I entered undergrad as a Math Major. I was in love with it from high school, had done a few competitions, wanted to continue along with that study and what I didn't like about math and what I started to realize in my sophomore year was that most of the jobs that I was looking at seemed to be bookkeeping jobs which isn't a bad thing, I have nothing against it, it just didn't fit my personality very well. I happen to take a CS course in that fall and then that let me realize that CS was a way to scale now, so I started asking around professors how do I get more into this because our CS department had been defunded and what they recommended was research and doing these directed studies, pitching a project and then just diving into it, that's what I did and then that led me to apply to some NSF REU. I did one at Clemson and another at Berkeley, and then that kind of pushed me into academia and I was awarded in NSF fellowship for some of the research that I was working on, which made me go into grad school immediately the following undergrad but I decided that they were some areas in my professional life that I couldn't improve upon just in Grad school alone so I decided to go in the industry and then I ended up continuing what I was doing, which is natural language processing and machine learning.

We surely have no preference, it's pretty much whatever gets the job done. We on our team which is very specific, we primarily use Swift, Objective C, and Python but we're not afraid to go into things like Java or R if it's able to do something in a quicker, cleaner manner. We use PyTorch to do sort of lower-level modifications for ideas that we're thinking about, TensorFlow and Keras for things we are trying to get a quick prototype out on.

I have no idea what to expect when I was first coming in. This is my first job at a big company, never been in a company like Apple. I was kind of going in blind, and I have been school my whole life but then I found that I loved it here. I still felt like I am able to express my ideas and they're received very well as well as I can pitch projects sometimes they're picked up, sometimes it's not the highest priority. But I think one big pleasant surprise was still having that freedom to pursue my own ideas as well as being at a community where scientific integrity is still paramount so there's no line, we're always honest about results. If we find a bug, it says okay, just point it out, readjust what our understanding of how well we're doing on the problem is and then continue moving forward and no one has any issues with that and no one takes anything personally.