My name is Tangee Beverly. I am a Sophomore at Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) in Elizabeth City, North Carolina with a major in computer science. I attended at Bertie High School a school for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Attending the STEM school gave me a good foundation for pursuing a technology career. There were many math and computer classes and in my senior year the development of apps caught my attention. A club that assisted me was the Tech Buddies, a club for students who were aiming for degrees in the STEM field. The director of the club introduced us to an online coding website. This experience contributed to my desire to make programming a career choice.

I am a member of the Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) program, directed by the principal investigator, Dr. Linda B. Hayden. This scholarship program has provided me travel to conferences, presenting research and by being a part of the CERSER program I have been able to learn new skills that can be used in my future internships.

During my academic spring semester 2016, I contributed to a team research project with CERSER. Our team performed research on Producing 3D point cloud and digital elevation models through the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Historic St. Luke’s Church case study. We used the UAV to take images of the historical landmark and with these images were processed with the Pix4d software to produce an image mosaic of the gridded area, a 3D point cloud and digital elevation model (DEM), and finally a 3D model of the historic structure.

In April 2016, I attended the ADMI conference in Winston-Salem to present my spring 2016 research. There were representatives and guest speakers from different companies such as Intel and Yahoo. Throughout the course of these sessions, the presenters shared information about their company and explained internships that were offered. I also attended the IEEE Joint meeting with GRSS and WIE at NC State University. At this meeting, Dr. Melba Crawford spoke on the ongoing remote sensing project and its results.

In summer of 2016, I interned at Indiana University, Bloomington conducting 10 weeks research. It was a great honor to work in Dr. Geoffrey Fox’s informatics lab under the mentorship of Gregor von Laszewski. We had a small meeting to get an idea what certain careers we are interested in and for me it is game designing. He set up the research for me to learn Python more in depth and to get familiar with Big Data. The research tied game development with Big Data. We researched the benefits of Big Data for new programmers who are interested in becoming a game developer. This research opened my mind to other topics in computer science such as Big Data.

My goal is to get a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Elizabeth City State University (ECSU), and further my education by obtaining my master’s degree. The CERSER program is a great opportunity that will provide me with opportunities to my further career.