Hi Blog Readers,
Happy new year, I hope everyone reading this had a great holiday season! Just to give a little reintroduction, my name is Tenzin, and I am a senior econ major and stats minor at Wellesley.
We are into our third week of classes in the spring semester at Wellesley. There has been a lot of snow and frigid temperatures here on the east coast, so I have been spending time staying cozy indoors.
I wanted to use this blog post to give a recap of my winter break! Wellesley’s winter break is about four weeks long, and I went back home to Illinois to spend the break. My aunts and cousins came to stay with us for Christmas, and we played games and spent a ton of time laughing.
Unfortunately, I got sick with the nasty flu-esque bug that has been spreading around, so I was bedridden for a few days. I quickly bounced back though and spent the rest of my time at home seeing my friends and playing too much of The Sims 4.
I actually returned to campus one week early to participate in Upskill! Upskill is a four-day long crash course program for Wellesley students about a specific career track. It is run by Wellesley’s Career Center and currently has the following career tracks you can apply to: Investment Banking, Entrepreneurship, Journalism, Medical Professions, Software Development Lifecycle, and AI For Social Impact.
I did the AI for Social Impact track, and this is my second time doing Upskill, as I did the Investment Banking Track during my sophomore year (read my old blog post mentioning it)
During this Upskill, we first learned the fundamentals of how generative AI works and what ethical principles to consider when utilizing it. A Wellesley alum who founded an AI startup came to speak to us about her product and ask us for feedback; that was definitely a highlight of the week.
My other highlight of the week was going on a field trip to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in Boston, where we did a simulation as US senators trying to pass a bill on regulating technology and AI. The workers at the institute were excellent actors and pretended to be tech experts that us “senators” asked questions about tech policy before we “caucused,” debated, and voted on the bill.
Lastly, we were put into small groups based on our industry interests and built a small AI prototype. My group focused on the pharmaceutical industry and we created a small prototype for an AI tool we imagined that a pharmaceutical company could use.
Overall, my break had both its restful and productive moments! I hope this was informative and thank you for reading!
Volunteering at the rescue cat shelter in Wellesley!