Student Government Association President and OLLU women’s soccer captain Rachel Dziuba recently completed a remote internship with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as part of the TExAS FAST grant.

A Biomathematics and Environmental Science and Sustainability double major, Dziuba worked from San Antonio with a data scientist in Washington, D.C., Dr. Gianna Short, to create a model to use climate change projections to predict loan risk for borrowers. 

“The first step in this was to model climate factors on crop yields,” she said. “We worked with weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and crop yield data from the USDA and created maps, plots, and regression models using RStudio.” 

Dziuba learned coding and immersed herself in the data science field. She received a stipend through a USDA grant awarded to OLLU. 

“Working with Dr. Short was amazing as well,” Dziuba said. “She was a really great person to learn from and work with, and I definitely learned a lot during this summer. This internship was extremely rewarding because I learned so much about coding and got some insight about what I want to do in the future, mainly including incorporating coding and science together.”