Practicum Pride: Bolt Threads
By: Victoria Suarez
Tags: Machine Learning, Students

Nicole Kacirek came to the MSDS program with a BS in Computer Science from Colorado State University and Wendy Xiao came to the MSDS program with a BS in Business Administration from Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. Continue reading to learn more about their practicum experience at Bolt Threads!

Nicole (left) & Wendy (right)

Can you tell us about Bolt Threads? What is it like working there?

NICOLE — Bolt Threads is a materials innovation company. Using proprietary technology and revolutionary bioengineering concepts, they deliver high-performance materials focused on sustainability. When first entering the office in Emeryville, you walk down a long hallway past a series of different research labs. In these labs, they’ve created Microsilk™ — a lab-made silk inspired by spider silk, Mylo™ — a leather alternative made from mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms, and most recently the b-silk™ protein — used in their new Eighteen B skincare products.

Can you describe the project(s) that you are working on?

NICOLE — For our first project, we helped the marketing team with message optimization for their new skincare brand, Eighteen B. Specifically, we scraped product reviews and social media data from a handful of their competitors.Then we applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to perform topic extraction and sentiment analysis on this data to see what and how customers feel about other products. After the successful launch of Eighteen B this month, we are now starting a new project. We will start building LTV (Lifetime Value) and Customer Segmentation models.

WENDY — The projects we have been working on are closely related to our curriculum which helps us review and reflect on what we’ve learnt in class. While our projects at Bolt are more specific to a business context, we continue learning by reading papers and learning more ML techniques. Our current project is building LTV models for their acquired e-commerce company to help make marketing decisions. Acquiring, cleaning, and understanding the structure of the data has taken us longer than expected, but the whole data science process is fun.

How are you applying the knowledge gained from the program to your practicum? Is there a particular class that has been the most helpful?

NICOLE — The Data Acquisition course was extremely helpful while collecting data for our first project. We used Selenium and Beautifulsoup to scrape product reviews, and APIs to obtain social media data. This class also taught us some valuable pre-processing techniques for text data. In addition, our Machine Learning courses also exposed us to scikit-learn and the many algorithms we could use to perform topic analysis.

WENDY — I agree with Nicole. I’d also like to add that the SQL and Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) courses were very helpful especially when it came to data processing such as scaling, encoding, and feature engineering techniques. In general, to do a project, from framing a problem, breaking it down into smaller tasks, making modeling choices, all the way to validating and interpreting the result, the “data science mindset” and “problem solving skills” for this whole process have been taught to us throughout our curriculum, particularly by Terence, Brian, and Yannet.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced at your practicum?

NICOLE — I would say the biggest challenge we’ve faced so far was how fast paced the first project was. We started in November and the product launched in March. In order to help advise the marketing strategy, we had to present our analysis to the marketing team in early February, but we also had a month off for winter break in January. Therefore, we were collecting all of our data across a variety of platforms ourselves, analyzing it, and presenting our findings in a very short amount of time. While the pressure could be overwhelming at times, it gave us some great experience in working in a fast-paced startup environment.

WENDY — Personally, communicating with people has been a little bit of challenge for me, partially because English is my second language, so I get nervous and have to be really well-prepared to make my points clear when I speak in the meetings.

Are there any cool perks?

WENDY — Our colleagues at Bolt Threads are nice, open, and willing to help. Although we are only there 2 days a week, they have made us feel very included. It is also very cool to see all the labs with serious scientific research happening.

NICOLE — One of the coolest parts about being a data science intern at Bolt is interacting with all of the scientists and engineers that work in the labs on a daily basis.