Listen to Alec (2021) talk about his internships in data science, at DataPlus, the past two summers.

Transcript: Stephanie: You're listening to Gear Up the Duke Career Centers student produce podcasts showcasing real student summer internship experiences. My name's Stephanie Mayle. And today we're talking Alec, who worked in data science this summer.

Alec: Yeah, my name is Alec Ashforth. I'm a junior studying economics and math, and I'm from Raleigh, North Carolina.

Stephanie: And what did you do this past summer?

Alec: This summer, I was working at Data+ the summer program research program at Duke, studying data. I worked with a company named Tether Energy, and I was helping them create a database for them that would help them trade on the California electricity market to help them minimize risk from extreme events.

Stephanie: Now, that's important work. How did you find out about that position?

Alec: So I had done data+ the previous summer as well. I really enjoyed it. So I decided to look for a different project for the following summer. And so, I looked through all the different projects over like winter break. And I found that one would be the most interesting topic for me. That's why I decided to do it, apply for that specific topic.

Stephanie: Cool! And what exactly where you doing kind of day-to-day for work?

Alec: Day- to-day, so I was mostly working on a computer with one other person. Me and her had an amazing time working together. So, what we did, for the first part of that, we're trying to figure out, OK, how do we classify what an extreme event is in terms of California electricity prices? So, we determine a specific cutoff for both time of day and for time of year. And then after that, we were looking up different news events in California during the time period that we were looking at and trying to figure out, OK, which of these seemed to be like a cause of the extremely high or extremely low electricity prices in California.

Stephanie: Cool. And so, you did that all summer the project?

Alec: There was a lot of news articles in that we were able to automate some parts of the process. So, for example, California, the electricity markets have a database or they have a bunch of tables on their website that have like here the list of all the different generator outages that could cause extreme high to low energy prices. And so, I was able to make a python algorithm to scrape all those different tables that we can get, like, okay, which of these which are the electricity prices on a specific day may have been caused by a generator outage.

Stephanie: So did you already have to know how to do a lot of those things before coming into the position, before working at the organization project?

Alec: Not at all. I had already so I had already known how to code in Python. However, that was not required at all under the previous summer with Data+, I had not known anything about how to program at all, so I had. And then so I learned how to program all on that previous summer. But I didn't need to know Python at all. And I was able like I didn't know how to web scrape with the jury. I didn't think at all before. And so, I got there just quickly looked at online like, OK, how did how to web scrape with Python? And then slowly learned, okay, this is how I would do it. Now this is how I apply it to that specific area.

Stephanie: Okay good! So what did you. Was there anything that you liked or didn't like about the experience about working and Data+ and both summers?

Alec: Overall, I really loved the experience because I'm from Raleigh. I was able to live at home, then drive up to Duke every, which is really nice. One specific aspect that I dislike a little bit more was that with the news article searching, it can be very monotonous, like okay, looked up this specific day. Look up the California electricity, California, whether it felt like a bunch of different search words that I can get pretty monotono