Project Title: Remnants of Rona: The Immediate Effects of COVID-19 on Gen Z
BASIS Advisor: Carrie May
Internship Location: University of Maryland: Department of Biology
Onsite Mentor: Professor William Fagan
For the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated millions of lives in the US, and despite the recent vaccinations being administered, continues to cause detriments to physical health, mental health, employment, and overall productivity in every sector of society. Particularly for Generation Z students, the switch to remote learning or socially distanced classes has undoubtedly raised education as another major area of concern for America’s youth. Considering the already high rates of anxiety and depression among students, as well as the increasing social pressures for high achievement and acceptance into prestigious universities, the additional stress of the COVID-19 pandemic will most definitely have lingering impacts on Gen Z and their future transition into the workforce. To highlight the ways Gen Z has been affected by the pandemic and further analyze the severity of its consequences, I will be creating a website with various graphs to explain the statistics behind COVID-19’s physical, psychological, and social effects on Gen Z. By learning programming languages such as Rstudio at the University of Maryland, I will apply data analysis techniques to study specific COVID-19 data and provide more in-depth information on my website. Through conducting this research, I hope to highlight the catastrophic repercussions of the pandemic so that profound reminders of our struggles can motivate us to better understand infectious diseases and develop ways to spur recovery as the country heals.
My Posts
Week 10: Final Results!
Hey guys! Welcome to my final blog post! Wow, what a ride it’s been over these past 3 months! I’m so grateful for having the opportunity to do an internship with knowledgeable professors to guide me. Being able to work on my senior project has also taught me a lot about the research process and […]
Week 9: Individual Project Update
Hey guys! Welcome back to my blog! This week, I will be discussing my current progress with my individual research. Regarding the Python course that I’m learning, I’ve been making a lot of progress and have learned many new concepts on optimization and neural networks. I’m looking to complete the course by next week. Meanwhile, […]
Week 8: Search Problems and Propositional Logic
Hi ya’ll! Welcome back to my blog! Not much stuff happened this week in terms of the internship, but I did make some significant progress in my data science course. Last week, I met with Mr. Swain to discuss my findings and see how they related to the data. For my next assignment, he needs […]
Week 7: Smoothing, Working With Matrices, and Cross-Validation
Hi everyone and welcome back to another blog! For this week, I continued making linear regression models for my internship while also learning about smoothing, matrices, and cross-validation in my data science course. For the past two weeks, I have been doing exploratory analysis of cell metabolism for a skin database of different bacterial species […]
Week 6: Conditional Probabilities
Hi everyone and welcome back to the blog! Last week, my schedule was pretty hectic but I’m still excited to share the progress I’ve made in my internship and my courses on R. Since last week, I was tasked with making more linear regression models and conducting exploratory analysis with the cell shapes, sizes, surface […]
Week 4 & 5: Productivity Tools, Wrangling, Linear Regression and Machine Learning
Hello and welcome back to my blog! I hope everyone had a relaxing spring break last week! It’s been two weeks since you’ve last heard from me so let’s discuss the progress I’ve made recently. Last week, I finished learning course 5 on Productivity Tools and course 6 on Wrangling. Productivity Tools involved introducing Git […]
Week 3: Bayesian Statistics and Calculations
Hello everyone, welcome back to another blog! This week, I continued working on finishing the calculations for the bacterial species database, which is meant to help analyze factors that affect cell metabolism. Things have been going pretty smoothly, so I will be meeting with Mr. Swain again on Monday to discuss further tasks for my […]
Week 2: Further Learning and Initiation
Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog! This week, I met with my professor’s graduate student colleague, Mr. Swain, who is in charge of guiding me through my internship project. On Monday, he sent me a database of around 370 bacterial species and their many characteristics including cell shape, cell length and width, colony […]
Week 1: Introduction and Preparation
Hello everyone! My name is Dora and welcome to my blog! For the senior project, I will be working with Professor Bill Fagan from the University of Maryland on coding a script to automate calculations of bacterial growth rates from a database of cell size. Using the data analysis techniques that I learn from this […]