When I started at IUI I honestly didn't know what to expect. I knew I wanted to work in AI but I didn't really know what that meant for me as a person, not just as a student. The Honors College pushed me into situations that forced me to figure that out. Three experiences in particular changed how I think and work. My Honors Contract project, the Costa Rica trip, and my internship at the Indiana Statehouse.
The honors contract was probably the first time I did something that felt genuinely hard. Not hard like a difficult exam, hard like I didn't know where to start and nobody was going to hand me a rubric that solved it.
Me and my team studied global climate change using real data we pulled from government websites across different countries. I used Python to clean and analyze it which sounds straightforward but it really wasn't. The data was messy and inconsistent and came from sources that weren't designed to work together. I had to figure out how to make sense of it before I could even start doing anything useful with it.
But honestly the harder part was working with the team. Everyone came from different backgrounds and had different ideas about how things should be done. I learned pretty quickly that being technically right doesn't mean much if you can't bring people along with you. I had to learn how to explain things clearly, listen when someone pushed back, and actually change my approach when their point was valid.
This is evidence that my work meets the IUI honors college goal of developing strong communication and problem solving skills. It also showed me something I think about a lot now which is that in AI, the data is never neutral. somebody collected it, somebody decided what to include, and somebody decided what to leave out. before you build anything with it you have to understand that. that's a habit the honors contract gave me.
I went to Costa Rica in spring 2024 with the IUI honors college service learning program. I stayed with a local family, helped with community projects, and went to talks about sustainability and culture.
I'm not going to pretend I handled it perfectly at first. I'm used to being someone who can communicate well and figure things out quickly and in Costa Rica a lot of that just didn't work the way I expected. Language was part of it but it wasn't just that. The way people communicated, the pace of things, what was considered polite, what was considered rushing, it was all different and I had to slow down and actually pay attention instead of just reacting.
There was a moment during one of the community sessions where I realized I had been answering questions before I fully understood them. just filling in the silence because that's what I usually do. Once I noticed it I started actually listening first and it changed the whole experience.
This experience meets the IUI honors college goal of participating in international and cultural engaged learning. but beyond the requirement it genuinely changed how I communicate. not just in different countries but in general. i think about who i'm talking to now before i decide how to say something. that sounds simple but I don't think I was really doing it before costa rica.
For AI this matters a lot. systems get built by people with certain assumptions and then used by people with completely different ones. if you never get out of your own context you build things that only work for people who think like you do.
I started working as an IT intern at the Indiana Legislative Services Agency in november 2025. I set up computers for staff, ran live broadcasts of committee meetings, managed the legislative website, and archived session footage.
The thing about that job that's different from anything else I've done is that there's no margin for error when it's live. if the broadcast goes down during a session it doesn't pause. the meeting keeps going and you have to fix it while everything is still happening. I had to learn how to troubleshoot fast, stay calm, and explain what was happening to people who were already stressed about something else entirely.
I think that's the job that actually made me feel like a professional. not because it was glamorous but because the work mattered in a real way. the recordings we made go into the public record. the website I helped maintain is how people find out what their government is doing. that's not abstract.
This meets the IUI honors college goal of experiential and applied learning. it's also where the other two experiences came together in a practical way. the communication skills from the honors contract, the patience and awareness I built in costa rica, I actually needed both of those at the statehouse.
I think what the honors college really gave me was discomfort at the right moments. The honors contract made me do real research before I was fully ready. Costa rica put me in a place where my usual approach didn't work. The statehouse gave me responsibility before I felt fully qualified for it.
And in all three cases I figured it out.
I'm going into my master's program and eventually into a career building AI systems. That field has a lot of people who are technically excellent and not always great at thinking about who their systems actually affect. I want to be someone who's good at both. The experiences I had through the honors college are a big part of why I think I can be.
I'm not the same student who walked in not knowing what he was doing here. I know now. And I know because of the work I did, not just the classes I took.
