From Being an Undergraduate Researcher to Mentoring Undergraduate Researchers: Personal Experience From a Cross-Institutional Program

Oregon Convention Center 

With the field of data science continuing to grow, hands-on experience is a vital resource for students attending higher educational institutions. The SoCal Data Science Program is an NSF-funded cross-institutional program hosted at Cypress College (CC), California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), and the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The goal of this program is to foster a community of students and faculty from a range of institutions, including community college and teaching-focused and research universities, in data science through research opportunities. The program focuses on creating pathways including college to four-year college, college to industry, and college to graduate school. In this talk, I will share my perspective on navigating the pathway as a former CSUF fellow to a current UCI graduate student in statistics. I will highlight my current experience as a graduate student researcher in the program, mentoring students from all three institutions. By sharing my full-circle point of view, my goal is to shed light on the challenges and advantages of being an undergraduate student participant and mentoring undergraduate students in data science initiatives.