Internships

Max Gonzalez Saez-Diez ’23

Major

School of Public and International Affairs

Project Title

Data-intensive Analysis of the Climate-Water Crisis in India

Presentation Link

View Max's Presentation

Certificate(s): Applications of Computing, Statistics and Machine Learning

My internship investigated how climate change and its consequences — water scarcity, food insecurity, etc., — are impacting the lives of many people in Karnataka, India. I worked with Ram Fishman, whose lab recently compiled a novel dataset containing detailed atmospheric information on hundreds of villages in Karnataka for the period between 2011 and 2016. The dataset also contains daily information on the number and types of crimes that were committed during that timeframe. I worked on cleaning up the dataset, which initially contained over 10 million entries. My co-intern and I also examined the interaction between food production and prices and crimes (e.g., murders, suicides, and crimes against women) in Karnataka. Beyond learning more about data scrubbing and data analysis in the programs R, Stata, and Python, this internship has convinced me that I want to pursue graduate school. I am deeply grateful for this summer’s experience: it not only gave me tools and techniques to advance my academic career, but also allowed me to develop as a person by giving me the opportunity to live in Israel and talk, debate, and collaborate with people from a completely different background.