Luke Schiefelbein-Featured Intern

Global Traffic Technologies (GTT) is dedicated to providing our customers with the latest technology advancements on a mission to make roadways safer and more efficient. GTT’s Opticom brand has been providing best-in-class priority control solutions for over 50 years. A testament to Opticom’s quality and durability is the continuing growth in the customer base, now comprising more than 70,000 intersections and 70,000 vehicles with over 3,100 customers worldwide. This includes 41 of the top 50 largest cities in the U.S. Our success is based on working with communities to provide the best emergency vehicle preemption, transit signal priority and traffic management systems.

As a Data Science intern, I was very closely integrated with the Data Team at GTT and worked on all facets of Big Data.  I was involved in data pipelines, data transformations, high-level data processing and detailed analysis, creating new insights from data using Machine Learning, and doing all of this work efficiently with large amounts (hundreds of gigabytes) of data.  In addition, I learned and worked with GTT’s version control, Agile software development process, databases, software systems and domain knowledge to complete my projects.

Through this internship, I learned a multitude of new and emerging technologies, was able to apply machine learning to create insights for the company, provided detailed analysis to clients and GTT, and helped improve and create real-world, valuable products for the company.  The GTT environment was very exciting and engaging and with the very helpful and highly skilled individuals at GTT, I grew personally, professionally, and as a developer.

This experience both confirmed my career choice and opened up new opportunities as not only have I been able to work on and enjoy data science projects at GTT but also was given the opportunity to expand and work in other areas within the company such as Data Engineering which I will be pursuing further throughout my career.

The best advice that I can give is advice that I have also received, always be curious and never stop learning.  That alone will take you far.