Jai Sankar
Could you give a brief introduction of yourself? What is your major, and what is your current committee or position in SAAS?
My name is Jai, I'm currently a junior studying Applied Math and Computer Science, and I'm in the Research and Publications (R&P) Committee as one of the directors this semester.
Where is your hometown, and what are some of your fun interests or hobbies?
I'm from Cupertino, CA, and some of my hobbies and interests include basketball, running, board games, logic puzzles, watching Marvel and anime series, and listening to heavy metal or grime music.
What committees have you been in prior to this semester as RP director?
So this is actually my second semester in SAAS. Last semester, in my first semester, I joined as an R&P Committee Member. I just found R&P really cool, so I decided to come back to SAAS as one of the R&P Directors for my second semester in SAAS.
Between your two majors being Applied Math and Computer Science, where your interests lie? How do you see them overlapping, and how do they play into what you're interested in currently and what you're interested to do after graduation?
Definitely I want to go to grad school for some sort of Applied Mathematics field, more in the Statistics or Data Science fields, and that's where I tend to lean more towards the Applied Math side of what I study. But also, if I'm doing research, I want to do it in an industry-focused context, and because of that, I also want to have a good understanding of Computer Science. But in terms of my future plans, my interests lie more within Applied Math.
Since you're a newer member in SAAS, I'm curious to know how you originally heard about SAAS? What made you really interested in SAAS, and what made you excited to come back for a second semester?
Basically I had heard about SAAS from more obvious things like online recruiting, tabling on Sproul, and seeing SAAS members at infosessions and events and everything. Walking through places and statistics-focused buildings like Evans or Cory allowed me to see tons of flyers and posters about SAAS, so I was inspired and curious to check out the SAAS website and what the club was all about. It seemed like the perfect club for anyone interested in data, and there are so many different committees that can appeal to anyone with an interest in statistics or data science, so I thought it was a no brainer for me to join that club, given that I was interested in applied math, and statistics is very specialized type of applied math. Definitely looking at the different committees, I was the most interested in R&P because you're able to do your own type of research, so that's kind of what got me interested in terms of my initial impression of SAAS. I was definitely impressed with my first semester here, so I definitely wanted to continue staying in this club.
Last semester you were an R&P Committee Member, and this semester you're an R&P Committee Director. During your time being involved with the R&P Committee, what have been some of your most important takeaways or most important project experiences?
In the R&P Committee, I think it's very important for everyone to go through the entire process of formulating and executing a research question, and going through the necessary steps of data cleaning, data collection, and creating your own model. I feel like many times when people at a much lower skill level try to do personal data projects, they're too haphazard with the way they go about it, and they never end up producing anything truly meaningful or complete just because they lack a solid sense of project structure and trajectory. So I feel like being in R&P will help people become more independent when they want to conduct their own research or conduct their own data science project, so that's my overall key takeaway from R&P. Last semester I learned how important it is to be organized in data science research and projects with your approach, and I wanted to get involved with R&P again as a director so I can help other members and teach them what I learned, so ultimately that's why I decided to apply as an R&P Committee Director for this semester.
What else are you involved in on campus? Do you have any other campus involvement or any other interests that you pursue outside of SAAS?
Previously I was doing research at a psychology lab in a computational intern or lab assistant type of role, so I did more of the statistics of everything at the research lab. But right now in terms of the stuff I do outside regular classes, obviously with the pandemic a lot of normal operations and activities got halted such as in-person research at labs, so currently I'm only involved in SAAS, and for now I like to keep it that way. I definitely want to dedicate as much time to SAAS as possible, and I don't want to be involved in too many different clubs and become flustered with that, but I'm really happy to focus my attention centrally on SAAS.
You mentioned you previously were involved in doing computational and statistics research at a Berkeley psychology lab. Could you explain more about what that work was like? What was the project goal was, and what were your specific duties, responsibilities, and tasks? What were the project results?
I worked on a few different projects. One, for example, involved eye tracking, so the goal was to analyze the correlations between an individual's attributes and various metrics about their eyes and eye behaviors, so I had to conduct those experiments while looking at different images or referring to different texts and literature to see if particular treatments had an effect on an individual's pupil or general eye movements. I definitely had to work with different technologies that were available in the lab such as eye trackers, and once I gathered that relevant data I was able to do analysis on that. Another project I worked on involved analyzing the pupillometry and its effects from reading a book and noticing which specific words might elicit certain reactions from the eye, its behaviors, and its movements. For research questions and goals like that I had to use various NLP machine learning methods like a Naive Bayes classifier to see what types of words or what frequencies of certain words would elicit those reactions from various areas of the pupil or the eye more generally. The project overall was definitely within the psychology field in terms of discipline, but the work I ended up doing and the research conclusions and insights I was able to uncover involved quite a bit of statistics and programming.
What is your personal vision for SAAS going forward, either in terms of your own personal goals of what you want to do in SAAS, or what direction you want to see the organization go towards as a whole?
I'm a newer member so I'm not really sure what SAAS was like during its SUSA or USA iterations, but I definitely think SAAS is trending in a really good direction. I think the organization is getting bigger and more well-known throughout campus, especially within the statistics, computer science, and data science student communities. Certain committees are definitely very popular amongst people who are not even in SAAS, and I particularly feel that Data Consulting is something that more and more people will want to join because of the client work and the great technical skills the consultants get to use. So overall I definitely see SAAS getting a lot more traction and attention moving forward, even though it already is pretty well-recognized among all the STEM academic and professional clubs in Berkeley. For me personally in terms of my own personal journey or growth going forward in SAAS, I'm pretty good with R&P but you never know if I might want to try something in Data Consulting, or something in Education, but for now I'm pretty good with R&P.