Meet Erica Cai, a junior majoring in Statistics at the University of Illinois who enrolled in the ATLAS internship program to make great strides in her career development. Discovering ATLAS through recommendations by department emails and newsletters, she is gaining wonderful opportunities to practice soft and hard skills she learned in her coursework. Her position at ATLAS is cutting-edge, utilizing machine learning to build a working model that can predict future medical conditions such as diabetes from a set of present medical information. She codes her model in python and creates weekly presentations to keep her supervisors updated on her tasks. On top of actually programming the machine learning model and understanding the machine learning pipeline, she also will clean the data and create a website for users to submit their own data into. All of this works her muscles of prioritization, work scheduling, and time management skills. Down the line, Erica aspires to become a data scientist which her experience at ATLAS will provide all the necessary skills to do so. She enjoys processing data, finding patterns, and building models to predict data. Outside of university experience, she attended three different highschools in three different cities. A lot of moving around, but she has found her dream here at the University of Illinois!