As a college freshman, I visited my professors' office hours weekly. At one of these office hour sessions, I asked my professor, Dr. Christiansen, about one of her posters on the wall. Little did I know that this simple question would lead to nine months of research, two conferences, and a poster of my own. I absolutely loved analyzing with Dr. Christiansen, and it was this project where I found my love for coding. It was the first time that I saw my skills as an engineering student make a difference in real life (not just a theoretical problem to practice). 

The VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) Collaboration is a multi-university project that uses the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope technique to observe the gamma rays that cause particle showers in Earth's atmosphere. I worked on numerous blazars, notably the M87 and the 3C273. At first, I was using their programs on the Linux machines to create sky maps to show a blazar's significance (ratio of gamma rays to background noise). An example of a sky map can be seen in the poster from Cal Poly's College of Mathematics and Sciences Spring Conference 2019 (the blue graph with a yellow center). During Summer 2019, I continued to work with Dr. Christiansen to create data-quality criteria and a program to sort thousands of data points using Python 2.7. My program is now used by Cal Poly researchers to sort through the "good" and "bad" data in minutes, rather than hours if done by hand. My final project can be seen below under "Studying L3 (Level 3) Rates With Crab Data."