Data Science to Make a Difference

In his first year as a Washington College student, Peter Junkin ’25 worked at the Watershed Innovation Lab. Now as he works on his senior capstone experience and prepares to graduate, he is back at the lab, but much has changed.

 

Junkin started at Washington intending to be an environmental science major and started working with professor Doug Levin, who was the Watershed Innovation Lab director that year.  

“I like doing the math side of things, assisting the people who do the environmental restorative efforts,” Junkin said. 

Levin took note and pointed Junkin toward a brand new major that began his sophomore year: data science. Junkin embraced the opportunity to learn detailed math, computer science, and data science skills and immediately found many ways to put them to work. 

“It is a nice major for people who really want to have a tangible effect, people who like to create things, and people who like everything. You do a bit of everything. Data science is very much a major that doesn’t exist without other departments,” Junkin said. “It is in service of whatever client you’re working for. It is interesting with every different job seeing a different side of an industry or a different side of academics.” 

After starting in the major, Junkin gained diverse experience applying his skills. He worked on analysis of the Eastern Shore opinion poll conducted by faculty and students in the political science department in 2022. He worked for the Geospatial Innovation Program working with traffic data and vehicle theft information.  

Course work has also been project-driven, for example creating data visualizations of U.S. energy usage, including emissions by state, in Data Ethics & Practicum. 

“We were given data-related projects, and we were given a layout of what we were required to do,” Junkin said. “We had to learn about how to do sprint cycles, how to work as a team. It was a great primer for working in my job.” 

The on-campus opportunities and data science courses prepared him for a summer job working for the Webstaurant Store, analyzing outbound shipping, reporting on potential pallet resizing, and improving the company’s efficiency.  

Now in his senior year, Junkin is back to his first subject matter passion: environmental science, and his first campus employer, the Watershed Innovation Lab, now led by Chelsea Peters. For his senior capstone experience, Junkin is designing a database to store data from the Lab as well as writing a script in R, a programming language central to many science fields, that will allow the Lab to integrate historical data kept online with the local database he is creating. 

“There is a tangible effect that I want this thing to have. It’s not just a paper,” Junkin said. “That’s why I wanted to do it.” 

— Mark Jolly-Van Bodegraven