Hi there! I'm Elaina and I'm an Instructional Designer & A/V Specialist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Computer Science. I accepted this role in November of 2023. More information to come as this story develops.
I completed my undergraduate degree in Linguistics at Reed College in 2019. Through that experience, I developed a love of working with unstructured data and being able to tell compelling stories through the power of computing. More information about my linguistics work can be found here.
After graduating from Reed College, I discovered that computer science could offer more powerful tools to pursue my interest in data science, which brought me to the iCAN program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), a bridge program designed to broaden access to computing. After iCAN, I was accepted to the Master's program at UIUC to continue my computer science education and graduated in May of 2023. More information about projects I completed during my time at UIUC can be found here.
While in the iCAN program at UIUC, I was fortunate to be a DREAM Fellow and conduct research on the nature of scientific impact with Dr. George Chacko. I was able to devote 400 hours of work on an independent project of my choice through the support of the DREAM program and I chose to report on different metrics for evaluating the impact of scientific studies. For more information, please see my project website.
Excited to announce that I have accepted a position as an Instructional Designer & A/V Specialist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Computer Science! I will officially start on November 13 and I’m very excited to start this new chapter in my career.
This month, I completed the MongoDB module in my Udemy course and updated my todo list application to have persistent storage (v2). After completing this, the course content updated to replace MongoDB with PostgreSQL, so on paper I’ve made little to no progress on the course this month. I sit at around a 77% completion rate currently.
I’ve been focusing heavily on advancing my Web Development skills this past month. I’ve completed two capstone projects; the first is a Todo List which uses Express.js to serve a simple landing page for a todo list application and node.js in the backend, the second is a simple currency conversion app which utilizes ExchangeRate-API to convert a base currency to any target currency. The link to the todo list application can be found here. I may make the currency converter app public at a later date if I can find a good way to do so while also hiding my API key.
I’ve finished my second web development capstone, which is a resume/personal website created entirely with HTML & Bootstrap. You can find that website here. In all, I’ve completed just under 50% of my web development course and have learned a lot about how to create fully functional, responsive web pages.
This summer, in between job applications, I’ve been taking two certificate courses from Udemy: The Complete 2023 Web Development Bootcamp, offered by Angela Yu and The App Brewery, and The Data Science Course: Complete Data Science Bootcamp, offered by 365 careers.