As the chatter in the room increased, everything in my mind went blank. My heart sank to my feet. Everything I was about to say suddenly vanished. I began to sweat, slowly tapping my foot, praying my name wouldn’t get called next. “Maybe you should add that,” I kept telling myself after each person went.

I was lost—there was no way I could speak and sound like I knew what I was talking about so early on. It was now the second day of my Summer 2024 internship. Our project lead, Mark, took turns calling a team member individually to give a sixty-second elevator pitch about our project, even though we had just learned the information the previous day.

This summer, I am interning at Duke University to build a Polypeptide Helicity and Ensemble Prediction tool that more accurately predicts intrinsically disordered regions of proteins. Through my internship at Duke University, I am collaborating with like-minded students to build this tool. This tool can potentially transform the future of Public Health as increased accuracy in protein prediction can enable the use of proteins as linkers to antibodies, which will help with disease treatment and developing vaccinations. As part of the team, I will be building the Public Interface of the website, giving researchers access to the first interactive tool, where they can submit these proteins for accurate prediction.

This opportunity to transform public health has allowed me to explore my strengths and weaknesses. Coming into the program, I needed more self-confidence and was hesitant to communicate in professional spaces. Being challenged to give weekly elevator pitches and presentations to other project teams has allowed me to build more professional skills, such as public speaking, to employ when solving real-world problems to make my community safer.

In addition to this opportunity, I also became a tour guide to get myself out of my comfort zone and to communicate with less anxiety. Pursuing the role of a tour guide has also allowed me to share my Duke experience and give other prospective students a glimpse of life at Duke. After a few weeks of becoming a tour guide, I noticed that I could present my project progress more confidently and deliver my elevator pitches with less anxiety.

In just ten weeks, I was exposed to different types of software, such as FastAPI, Docker, Bash, Voila, Jupyter, and much more. This exposure allowed me to piece together a puzzle that was once foreign to me, enabling me to build an interactive user interface for direct software interaction. This summer, I have learned more about myself and my classmates and gained a deeper understanding of the transformative power of code. With coding as my paintbrush, I have been able to illuminate life by helping develop new drug and vaccine markets that help fight off diseases quickly. The software I am building has allowed me to delve deep into the transformative power of technology, helping me feel more connected to my community by advancing the field of biology. This summer marks the beginning of my journey of seeking opportunities to make my community safer by solving real-world issues through the transformative power of code while giving back to my community and pouring into the next generation.