Hello Outreachy!

My Outreachy Internship with Ersilia

Outreachy offers open-source internships, the internship is remote and allows you to contribute to open source while learning new things and improving your skills as a developer. Most of the projects have a great impact on the world and all the work is collaborative, there is such a diversity of projects that you can choose the one that best suits your interest and skills. All this was what motivated me to apply to Outreachy, and therefore to the Ersilia project.

Ersilia is a non-profit initiative that uses data science and machine learning as a tool for infectious disease research in low-resource settings. And my task during this internship period is to incorporate AI/ML models to expand your library of AI models for drug discovery. Ersilia has characteristics that interest me, everything I will do is aligned with my professional objectives, which consist of learning machine learning and having experience in real scientific research projects, becoming a great professional experience for me, which I will tell you about on this journey in my internship with Outreachy.

I’m Carolina, I’m a Computer Engineer, technology and open source enthusiast, proudly Colombian and mother of a girl, and very lucky to be accepted as an Outreachy intern for this winter internship 22 -23. One thing I would like to bring to this first Outreachy blog is how curious it seemed to me to find myself the only Colombian in this internship, and among the very few Latin Americans who applied and were accepted. This makes me feel a great commitment to disseminate this type of initiative such as Outreachy among all the software development communities of women that exist in Colombia so that many more talented people benefit from contributing to this wonderful world of open source, which brings challenging projects like Ersilia. This motivation is partly rooted in a series of values that identify me as a person who values communities, which are always in favor of improving many people’s lives. I also love challenges and always discover new things, getting out of our comfort zone will make us discover capabilities that we did not know about ourselves and will make us empower ourselves with that new knowledge, that is why my fundamental values are a challenge, contribution, community and learning.