Personal Projects:

• PDF coversions for for Almond Acearage Reports

  Summary: This notebook extracts data from yearly Almond Acreage Report PDFs found on the website of the Almond Board of California. Over the summer of 2021 I worked as an Assisant Economic Research intern at AgIS Capital where I manually had to copy and paste this data into Excel in order to do any sort of analysis. And then I said never again. As one might imagine, this was very monotonousness work and I started to wonder if I could write Python code which might make the process more effecient. While I have partly failled to acomplish this, 2013 and the years 2007 and lower would up being impossible to get data out of, I was able to create CSV's for 2021 through 2008. Furthermore as new reports are released, I will be able to use my class ALMOND_PDF to create a new CSV file.

• Modeling Student Transportation Decisions

  Summary: This project is an in-depth analysis of transportation choices among college students at Cal Poly, aiming to provide valuable insights and recommendations for optimizing transportation options. Through careful data analysis, I found that demand for cars is notably inelastic. Further, I show that a reduction of bus travel time by 20% results in a 13.6% decrease in the number of cars on the road and a 16.3% increase in bus usage among students. Additionally, I provide a visualization demonstrating how bus usage decreases as income increases.

Articles:

• Limits and Loci: On Motion's Role in the Definitions of Curved Lines
  

  Summary: This Senior Thesis, which I wrote and defended for the completion of my Bachelors Degree at Thomas Aquinas College, argues against Descartes use of motion to define curved lines. Descartes claimed that the "ancients" labeled these lines as mechanical and thus had barred them from mathematics, meanwhile he himself omitting those formed by two separate motions. In contrast, I advocate for Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas’ view that mathematics involves quantities abstracted from motion and matter. While Descartes and modern mathematicians were not misguided in employing motion for comprehension of mathematics, a curved lines' definition relies on unchanging aspects of the function rather than what is variable.



• Agricultural Advancements in India: The Role of Good Soil Practices Amidst Climate Adversity

  Summary: Amid climate shocks such as droughts and floods, smallholder farmers endure the most severe repercussions. Empowering these farmers with knowledge and skills in climate-resilient farming techniques becomes crucial in enabling them to overcome the challenges presented by climate-related adversity. In this paper, we study smallholder farmers in Maharashtra, India to assess the impact of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) on sugar cane yield and cultivation costs. We employ an instrumental variable approach and find that implementing more GAPs decreases a farmer’s cultivation costs significantly and decreases their yields non-significantly. This paper was written for the IFC in collaboration with Joe Schneider, and Jesse Saechao while studying at Cal Poly. Specific numbers have been redacted in compliance with the NDA.