Inspirit AI Scholars Program Review 2024
Amita Satish is currently an undergraduate student at University of Texas at Austin studying Electrical and Computer Engineering & Economics. Before getting admitted to UT Austin, Amita was a student in the Inspirit AI Scholars program. She participated in the program in Summer 2021, and in this interview, she shares a review of her experience in the program, answering the question: Is Inspirit AI worth it?
Amita Satish’s Inspirit AI Alum Profile
How did the AI Scholars program impact your preparation for college and your academic journey?
“The AI Scholars program introduced the world of AI to me, which I found different from the data structures and algorithms classes I had been exposed to. After participating in this program, and going through interviews, I got an offer at Citibank to be an AI/ML Engineer. This probably really helped me to get into college and also find research positions once I was in college. Inspirit sparked my interest in AI which I have been continuing to explore.”
What project did you work on in the AI Scholars program?
AI + Disaster Relief Improvement
In this project, students help relieve natural disasters by identifying tweets from people asking for help or offering resources like food or water. First, students create rules-based classifiers to classify different posts. Then students train a model on a real dataset from Twitter, improving it with a variety of natural language processing techniques - including modern methods like word embeddings. This model could help first responders connect people in need with people who can help, and students will be able to apply the same techniques to study patterns in language anywhere!
Which colleges/universities did you apply to, and which did you get accepted to?
Amita applied to highly selected colleges, including UT Austin, where she now currently attends. Take a look at her college admissions journey below.
In what ways did you feature your Inspirit AI experience on your college applications?
Many students will choose to showcase their AI project-building experience on their college application in a variety of ways. From including Inspirit AI on the activities section to writing an essay about their project, many students will highlight the work they completed as part of the AI Scholars program to help bolster their application. Amita chose to showcase Inspirit AI on her application in the activities section, where she mentioned participating in the program, as well as her essays, where she wrote about her Inspirit AI project-building experience.
How has your AI Scholars project affected your career journey?
A student’s learning journey doesn’t end with AI Scholars—the Inspirit AI program can be a launching point for many students’ college and career journeys exploring computer science and artificial intelligence. For Amita, her project helped solidify her interest in technology and engineering.
“The AI Scholars project really helped me concretize concepts we learned such as linear or logistic regression, which I had initially learned as a more theoretical concept. Like I mentioned before, this experience helped me land an offer at Citibank after my senior year of high school under the AI/ML division. In general, Inspirit was one of the biggest drivers of me choosing technology and engineering. The following summer (Summer 2023), I was offered an internship at Tesla as a Manufacturing Controls Automation Dev Engineer. In that role, I got to make applications and analyze data, and I was able to apply a lot fo what I learned at Inpsirit. Primarily, I would say the approach that we were taught to tackle projects we face was a huge takeaway, because I was able to use it in many different contexts.”
What has your college and career journey been like since you completed the AI Scholars program?
“I interned at Tesla after my freshman year of college. These are all the college courses I have taken: Intro to computing, Intro to electrical engineering, Calc 2, Risk management, Undergraduate studies, Intro to embedded systems (C, ARM), Digital logic design, differential equations, government, engineering ethics, economic statistics, microeconomics, macroeconomics, software implementations 1 (C/C++, DSA), circuit theory, engineering communications, intro to tech product development, symbolic logic. I also got into a prestigious and competitive student organization called Undergraduate Computational Finance (UCF). We do a lot of algorithmic trading, and AI is a huge part of that.”
What advice do you have for high school students applying to their dream colleges?
“Truly realize why you are applying to the major that you choose. What makes your path unique, and what are your motivations? Share your story with admissions officers, and I'm sure they'll see the passion from you. Also, try to "show" that passion (backing your passion up with proof is one way to think about it) by starting a club or org or working on a cool project on your own time. You got this!”
For Amita, the Inspirit AI program was more than worth it, from showcasing AI Scholars on her college application to applying her learnings from the Inspirit AI course to her work as a college student. If you liked this Inspirit AI review, we encourage you to apply to the live online program here.
About Inspirit AI
AI Scholars Live Online is a 10 session (25-hour) program that exposes high school students to fundamental AI concepts and guides them to build a socially impactful project. Taught by our team of graduate students from Stanford, MIT, and more, students receive a personalized learning experience in small groups with a student-teacher ratio of 5:1.
