Dhruv Gajjar

I'm currently a senior at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign doing what any soon-to-be graduate is doing: rushing to find a job and trying to make the most of time I have left at school.

I am set to graduate in December 2018, so my time to do the above items is shorter than expected. My background is in engineering physics with a specialization in data modeling and analytics, and I have applying mechanical/civil engineering and data analysis concepts at my previous internships. The latter of those two roles is what I am mainly interested in. Over the course of the summers of 2018 and 2017 I have devoted time to learning and becoming familiar with Visual Basic, SQL, and database principles. I have used this knowledge to help the company modernize several of their practices by automating certain processes, recommending specific ways to standardize their data and records, and having my final project be to develop a demo to present the potential capabilities of using a SQL database rather than a file-sharing platform.

I believe that my background in physics gives me a great advantage to learning and tackling new concepts with relative ease. As a physics major, I was exposed to solving complex problems on a daily basis. The greatest asset I can bring to the workplace is to be able connect two disparate subjects to solve problems. In school, we learned the similarities between thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and circuits and also something completely different as quantum harmonic oscillation and a spring moving back and forth. This type of teaching environment prepared me to tackle challenges outside the box.