UKC: A Strong Companion for Career Development

I am a first-year master student in Materials Science and Engineering at UCLA. I worked at Samsung Electronics as a process engineer in Korea, but I’ve been cut off from my career for a long time due to childcare. As my first step to resume my career arc, I started my graduate study last fall and am interested in structures of materials, computational material science, and the application of machine learning. I also currently serve as one of the IT Directors in KWiSE (Korean-American Women in Science and Engineering).

I attended UKC 2021 as one of the speakers of the Women’s Forum hosted by KWiSE-KOFWST (Korea Federation of Women’s Science & Technology Association). I joined KSEA and the US-Korea Conference (UKC) for the first time this year with recommendations from the senior members of KWiSE. UKC provided me with many valuable experiences. Communicating with people from various fields in the forum was exciting. Moreover, attending technical sessions and listening to the research of senior scientists gave me insight into my career path. UKC also introduced me to the Mentorship program. Through the conversation with my mentor, I got precious advice which encompassed my entire life as well as my career. Finally, my interest in machine learning and the data science field led me to participate in the Data Science Workshop (DSW), one of the most valuable experiences.

Before participating in the on-site workshop, DSW provided us with some study materials including a detailed guide of installing necessary software packages, brief tutorials, previous workshop lecture videos and supplementary study notes using Google Colab documents. I enjoyed watching last year’s lectures in the belief that it would help me to better understand what I would learn at this year’s workshop. It has been a great help to people like me who have a rudimentary interest in data science.

The official workshop was beneficial to learn some of the state-of-the-art algorithms of data visualization and machine learning. In the data visualization part, we learned ‘Tableau’, which is one of the most powerful, secure, and flexible platforms for data utilization. It is a fascinating visualization tool that I didn’t know before coming to the workshop. Getting used to the Tableau program was a very fun and interesting experience.

The second part of the workshop was to learn machine learning, such as Decision Trees or Random Forest models. Specifically, I learned about Gradient Boosting and XGBoost through theory and real-world data, and about SHAP interpretability, which explains the output of any machine learning model. I honestly could not understand all the concepts in the workshop at once, but study materials and Google Colab files provided by the DSW helped me to review and learn again after the workshop.

During the last session of the workshop, we learned natural language processing (NLP). It was interesting to see the whole process of NLP. My level at the time was that I knew the basics of Python, a little bit of Pandas and Numpy libraries, and I just recently learned the concept of NLP through the pre-exercise materials provided by the DSW.  The example codes were very helpful for me to easily understand the process of NLP.

I have to say again that the most valuable part of the data science workshop was all the organized class materials sent to us afterwards. In this point of view, I felt that it was not just a one-time workshop but something where I can refer to even after the workshop. As a first-year graduate student, I am looking forward to applying the latest data science technologies to my work and I believe they enhance the quality of my research. I hope I can participate in the next year’s DSW too.

In closing, I want to mention that UKC provided students or senior participants a great opportunity to learn current research as well as to know amazing people who are at the top level of their work. For me, the meeting of DSW instructors and staff members was one of the precious experiences of it. I also happened to meet the many professors in my field of study, who inspire me as a member of the Korean-American science society. I want to encourage people to join the UKC to broaden your professional network and strengthen your knowledge in science and engineering.