Becoming an AI Engineer and Studying Advanced Computing in the USA

Opeyemi T. Adeniran shares her career journey with Omdena as an artificial intelligence engineer and how it helped her to get a fully-funded Master’s study at Morgan State University, USA. 

How did your journey start?

My artificial intelligence career started with Omdena in 2020. It was my first project and my first time hearing about Natural Language Processing which deals with extracting sentiments from data and also builds network graphs for collating related content for search optimization.

The project was an interesting one because it deals with online child abuse and is in conjunction with Save The Children.

Working with experts from different countries was very challenging as they gave updates every day, and you wondered how fast they were able to achieve these things in less than 24 hours. It may be funny now, but never then. Each time I go through the codes, I find out that I understand nothing, and I sit back to ask myself, how on earth can someone write all these codes? 

How did you overcome obstacles during Omdena projects? 

I reached out to some members of the Omdena community to educate me more about the project, and also to guide all the way through it. In the end, I was able to build an educational chatbot and learn more about network graphs and natural language processing. Also, I found myself doing additional self-study to learn more about these areas.

Could you share any thoughts or tips for future Omdena collaborators?

At this point, I would like to place a bit of emphasis on the use of the community for your personal growth. A community is a group of people with common interests. It is cool, never intimidating, and necessary to use the power of community to network, ask questions, and for mentorship, and also to create a study group for your personal development or for job recommendations and so forth.

Opeyemi representing Morgan State University and the Department of Computer Science at CVPR 2022, the world’s premier computer vision conference

Back to my personal development tips, It was time to advance my career, so I applied at Morgan State University. My professor took an interest in me based on my real-world working experience in the field of artificial intelligence at Omdena and my research work in my final year project, which was also based on image segmentation techniques. He was so impressed and got me connected to the university for a funding opportunity, which took care of my masters program in Advanced Computing at Morgan State University, Baltimore, USA.

Any concluding words?

Here is my giveaway: understand your career path and be an active member of a community that would help you build the skills and work experience needed to achieve your current career goals.

We did a second interview with Opeyemi since our last conversation in early 2022. 

How did your life change since our last interview?

I am currently a student studying “Advanced Computing” at Morgan State University since January 2022.

Recently this August 2022, among other applicants from my university, I got selected by NetFlix for Advanced Data Science Bootcamp.

Also in May 2022, I was awarded a Community Lead at Global AI Hub.

In November 2021, due to my achievements in Omdena as a Chapter Lead coupled with my final year research and certifications, my professor picked interest in me and got a research work that took care of all my university and living expenses.

Also following my work and impact as a chapter lead, I was selected by the CEO of Omdena, Rudradeb Mitra, to work virtually as a part-time with Omdena, as an AI Evangelist & Partnership manager.  My major achievement was the Omdena partnership with “Dataquest” which gives 500 premium scholarships to Omdena members on monthly basis, I also gave talks at local and international platform like TechSoup.

In addition, I became a Google women Techmakers ambassador in  September 2021.

And in August 2021, I got a job as an AI Engineer with Infineon Technologies but resigned to further my education.

Ready to test your skills?

If you’re interested in collaborating, apply to join an Omdena project at: https://www.omdena.com/projects