July 14, 2020
Academics at Amherst are about much more than assignments or grades; Amherst is a place for learning, in all the forms it can take.
One common way students learn beyond sitting in classes or writing papers is by participating in research, either independently or in conjunction with a faculty member. About half of seniors write a thesis within their major, which is supported by a faculty advisor and the resources of the college, but at its core is created and driven by the student and their passion. Many students spend their summers working on research through programs like the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), which is designed to give STEM students early research experience under the mentorship of faculty; other research, during the summer or the school year, is not part of a formal program like SURF, but arises from partnerships between students and faculty that occur more organically as a result of shared interests or skills.
My own experience with research this summer has been, like so many of my most valuable experiences at Amherst, an unexpected adventure.
My path to this project started last winter, when I decided to take a few of the brief, non-credit courses and workshops the college offers during the interterm break between fall and spring semesters. One of these courses was “Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS);” I didn’t have any particular reason for taking this course, but it seemed like cool stuff. I learned the basics of the ArcGIS mapping and geographic analysis software and realized how much fun I had playing around with it. A couple months later, I got to hone these skills and apply them in a practical setting as part of a volunteer project I did with the Massachusetts public defenders’ office.
And then I got an email from the professor who had taught the Intro to GIS course over the interterm; he said a faculty member was looking for a student research assistant with GIS experience and asked if I was interested. I told him I was, and he put me in touch with Professor Debnam Guzman, an economics professor.
Professor Debnam Guzman introduced me to the project, a study on the effect of mood on college choice, and told me about what my task would be: to determine a measure of cloudiness for each zip code in the US, every day for a two-year span. In short, I would be a history and computer science major, working for an economics professor, researching meteorological data; interdisciplinary study is a pretty big thing at Amherst.
The task sounded simple enough – get information on clouds from all the weather stations in the US, use ArcGIS to plot it on a map, correlate with the zip codes, and boom. Simple, of course, until it came to actually doing it; there are 41,702 zip codes in the US, compared to only a couple hundred weather stations, and with very inconsistent reporting of cloud data across them at that. It soon became clear that this approach would not have nearly the amount or specificity of data required.
I looked around for potential alternative solutions and eventually found out about Google Earth Engine, a cloud computing service for large-scale analysis of geographic data; more importantly, it provides datasets which, with a bit of toying around, yielded the cloud cover information I needed.
The project has been an extraordinarily rewarding (and frequently even fun) problem-solving adventure. I’ve had to learn JavaScript which, for all my complaints about it as a programming language, is still a very useful skill to have. Professor Debnam Guzman has been a mentor and sounding board for my ideas, such as when the volume of data to analyze resulted in agonizingly slow runtimes, and I had the idea to randomly sample a set of points in each area so we didn’t have to process every single square kilometer in the US. She told me to run with it, and I’m now seeing significant progress on that front. I’ve learned the practice of keeping track of what decisions and judgement calls I make and the value of tenacity in surmounting obstacles.
I landed this project because I found something I was excited about and I ran with it; this is one of the most valuable things Amherst has taught me how to do in every aspect of my life. What’s more is that even though I’m not an economics major and in fact have never even taken an economics course, pursuing this passion beyond my comfort zone has yielded invaluable skills that have prepared me for future opportunities, which can now come from so much wider a field than they would have if I had remained confined to my own niche. That’s what research – and what Amherst – is all about.