Service

I have served national/international mathematics, computing, and engineering communities through hands-on leadership roles and peer review contributions that have directly support fellow researchers and students:

• At the SC international supercomputing conference, I've progressed from student volunteer to leadership roles. 

  • For SC23, I volunteered across eight different roles including headquarters support, workshops, tutorials, Birds-of-Feather sessions, poster receptions, student tours, exhibitor hall activities, and forums to gain comprehensive conference experience. 

  • As Lead Student Volunteer for SC24, I co-organized a guided interest group on Machine Learning and Artifical Intelligence,  creating an inclusive environment to engage with the conference for a dozen Students@SC participants.  Other general responsibilites included full-day tabling and evening gala support while monitoring centralized communications on Slack to address emergent issues. At the same time, I provided real-time support for the Student Cluster Competition (SCC/IndySCC). 

  • As a member of the SCC committee, I reviewed team applications monitored the competition for issues/conflicts/cheating, engaged with and handed out swag to visitors, served as a liaison to teams and helped them locate committee members when needed, herded students to events where their attendance is required and assisted with the post-mortem session for students to provide feedback.

  • For SC25, I transitioned to solely reviewing applications for both the Student Volunteer program and the SIGHPC HPC Immersion program, helping identify promising students for career-changing opportunities in high-performance computing. 

• I chaired the Facilities & Energy Management Session during the Institute for Industrial and System Engineers (IISE) Annual Expo, coordinating technical presentations and facilitating discussions between researchers and industry practitioners.  

• I reviewed papers for the 54th Proceedings of the Southeastern International Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing (SEICCGTC), contributing to the rigorous academic standards of this longstanding mathematics conference. 

• After earning an introduction to high-performance computing certificate (covering UNIX, VIM, parallel programming with MPI/OpenMP, and GPU computing with CUDA/OpenACC), I volunteered at the 2022 SIAM Conference on Mathematics of Data Science (MDS22) to diseminate a similar course. During the session, I shared my experience with HPC and answered questions during hands-on sessions, helping other participants navigate foundational concepts. 

I served a 4-year term as the president/treasurer of the UTRGV student chapter of SPIE, the International Society of Optics and Photonics. During my term, we supported student speakers interested in disseminating their research about ML/AI with generous compensation and professional development opportunities. I secured over $5000 in funding throughout my four years of service to the chapter from a variety of sources. We gave workshops on building better resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and portfolio websites. 

We emphasized resources about programs that create pathways to DOE labs. In 2023, we promoted the national Smoky Mountain Computational Data Challenge (SMCDC) organized by Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). Our chapter organized a team of students and faculty to participate, who won the best paper for the SMCDC Challenge 2. That same year, we also promoted another program which creates pathways to various DOE labs, the Sustainable Research Pathways (SRP) program hosted by Sustainable Horizons Institute. As a result of the workshop hosted by SPIE, we had eight UTRGV students accepted to the program.

Overall, I organized and hosted over 50 research talks, ranging from staff scientists at national labs and faculty members from R1 universities, to students historically marginalized in STEM. Check out our website for more information. Part of my duties also included being the webmaster of this website.

I have recurrently volunteeed as an enthusiastic speaker for the UTRGV Center of Excellence in STEM Education (C-STEM) since Spring 2022. I have given different talks about topics ranging from applying to REUs and interning at national labs to sharing my experiences and giving advice about how to succeed:

• For my first session, I had the honor of giving a talk with Ms. Teresa Padron, associated with the C-STEM office at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, about our experiences participating in REUs (research experiences for undergraduates) across the nation. 

  • A recording is available here.

  • Click here to access the slides. 

• My summer 2022 internship at Oak Ridge National Lab showed me career paths that I wouldn’t imagine for myself on my own. I sought to inform more UTRGV students about these paths by sharing my story through a C-STEM workshop. Ms. Padron invited me to speak again for the Fall 2022 semester, where I gave a talk in collaboration with Dr. Josef Sifuentes on Summer Research Opportunities at National Labs and beyond. 

  • A recording is available here.. 

  • Click here to access the slides.

• In Fall 2023, I gave a similar talk to showcase more Summer Research Opportunities at National Labs, highlighting what I learned from my time interning with the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Lab. Click here to access the slides. 

• The following semester in Spring 2024, I shared with the broader UTRGV community about how to Travel to an International Supercomputing Conference for Free, collaborating with another student who attended SC on a separate scholarship. Click here to access the slides. 

• In Fall 2024, I delivered two C-STEM workshops:

  • First, I refined my prior talks about national labs to highlight different pathways depending on student status, called Launch your STEM Career with the DOE. I also invited an international student to speak about her summer internship experience, which she secured by attending one of my previous workshops. 

    • A recording is available here. 

    • Click here to access the slides. 

  • Second, I collaborated with a colleague and good friend to share our tried and true tips on Applying for Conference Travel Scholarships. 

    • A recording is available here. 

    • Click here to access the slides. 

An archived list of talks can also be found on the UTRGV C-STEM website. 

For the inaugural Frontera Hacks hackathon, I served as a mentor facilitating a workshop on how to create an interactive dashboard, which is on my GitHub here. 

I have also served in three cohorts of the Frontera Devs Community Mentorship program, which has served high school and college students in the Rio Grande Valley who are interested in gaining research experience. 

