Honors 220: DNA and Evolution

Although I primarily focused on my major during junior year, I found an opportunity for taking an Honors class. While I anticipated this would be very similar to my introductory Biology coursework, I found this class to be an excellent building block: it described broader trends and applications in biology, which inspired me to continue working in that field.

CSE 452: Distributed Systems

I stepped out of my comfort zone again and took a class on distributed systems. Although it was incredibly challenging and time-consuming (implementing Paxos took at least 100 hours), it was absolutely worth it. I gained an appreciation of the workings of large-scale computer systems, and discovered my future path in computer science.

Paxos demo

Amazon Internship

The internship on the EBS replication team was an unprecedented opportunity to put my CS skills into practice. Working with a real distributed system was a challenge, but it was worth it for the feeling of contributing to a real product improving people's lives every single day. With the help of my mentors, I was successfully able to lower the system upgrade time by about 80%.