UBC MDS

Doing homework and passing exams teach you more than just the course materials, but they also train you to be a motivated problem-solver.

“One day, I’ll work at AbCellera”, I told my partner. I didn’t want to spend my entire career working in a medical laboratory, performing repetitive tasks, and being stuck in a routine. I wanted more variety in my work, a chance to analyze and troubleshoot complex issues, and contribute to innovations that could make a real impact—whether through discovering new treatments, helping develop vaccines, or being part of a team that pushes the boundaries of science. That was my dream back in 2020, a year after graduating from the University of British Columbia (UBC) with a Bachelor of Science in microbiology, and shortly after I started working at Vancouver General Hospital. The excitement of being in the field I studied and the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to medical science energized me, and I started to envision a future with greater professional fulfillment and growth.

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash.

I first heard of N-of-1 trials in 2018 as a master’s student studying epidemiology. I was in my Intermediate Epidemiologic and Clinical Research Methods class, and we had a guest lecture from Dr. Eric Daza on N-of-1 study design. The N-of-1 study can be thought of as a clinical trial investigating the efficacy of an intervention on an individual patient. At the time, this methodology was an emerging practice, with promising implications for personalized medicine and optimizing healthcare for the individual.

Picture This…

You’re sitting at your desk browsing the news and you see a head line something like:

You’re skeptical but you check out the AI startups demos and sure enough it looks like it could pass most first year university degrees with a 4.0.

Now imagine you’re in a Masters of Data Science program, working on a lab that is writing a basic text generation model from scratch and you read the same headline. I suspect you would feel somewhere about here on the Dunning-Kruger curve:

This post aims to share some of our learnings from our MDS Capstone project in 2021. If you’re a new student or a current student reading this after completing your block 6 coursework, congratulations! We wish you the very best in your capstone journey and hope that some of the following tips might serve you well during your project.

Project Management

Have a realistic timeline, give a buffer for your intended timeline

8 weeks for capstone projects is double the time of your earlier group projects in MDS, and you may think you have more time. However, more often than not, people tend to overestimate their productivity. Furthermore, from our experience, the first week for the hackathon and the last two weeks for presentation, testing & documentation went by much quicker than we realized, hence the core time for the project development was actually around 5 weeks.

Before starting, I wanted to give a brief introduction to the project, as well as give a special thanks to the team I worked with. This project was done for realtor.com as a UBC MDS capstone project. The team – Braden Tam, Florence Wang, Hanying Zhang and me – was given the task of using image generation to generate realistic pictures of neighbourhoods. The solution will address the issue of having empty thumbnails for some specific pages of the website. It is also worth mentioning that the images are not related to house postings (because we cannot sell a house that does not exist), but it is more related to the aesthetics of the website. Now that we know what the project is about, let’s start.