. The most talked about point was the ethical structure of IoT.

Fran also took the time to explain data stewardship: “[data stewardship] is about creating a home for data that both takes care of it now and takes care of it in the future.”

The distinguished professor’s latest passion is IoT’s potential inflience on cyber/physical-biological systems. She explained that the intersection of the subjects, with the addition of artificial intelligence, is “both an amazing thing and a scary thing.”

Fran illustrated her point using self-driving cars and the ethical thought process behind them. She made the point that a self-driving car has to make the same decisions humans must make while driving, including what to do in instances of an imminent collision.

“Each one of us has an ethical framework,” she said, suggesting that one day perhaps self-driving cars (as an example) would be programmed to make decisions based on the individual’s moral configuration rather than a standardization. IoT could make this possible.

Fran also identified some of the largest issues that graduates will encounter in their careers: industries are not turning to technologists to be leaders, and women are challenged when finding their place in the technology industry. But if Fran can do it, so can any female computer scientist—she’s a living example of female leadership in the technology industry.

As for what the future of technology looks like, “hopefully this is what it looks like,” Fran stated, indicating the many female students in the audience.

One piece of advice Fran offered was the importance of getting involved. It’s a huge learning opportunity—one that students can truly benefit from.

“If you have clubs here, become an officer of the club,” Fran advised. Becoming a club officer is a notable accomplishment. If you’re excited about something, then you should get involved with it.

“Waking up every day and feeling really excited about what you do . . . that’s another super important thing,” Fran added.

One of the most significant things Fran spoke about was the concept of failure as a good thing. Failure, Fran suggested, is just a part of the process of life. If you mess up, then that’s how you end up figuring out how to do it better the next time. Failure is expected and should be celebrated!

As an example, Fran spoke about her first job. “When I first got there, I had no idea how to do all the stuff I was supposed to do.”

“If you don’t keep at it, you’re never going to figure it out.”

The biggest piece of advice that Fran focused on was a single word: resilience. She outlined the ways that resilience makes a great leader.

“At the end of the day, don’t give up. Find your own heart and passion in it, find a network of people who can go through it with you and support you, be strategic, and be resilient,” she said. “It’s not always easy, but if it’s important to you it’s always worthwhile.”

As for Fran’s time at Seidenberg, she only had good words: “I had a blast. I think everyone here is wonderful.”

We were so lucky to have Fran at the Seidenberg Lounge for this intriguing and empowering discussion. We would like to thank Fran for taking the time to visit our campus for the WiT event.

Keep updated on the Seidenberg socials and follow WiT to hear about future events!