I completed a 105-hour in-person internship as an AI Research Intern at the Space Design and Design IT Lab at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Working alongside graduate researchers, I led a geospatial sentiment analysis project, building AI agents and data pipelines to interpret emotional and social patterns from spatial data, and contributed to projects on housing price analysis and AI-driven disaster-prevention design. Conducted partly in Korean, the internship brought together my Statistics and Data Science major and Applied Psychology minor in a uniquely hands-on way, pushing me to ask not just how data systems work, but how they reflect and shape human experience in real spaces.
The lab itself was unforgettable. The building was under construction, so we worked in a room with a hole in the ceiling and tarps covering the floor and computers. It felt fitting to explore the future of AI and architectural design in an unfinished space. This internship showed me that my interests in data, psychology, and design come together to build more thoughtful systems.
Rolando Sanchez
Senior | UC Santa Barbara | South Korea | Statistics and Data Science