Introduction

Hi! I’m Eli, a first year Masters student in the BANA program. Originally from the Cincinnati area, I moved out to Los Angeles when I began my undergraduate career at the University of Southern California. There, I received my BS in Physics/Computer Science, and then continued pursuing higher education at the University of Washington in their CLMS program (Masters in Computational Linguistics). While I enjoyed the program, I sought employment over continuing academics, and left early to work across multiple startups over the next few years.

When I’m not working or in school, I enjoy playing pickleball, going rock climbing, reading historical fiction, watching soccer, and enjoying the outdoors.

me hiking

Education

  • BS in Physics/Computer Science with a Minor in Linguistics (USC, Los Angeles)
  • MS in Computational Linguistics (UW, Seattle)Incomplete
  • MS in Business Analytics (UC, Cincinnati)Pursuing

Professional Career

After leaving the CLMS program at UW, I began working at various startups as a software engineer. From social media to finance, I was eager to gain as much professional experience as I could. My largest and longest position was also my most recent one, where I found myself as a Lead Engineer at a financial technology company called Balance. As Lead Engineer, I oversaw a team of software developers building out our enterprise SaaS product aimed at financial institutions like banks and wealth management companies. While I wrote the code for the product, I was also responsible for the deployment and upkeep of our companies technical infrastructure, including our CICD pipelines, AWS services, SQL and NoSQL databases, and more. I utilized all of my past experiences, and quickly learned whatever I did not know that was necessary to keep the company moving. After a year and half at the company, we unfortunately had to shut down as the banking industry proved too difficult to break into for a company of our size.

With all this new professional experience, I wanted to go back and pursue a Masters again with a clearer idea of my path forward, and UC’s BANA program combined well my technical background and analytical mindset.

R and Analytical Tools

While this is my first time learning R, the other coding languages I know are:

  • Python
  • C++
  • JavaScript
  • Java
  • SQL

As for analytical tools, I used my analytical Python libraries extensively in my time in the CLMS program, such as matplotlib, pandas, and numpy. As part of that program, I was also continuously analyzing datasets for possible uses in the AI and LLM fields, and frequently had to develop Python scripts to parse and clean up data before we used them for training or fine-tuning.

Fun Facts!

  • I played the viola for 8 years, stopping when I left for undergrad. In undergrad, I wanted to continue making music, and so I joined the Men’s Choir at USC.
  • I was apart of a mentorship non-profit at USC, and served on the executive board as the Director of Grants and Itemized Gifts, bringing in over $70,000 for the organization.
  • I co-wrote a research paper at UW about using LLMs for Humor Classification, with downstream applications for content moderation and hate speech detection. You can read the paper here!