Internship Description
Da Hua Chen, Nithya Kocherlakota and Yiwen Xiao, ‘19SEAS, interned with Social Solar, an organization founded by Columbia University graduate students from the business and engineering schools in 2017. Social Solar is a trusted online platform that matches individuals and businesses seeking clean energy alternatives with vetted solar energy suppliers. The company helps solar energy customers make informed decisions by analyzing their energy usage and assessing their energy needs. Da Hua worked on enhancing the company's AI utility bill reader and rating and decision algorithms, wrote and integrated an API for property technology platforms, and tested various channels and platforms for gaining traction. Nithya was responsible for energy analytics using Social Solar’s machine learning Utility Bill Plugin. She was also involved in developing a product roadmap for Social Solar to gain a competitive advantage and establishing partnerships with real estate portfolios looking to move to green energy alternatives. Yiwen worked on real-world projects for the sake of enhancing Social Solar’s energy platform. Her position duties involved enhancing current decision-making clean energy algorithms, performing energy analytics using the AI Machine learning Utility Bill Plugin and developing a product roadmap. Yiwen also engaged with Solar customers/Solar suppliers to better understand how energy software meets their needs.
My work mainly focused on the energy analytics component of our energy platform, which included the data visualization, front-end programming component and data extraction from our Utility Bill Reader Plugin. We also worked on integrating our energy analytics component into a 15-point Utility Bill Assessment. Our customers could check their own utility bills to determine their carbon footprint and potential billing errors. Compared with other offline utility bill assessment, our service provided the Plug and play, and showed the detailed personalized analytics. It is always our mission to bring customers the freshest solutions about clean energy.
When building the advanced energy analytics dashboard for customers, it really helped me exercise the technical skills that I’ve learned from my major. The whole dashboard consists of several calculator widgets and interactive analytics charts. Our team first worked on the data visualization with Tableau to provide a general overview. Before starting to build the front-end, I figured out how to fetch data from the files generated by our Utility Bill Reader program. After taking the extracted data as the input, I implemented the user interfaces using JavaScript and Python.
We also considered what kind of styling of our website design would be appealing. Besides, the challenge was that launching our web application requires integrating all the front-end and back-end programming smoothly. This experience strengthened my understanding of web application design and equipped me with more solid technical skills.
This internship provided me with more software programming and data analytics experience, which will help me pursue a career in software engineering. When working on my projects, I learned quite a lot about web application design, and became more interested in this area. Lastly, I had the opportunity to work closely with the leader and saw how to run a business. I also collaborated with other team members and solved problems together with a spirit of teamwork.
