Scott McCloskey is an S-STEM Scholar at the University of California, Irvine. In this S-STEM Scholar Spotlight, Scott shares how being an S-STEM scholar has led to enriching opportunities, a passion for research, and a clearer sense of direction.
Scott McCloskey with Brianna Wright at the WD&E Intern Poster Session.
As an S-STEM scholar, I have had the opportunity to flourish thanks to the generous funding and opportunities offered by the program. At Saddleback College, the NSF S-STEM scholarship supported me for two years and allowed me to focus on my education and extracurricular activities without financial burdens. During that time, I collaborated with a mentor and three other students on an NSF-funded Federal Work-Study project to create an ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) debugger made in Python on a Raspberry Pi, including a user interface to sequence through a list of unit tests on student ALU boards. This project set a new bar for extracurricular projects at Saddleback College and impressed many faculty members. Additionally, the S-STEM program has supported my research efforts, allowing me to gain skills and knowledge in machine learning and artificial intelligence to secure a 2024 summer internship at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Deliverables of this internship included creating a fine-tuned model capable of predicting sugar yields from biomass feedstocks, thereby increasing productivity for scientists researching renewable energy for aviation fuel. Another deliverable I achieved was a scientific research paper that will be published in the upcoming months and a scientific poster that I presented in the WD&E Intern Poster Session at the end of the internship. Thanks to the S-STEM program, I will be presenting my LBNL scientific poster at the upcoming Chicago S-STEM Scholars & PI conference.
Scott McCloskey, Julia McCloskey (Sister), and Dupeng Liu (Berkeley Lab Mentor) in front of the NERSC Perlmutter Supercomputer.
Scott McCloskey at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
I cannot overstate how beneficial being an S-STEM scholar has been for my career. Previously, I was a financially struggling computer science student on my own and lacked a clear career direction. Since becoming an S-STEM Scholar, I have found a passion for computer science and have been awarded eight different scholarships from separate donors over the past two years. I have also discovered a passion to continue more computer science research in the future at UC Irvine and now have two scientific papers in progress to be published: one for a heliophysics machine learning research project at Saddleback College, and another for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. My advice for any student beginning college of any experience is to get involved in extracurricular activities and apply for programs. If you show a genuine passion to succeed in the STEM field, you will shine!
Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.
The S-STEM Scholar Spotlight series shares stories, builds community, and highlights students and alumni and their S-STEM programs. Learn more and submit your spotlight today.
