Maria joined the ENGAGE Project with a passion for biology and a curiosity for technology, but no formal coding experience. "I was intimidated," she admits. "Seeing lines of code felt like reading a foreign language."
Through our Tier 2 program, Maria was introduced to Python, the fundamentals of machine learning, and data analysis libraries like Pandas and Scikit-learn. Her capstone project was ambitious: a model to classify different species of local flora based on leaf images. This story documents her late nights, her "aha!" moments, and the incredible feeling of seeing her model correctly identify a plant for the first time.
