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The Practicum Program at USF is 
interwoven with the curriculum.

Students show up in July, they 
take classes into October,

and in the middle of October 
they begin their practicum.

Every student works Monday 
and Wednesday, and Tuesday,

Thursday, Friday, 
they have classes.

What that means is 
that they're learning

on the side of their 
industry experience.

My practicum company is TruSTAR.

It's a cyber security company 
here in San Francisco.

I get to use every 
day the things that I

learn in class in my company.

We apply several 
machine learning

models, which is 
amazing because as soon

as I was learning them in 
class, I was applying them

in my company.

One of the nice things about 
the practicum experience at USF

is you're assigned a 
faculty mentor, who's

really experienced 
and knowledgeable,


and can help you solve real 
world data science problems

that you're going to encounter.

So I have to mentor 
them through not

knowing much to actually 
learning the tools,

and by the end--

and also a lot of 
different details

on how do you handle data, why 
do you do it this way and not

that way?

So in every meeting, we go 
through these little details

that are very important at 
solving these type of problems.

It's not a burden 
on the students

to go find the companies.

All of that is done 
by the faculty.

We have 60 to 80 
companies come in,

and these companies come in 
and give five minute pitches.

And then after all of 
that, the students rank.

They say, these are 
the ones that I'd most

like to work with, 
and these are the ones

I'd least like to work with.

And then we do a 
matching, where we

try to put as many students with 
their top choices as possible.

It's really cool how there's 
such a myriad of opportunities

on this data science spectrum.

And whatever you're 
interested in, basically,


you have the 
opportunity to apply

that in a real world setting.

Well, I'm currently interning at 
Ultimate Software, a technology

company that does human 
capital management.

And well, I think that makes 
this program very unique

because it offers 
you a real world

experience before you graduate.

So you graduate 
already with having

eight months of experience 
and ready for your job search.

The project that 
I'm working on is

being able to help predict 
survival of cancer patients

based on physician 
and clinical notes.

And it's been great to work 
on a meaningful problem.

And I study biomedical 
engineering,

so I was really excited to 
be able to get this practicum

and apply data science machine 
learning to health care

and medicine.

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