Jonah Turner, B.S. Data Science (2022)

Jonah graduated in Spring of 2022 and interviewed with several companies in the Dallas area and closer to his home in Nebraska. He says that his data science degree opened up a pretty wide field of positions, from data analyst to machine learning engineer. He had always favored the courses in the machine learning realm, so the opportunity to join the team at Sandhills focused on machine learning model development was a perfect fit, he says.
 
The NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates with Dr. Ding and Dr. Chen was the catalyst for his interest in machine learning. He says, "When I read papers from ECCV or CVPR now at work, I remember reading the foundational ML papers with the other REU students and the professors. I would be a much less effective engineer today without that great experience."
 
His advice is: Follow the right people on GitHub, Twitter, and read the Huggingface blogs and release notes, and you can have a big impact at small- and medium-sized companies even with a BS degree.