I value my experience at the lab greatly and had a positive experience. I graduated with my bachelor in computer science this past spring. Currently, I am a first semester grad student of the industrial engineering department at Clemson University in South Carolina. I have a research assistantship in a lab that performs anti human trafficking work using operations research. This summer, I published and presented my first paper entitled, “Natural Language Based Integration of Online Review Datasets for Identification of Sex Trafficking Businesses”. In fact, I was mainly brought in to the research assistantship because of my experience with natural language processing. The drive from California took about 5 days and was an amazing experience, although, many special precautions were taken to ensure I wasn’t catching or spreading covid, including avoiding stops in certain states and the consistent use of hand sanitizer and masks.
South Carolina is hot right now and certainly humid. I bought a dehumidifier to handle the indoor environment and it seems to be working very well. There are many, many insects here, but it is a beautiful place. Clemson, where I am staying, is a college near a lake and a botanical garden. The town is a dichotomy of ever evolving understanding of the world we live in today and the fervent resistance of letting go of exclusionary practices and behaviors. I’ve been here for a little more than a week and I can say with relative ease that I miss home. The makeup of a home is just as much the people as it is the physical location, and the global pandemic is slowing the people part of this process down. The drive to the beach is much longer (2 1/2 hours) than it was at my home in Covina. There are fewer people following mask mandates in Clemson despite it being a college town and there are even fewer people wearing the masks outside of this town in the bordering Seneca and Pendelton. (I find myself in a place of frustration as yet another science based call to action has been politicized.)
Aside from this, I am happy with the “green-ness” of this place since I’m a plant lover. I’m grateful to have joined a lab that shares the same goal as me, and since property value is cheaper here, I was able to get a good sized apartment at a decent price relative to my income. My partner and dog came with me, so I’m not alone and I’m also grateful for that.
My first day of classes began yesterday, and I can tell that this work will be interesting and engaging. It is a lot of math and I am taking a computer science course called network science that should bridge my computer science background with operations research fairly well.