by Fatoumata


When I first heard about ESR (Earth and Space Research), I actually didn’t know what it stood for let alone what they did. I was first given the opportunity to be an intern by Dr. Town through email since he had heard about my interest in coding that summer. Upon receiving the email, I was really excited since I had previous experience with coding and thought that I was good at it. Although, truth be told, I didn’t really understand what I was interning, I was still excited nevertheless. Though my excitement simmered down upon my realization that my coding skills weren’t as grand as they ought to be for me to start plotting data.

I had previously received an email from Dr. Town listing things I should do to set up. One of which was to create an account in codewars.com, a website used to practice coding. I was initially very confident that it would be a breeze to level up on the website, I mean I had done two months of computer science workshops with Rainier Schools and did a whole trimester of coding in school. I can still imagine my face of shock as I stared at the screen that had a simple task of creating a function that replaced the letter ‘a’ with another. As it turned out, I actually needed to understand what I was coding, rather than just copying the teacher’s work. I admit that my ego was hit that day, but fortunately I reorganized myself and decided to re-learn python with the help of the internet. I watched an hour long youtube video that taught me all the basics and went from there.

So although I had a rough start at ESR, with the help of Google and Dr. Town who guided me when I had bugs, I was able to get into the flow of learning. As it had turned out, all I had to do to solve the previous problem was use the .replace() function, a function which replaced part of a text string with another. I had previously only known about .lower(), a function that converted a string to all lower case letters, and .upper() function, the opposite of the former, so I really didn’t know much about other functions. Luckily, there were tons of resources on the internet that helped me learn more about them. So thank you internet, I wouldn’t have made it without you.

The other person that I was interning with, Swaraag, had given a presentation on how using Chatgpt as a coding assistant was really useful. He even demonstrated it by giving Chatgpt a prompt to teach him how to plot using matplotlib and Chatgpt generated a whole step by step guide with images and explanations on every step. I was quite amazed, I had previously only used it to analyze my face shape or to get workout suggestions, so it was quite frankly shocking to see how advanced the AI actually was. Now with all these resources at hand, I was able to grinded up from level 8 to 7, then 7 to 6 with the help of my amazing assistent, Chatgpt.

Once I had gotten to level 6, I was finally ready to start plotting some graphs. Although there were some technical difficulties along the way, with my brain being reduced to that of a 70 year old woman, I was able to paste the code I needed to make the graph into python with the help of Dr. Town. With excitement, I clicked the run button expecting to see many graphs filled with data. But imagine my disappointment when all that popped up on the console was a glaringly red error message. I had never hated bugs more than I had at that moment. But having experienced many errors along my way of leveling up at codewars, I pasted the error into Chatgpt, which helped point out the cause of the error and the solution. As it had turned out, the program had some outdated code that had been changed. So I upgraded that line of code and clicked the run button again. But who would have thought, another error message. I had to redo the previous steps of copying the error into Chat Gpt about two more times before a graph finally showed up.

I was so proud upon seeing graph after graph popping up on the screen, I mean I had worked all month to get to this point and seeing all the hard work pay off was really gratifying. Although I still need to deepen my understanding of plotting, since I just got introduced to it, I’m sure that I’ll continue to make progress as long as I continue working on it. Overall, this was a very productive and fun month filled with learning and debugging and I can’t wait to do more next year.