Hey, my name is Evan Perez, I’m taking this course late because I waited to take Freshman English until last semester, I decided I wanted to take other classes beforehand like Differential Equations and Algorithms. I kind of regret waiting though because this class seems like it definitely would’ve helped me along the way! My family and I live in Uniondale, NY but I live with some friends in a cheap apartment in Harlem. I’m half Mexican and half Honduran, but I’ve mainly lived with my Honduran side of my family so I feel more aligned with that. I’m into photography and music, I’ll shoot street photography sometimes and I practice some jazz on the saxophone I bought recently. I love instrumental music genres like classical strings/choir, jazz, synth-wave, vaporwave, dungeon synth, barber shop beats / barbershop-synth, ambient, all that good stuff. Right now, I’ve been into Drum and Bass / Breakcore related music, so I’ve been listening to artists like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. My all-time favorite artists are definitely The Weeknd and Hozier. Despite being singers, their songs always have amazing instrumentals and I like to listen to music not for the lyrics, but for the sounds, almost as if the singer’s voice is just another instrumental. I actually saw The Weeknd in concert last August and I straight up cried, I don’t ever do that so it was freaky how my body reacted as soon as the concert started (The concert was insane). My main hobby is definitely the gym, I’ve been into weightlifting for a few years now and I’m currently cutting down (started at 210 lbs in Fall 2022 and I’m down to 182 lbs now). This past year, I’ve been able to develop a focus on Computer Vision / Satellite Imagery and landed an internship for another geospatial-related startup building machine learning-related services, where I continue to work as a Machine Learning Engineer. This semester I was selected to participate in the CUNY Tech Prep Data Science Cohort  #9, where I’ve been attending classes on data science techniques and building new skill sets. For the program, I will be working on a group project that will use a machine-learning model to detect ships on the ocean in satellite imagery. I believe my interest in photography definitely influenced me to work with satellite imagery, it’s fascinating. Learning how computers can learn has made me appreciate the way humans learn which is also something I find interesting to study. Something I wish to improve in my writing is writing more concisely as I notice that I tend to write too much, and I am often told I need to shorten my explanations and descriptions by mentors and supervisors. This is an important skill since explaining complicated topics in a simpler manner to an audience that may not have contextual knowledge is crucial to pitching products/services to clients.