Meet Kirthi Shankar, a junior majoring in Computer Science and Linguistics and an active member of Women in Computer Science, where she serves as the Infrastructure Co-Chair. After hearing about the ATLAS Internship Program through friends and classmates, Kirthi decided to join because she wanted to apply her self- taught knowledge of machine learning and artificial intelligence to a meaningful, hands-on project while also developing the soft skills needed in a professional environment. In her first semester as an intern, she works with Michael Sommers as an AI and ML Intern, contributing to a team project that uses LangGraph and the Gemma LLM to automatically classify UIUC faculty research descriptions by field and subfield. She designed various LangGraph pipelines with a focus on energy efficiency and accuracy, and she and her team tested these pipelines and implemented the best performing one using Python, Gemma, and the LangGraph library. Through this internship, Kirthi has strengthened her technical skills in LangGraph, artificial intelligence, Python, and LLM integration, along with soft skills such as communication, organization, and presentation. One major lesson she will take from ATLAS is the importance of considering multiple approaches to any product, keeping efficiency, accuracy, and impact in mind throughout the process. Looking ahead, Kirthi hopes to become a software engineer at a company that improves everyday life by developing robust backend systems, leveraging natural language processing, and centering user needs in everything she creates. A fun fact about Kirthi is that she loves spending time in nature.