Birthday Week + Spring Break

This past week was very busy for me. On Monday, I visited my mentor after orchestra rehearsal, and we discussed the types of ensemble learning and future steps for my machine learning model. The next day was Research Showcase, which was very exciting. It was great to see some of my friends from other schools and explain computational chemistry to others. I was nervous at first, but I was glad that people showed interest in learning about my topic. On Wednesday, I had Orchestra UIL, which we weren’t too well prepared for, but we still won sweepstakes! Finally, I had the DECA state conference to look forward to. Unfortunately, I was out the door when I got the message to head back home. While disappointing because I had finally packed and felt more confident about my presentation, at least I didn’t have to make up school that day, and I got to present virtually (however stressful it was to miss more school). Plus, I got some time over the weekend to write code. I tried the SMILES augmentation technique that my mentor suggested, but I was unaware that the featurizer I was using was invariant to SMILES ordering. Despite the hours of training I lost, at least I learned something: the model performed better when focusing on smaller molecules. Even though I already have work to make up, I’m hoping for a (birthday!) week that’s not too busy before I head north for Spring Break.