The UT Student Advisory Council consists of two student representatives from each UT institution, providing input to the UT System Board of Regents on a variety of issues of student concern. Of the entire UTRGV student body(30,000+), I was one of two selected to be a member of the graduate committee. In this role, I strived to improve the educational experience provided by UT system schools for nearly 250,000 students. I identified core issues experienced by students at all UT institutions, like fair wages and affordable health insurance, to make a positive impact. This role also required research into topics like standardizing safety resources and needs-based scholarships. After my term, the UT system implemented micro-credential programs to add even more value to the UT system educational experience. I also contributed to a draft of suggestions towards a streamlined 1st year experience, which could expose students to research opportunities and encourage higher education. 

All in all, it was such an honor to serve the UT System in this capacity! I made genuine connections with the best and brightest students in Texas. We also met tremendous people, both inside the UT System and outside of it (like the Estonian president Alar Karis!). Each meeting reminded us of the power we have as individuals, and how important it is to use our voice - and every piece of valuable information I learned has subsequently helped me better serve UTRGV. I recorded this video to talk more about my experience. 

I am a strong believer of community advocacy. I began serving as Graduate Senator for Student Government Association as of Fall 2022 because there has never been a better time to be a part of UTRGV.  I think that my perspective attending UTRGV as an undergraduate and graduate student allows me to be of unique service. I collaborated with other Graduate Senators on initiatives like increasing the travel funds available for graduate students. I also served as secretary of the Financial Affairs committee, which awarded thousands of dollars of funds each semester to students participating at and attending national conferences. 

I applied to be a Gilman scholar in October 2020 and was awarded the max scholarship amount. I have shared my experience writing personal statements for the Gilman Scholarship in collaboration with the International Programs & Partnerships office at UTRGV. Watch one of these talks on YouTube. Some of the tips I provide are written below.

1. Write too much!

• Write like a stream of consciousness. Write the story of what you're describing. For my statement of purpose essay, I wrote about 10,000 characters at first. It was too much! I was writing about an experience I had before I enrolled in college Fall 2019. One of those paragraphs I wrote was loaded - describing some of the self-esteem issues I experienced during that time - I even shared my experience with burn out. I felt pretty raw afterwards.

• But the next 3 paragraphs I wrote were all about the lessons I learned from that experience - how much I love to show others how to do something they feel is impossible; how much I enjoy diving deeply into a project and learning all I can about it; how I realized the personal power I have in changing my life. I didn't have to include the issues I experienced in the final version. What was valuable were the lessons I learned as a result of that experience... and that's what stayed in my essay.

2. Make it relevant!

• What's going on in 2021? Think about this past year, how it shaped you, how it shaped others. I chose to write about "quarantine hobbies". Almost everyone picked one up. I know I did! So for my introduction to the personal essay, I talked about what mine was - aquarium maintenance. And as I wrote about my fish - as I wrote about something interesting to me - I realized how I could connect that experience with studying abroad. That interest, that excitement, that joy I felt when writing fed the creative part of my brain and made connections I hadn't even realized.

• Relevance counts both for current events and for the content of your essay. With my final edit, I realized I needed to write less about my experiences and more about what I wanted to experience, with the help of the Gilman scholarship, and why. So in my case, I talked about London! I asked Dr. Wylie about what the program would be like, and he shared some sights we would see related to Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing. Well - Ada Lovelace is one of the first women we think about when we think about women in STEM. There's a whole day dedicated to her. And even though Alan Turing is celebrated today, he was stigmatized during his career. This is the history that I was most interested in learning about during my trip, so that's what I described in my essay. Of course... my interests are going to be different from yours. And that's why my third tip is...

3. Take risks - be yourself!

• With all the uncertainty in the world, especially nowadays, what do you have to lose? Put your authentic self out there. What are your strengths? Your interests? How is the Gilman scholarship going to change your life? The Gilman scholarship committee wants to know who you are. That's why they're reading it. Your job is to tell them.

• I also shared my essay with a friend who knows me really well. She helped me take an objective view of what I was sharing in my essays so I could emphasize the most important parts. This was especially important for the closing paragraph.

Other tips & general advice

I'd say the introduction is the most important part - if you're bored after the first line or two of reading something, what do you tend to do? This is the culture we're living in today. So by the time you catch the committee's attention and share yourself with them, show them a closing paragraph that confirms what they should already be thinking - that you're a perfect candidate for the Gilman scholarship. Be vulnerable. At the end of my essay, I shared how I'm a first-generation college student, that I wish I realized my passion for these studies sooner, and how I realized that I learn from making mistakes. And mention the fish again! Or whatever your version of "fish" is.

These tips apply to all required essays for the Gilman scholarship, not just the personal essay. For example, I write about Alan Turing's chemical castration during my "building mutual understanding" essay and connected it to the intolerance still existing in our world today. If you don't know what people outside of America think of America, ask someone outside of America! I talked to an online friend from my prospective program's country, the United Kingdom, to ask for her perspective.

Regarding the service project essay, think about the programs and places and organizations you're already involved with at UTRGV. Think about how you're already of service to them, and expand on how those acts of service can intersect with your experience with the Gilman scholarship and with studying abroad.