Rikhita Baddula is a senior Statistics & Computer Science major working her second semester at ATLAS. She discovered the opportunity through the ATLAS website and joined to gain both technical and professional experience, along with soft skills and mentorship to support her future success. Rikhita works at ATLAS as an Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (AI/ML) intern. Her main project she has worked on this semester is building a web application that allows students to get a meal plan on a budget. To make this happen, she’s been expanding her machine learning knowledge through online courses on Kaggle. Her responsibilities also included presenting her progress through slides in a weekly meeting with her peers and supervisor. Her internship caused Rikhita to learn more about machine learning through the different courses she took through Kaggle, increasing her skills in the field. She is also in the process of learning how to use Vue.Js as the frontend and how to integrate API’s into her code so she can provide accurate information to the user. Along the way, she’s also honed her communication skills— learning to clearly express challenges to find solutions—and strengthened her time management abilities while balancing coursework and internship responsibilities. Coming out of the experience, Rikhita feels more confident as a better communicator, team player, and problem solver. Being able to work on her project this semester will no doubt help her in her journey into her chosen fields of AI and data analysis. And maybe due to her technical nature, Rikhita is able to solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute. Impressive!