Experience

During my master’s at RIT, I took the opportunity to explore the tech industry through internships, gaining hands-on experience and insight into how companies function in the real world. Below are some highlights from the internships I’ve completed across a variety of organizations.

Fluxdata,Inc.

Rochester, NY – Summer Internship

Summer in Rochester is beautiful, and I made the most of it by biking 7 miles to work along the scenic Lehigh Valley Trail, the Erie Canal, and the Genesee River. This was my first experience working at a startup, and I loved the collaborative energy. I worked alongside other enthusiastic interns from RIT and the University of Rochester.

At FluxData, I focused on machine learning applications, gaining hands-on experience with TensorFlow and Python. I was especially excited to apply the Object-Oriented Programming skills I had developed at Amazon. My projects involved image segmentation, classification, and regression, and gave me a strong foundation in applied computer vision and data-driven modeling.

Amazon

Seattle, WA – Software Development Engineer Intern

Seattle’s rainy charm won me over instantly—and so did working at Amazon! This was my first formal experience as a software developer, and I was entrusted with building a framework designed to support vendor managers. These are the folks who manage third-party sellers whose products are rebranded and sold under Amazon’s retail operations.

I contributed to both front-end and back-end development, working in Java, exploring multi-threaded programming, and writing unit tests with Mockito. I also got a brief introduction to Perl. My time at Amazon significantly improved my Object-Oriented Programming skills and gave me confidence in large-scale, collaborative development environments.

Xerox Research Center (now Naver Labs Europe)

Grenoble, France – Research Internship

Bonjour! This was my first time in Europe, and Grenoble, with its mountain views in every direction, was the perfect setting. My high school French helped me get by—and the experience planted the seed for my passion for research.

At the lab, I worked on instance-level semantic segmentation, reproducing results from the then state-of-the-art paper and analyzing its failure modes. I also replicated findings from this paper, modifying the loss function to observe its impact on performance.

This was a challenging but rewarding experience that introduced me to computer vision in a serious way. It was my first exposure to academic-style research and marked a turning point in my journey—I genuinely loved the work and learned lessons that continue to shape who I am today.