1. What is your major and which class did you attend? Why did you choose that class?
My background is in EECS, and I’m currently pursuing Development Engineering with a focus on AI & Data Analytics. I tried Civil Engineering 263: Human Mobility and Network Systems because it felt completely different from the way I usually think about technology. The class looks at how people, places, and movement can be represented as networks. I thought it was really cool that something as messy as human mobility can be modeled through nodes, links, paths, and relationships, so I wanted to see how civil engineers approach these problems.
2. What lessons did you take away that could be applied to your current area of focus?
One of my biggest takeaways was to stop looking only at individual data points and start looking at the structure connecting them. We have been working with concepts like shortest paths, connected components, and network measures to understand how a system behaves as a whole. That translates really well to the AI, product, and development work I’m interested in. Whether I’m thinking about transportation, healthcare access, education, or even how information spreads, the relationships between people and resources can matter just as much as the individual pieces. It gave me a new lens for thinking about how technology can improve access and real-world systems, not just optimize an isolated product.
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