First Interview!

This past week I went on my first interview and completed my original work proposal. Through my interview, I learned a significant amount about the skills needed and everyday work for modelling processes in analytical chemistry. I found that I related quite a bit to the qualities that his job required, and I was happy that his day-to-day work aligned well with my topic of interest. During the interview, he described his research into developing calibration models and explained that the breakthrough moments in his field of work involve determining which first principles measurement applied to the process. I was surprised to learn that analytical chemistry is far from being modelling-based: wet chemistry will likely remain relevant for many years. For my original work proposal, I decided to be ambitious and compare two types of machine learning models (e.g., deep neural networks vs. MVLR) on a certain problem, like predicting aqueous solubilities. While it will likely take a lot of effort and learning on my part to design the models, the result will be very rewarding if I am successful.

I also confirmed a second interview with a high-level data science professional. I’m looking forward to this interview so that I can expand my knowledge on the machine learning side of my topic, including model architecture, rather than focusing on, say, analytical techniques. Next week, I’m excited for Business Symposium and conducting my second interview.