Engineering Student Stories

Meet Rajvi

Engineering, specifically computer science, is a discipline of creativity and not the hyper-technical mechanical profession it is stereotyped to be. This expression of imagination, whether it be through robotics, computer vision, or some other discipline, is what excites me about engineering. I have worked on projects ranging from Artificial Intelligence models that use natural language processing to act as public-speaking coaches using natural language processing, to machine learning models that predict the behavior of customers in an open market. The College of Engineering has given me the tools to express my imagination and come up with such fun and incredible applications.

The opportunities here are endless! I have worked as a Teaching Assistant for CSE 3380, represented UTA at the national Lockheed Martin Ethics in Engineering Case Competition, been the VP of Operations for HackUTA 2018, interned at a FinTech company over the summer and even got elected as an Engineering Senator for Student Government. The academic and organizational skills and networking opportunities that I have gained have had a huge impact on my career. The College provides a very well-rounded experience for its students. As future professionals in the tech industry, this holistic development is the key to long-term success. As a student, I am surrounded by excellent professors who have instilled a deep appreciation for computer science within me, while providing mentorship and leadership opportunities to enhance those skills. I was also selected as one of the 1000 Forbes Under 30 scholars around the world for 2019 and the résumé I built at UTA was key to achieving this.

My goal was to work for a company that would not only provide me with a platform to build a successful long-term career but also fulfill my quest for deeper knowledge in my field. I have accepted a full-time offer as a software engineer at Microsoft starting in May 2020. I believe working at Microsoft will help me gain valuable experience in software development as well fields like machine learning and computer vision. I will also be working with some of the leaders in the tech industry and I look forward to gaining an insider’s look at the process.

From the day DeepMind’s AlphaGO triumphed over Lee Sedol, I have been fascinated by machine learning and artificial intelligence. My dream is to work with talented engineers and scientists to advance the current learning algorithms in the field. The implementation of machine learning in computer vision is another specific area where I want to create tools to improve gesture recognition technology and optimize the time taken for such algorithms to converge. A breakthrough in this field would help to make the futuristic tech that I dreamt of as a child more realistic to implement and lead to a completely different and enhanced society in the future. The promising improvements we are witnessing in quantum computing right now are an indication that this "enhanced" future is nearer than we previously calculated and I cannot imagine working in any other industry than being at the forefront of this innovation.