My SUMMER WITH DSPG
Introduction
My name is meenakshi. I am an international student from India pursuing my master’s in political science; I did my B.A. in international relations from the University of Delhi. I have also served as a research assistant for the Department of Community and Economic Development. I worked on several interesting projects with CED like digital accessibility across ISU, governance ethics, and civic infrastructure. I chose political science to understand how public policies are drafted and then implemented on the ground. Another area of interest is analyzing wars and how they shape societies and long-term political outcomes. 
PLANS WITH MY DEGREE
I want to work in policy research to ensure fair and informative decisions. I am also interested in future research on how war shapes civic and national identities.
Why Data Science is important to me.
Coming from a humanities background, data is not just numbers for me; it’s about asking the right questions and finding patterns to help people. It amazes me how data transforms abstract ideas into something you can understand and replicate.
Prior Experience with Data Science
I come from non-technical background but over the years I have developed strong interest in data; for my statistics class, I worked on a project where I analyzed the correlation between a crime against women in India and Socio-economic factors. I used publicly available data from national records of crime bureau and state-level data on literacy rate, urbanization, unemployment, and poverty. For that project, I used software called JMP. Currently, in the last 3 months, I have been learning R.
Hobbies
Creative writing, journal, Learning R and python these days
interesting facts
I once started a YouTube channel ; during that process, I learned a bit of 3-D modeling. I like finding patterns, whether political events or people’s behaviors.
Skills I Value
clear writing and communications, asking meaningful questions, understanding theory and practical needs
data science skills I already have
Basic work in R, cleaning and organizing data, Analyzing patterns and making simple visualization
skills I want to learn
Writing better, cleaner R code, Basics of GIS, Creating strong and simple data visualization.
why do these skills matter to me
These skills will helps me to turn ideas into action. I wan to use them to work on real problems and make my research more useful and practical