Shaheen Amin - Summer STEM Work Placement Student - Weekly Reports

Work experience is great and it provides students with many benefits whilst gaining skills and helping choose the right future career path for pupils. Having work experience on a Curriculum Vitae will make a person stand out to employers as they will notice they have motivation and a real passion for work. It will also help to boost a students confidence in themselves! 

The STEM placement students are sending us weekly blogs all about their experience in the world of work! 

See how Shaheen is getting on with their STEM placement! 

Week One 

"The first couple of days involved me getting to know my supervisor, Stephen Webb, and setting up my laptop to begin doing some work. On the third day, I met with a woman, Christina, who needed a webscraping program to fill out a CSV for her team - doing this manually would take hours upon hours, and therefore I spent the next two days learning how to webscrape and making the program. I learnt the basics of webscraping within a few hours, and within three days, I finished a prototype and emailed it back to her, and then two days later, I created a final version with a GUI that could be run on any Windows machine with Python installed. My program can complete 100 rows in two minutes, where it would have taken hours by hand. 

I am now working on a program to process language and the overall sentiment within it, as well as data analysis." 

Week Two 

"This week, I developed a program which captures random tweets from Twitter, and analyses the text within them to understand the overall sentiment/feeling within the tweet, allowing us to do keyword searches to understand how the public feel towards certain topics. All this information is stored within a database, allowing other programs and services to access it and process the data as they wish. The location of where each tweet was sent to is also recorded in the form of Latitude and Longitudes to enable us to plot the tweets on a map and observe what certain countries feel towards a certain topic." 

Week Three 

"In my final week, I was tasked to use a program called Microsoft PowerBi to display the data obtained from the sentiment analysis in a visual way, as well as research its strengths and weaknesses for data visualisation. I also tidied up my old code (I had to remove the location data attached attached with the Tweets as it is against the developer terms of service for Twitter), and I also spent a day in the building services engineering department of Jacobs where I had a few one to one sessions with experts in Electrical, Mechanical and Sustainability Engineering. 

Overall, this placement has been an amazing experience and I am very thankful to everyone who has helped me along the way." 

- Shaheen Amin