Jeannille Hiciano has tested hormone levels in red-backed fairy-wrens in Australia, examined physiological responses to heat with painted buntings and cardinals in South Carolina, and even audited tax forms for affordable housing developers at an investment firm. Her newest adventure? Khoury College of Computer Sciences’ Align program, where she’s hoping to gain skills in data science and predictive modeling.

“I love solving problems, I always have, and that’s what computer science is about,” Hiciano said.

Hiciano joined the Align program in Fall 2019, but her interest in computer science goes back a decade, when she was at Cornell University getting her undergraduate degree in natural resources. She took a population modeling course and was introduced to the programming language R, and as she put it, “That’s what got me.”

After graduating, she spent three field seasons working as a field technician for avian research projects in different parts of Australia and South Carolina. She loved being on the ground banding birds, taking blood samples, and participating in experiments, and she knew each individual bird on sight just based on their band.

“It’s so amazing to see the hard work they put into surviving—like, humans are so lazy,” Hiciano said, laughing. “Learning the intimate details about how they function as a species and learning that my birds were on someone else’s plot, and that’s why I didn’t see them that day—it was like a little novella.”

But her passion for data was always in the back of her mind, and the three years she spent in the field had just confirmed it. So, she decided to take a chance and move to a new city to explore her options for a different career.

“After my third field season, I decided to just move to Boston and look for a job while I took CS classes to figure out what specifically I could do,” Hiciano said. “Last year, I decided to apply to a couple programs in CS, and Align was my top choice in Boston.”

Expanding horizons

Starting in 2014 and since her start in Align last fall, Hiciano would attend pop-up workshops and classes where she learned Python and Ruby, and more about the computer science industry. She found work at MIT’s library before joining that investment firm to audit tax forms. Later, she returned to MIT, doing marketing and communications at their Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Because Hiciano has often found herself wanting interdisciplinary education and experiences, she has worked hard to get them. Before she studied at Cornell, she spent her first year of college at SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in upstate New York, where even her writing classes had titles like, “Writing and the Environment.”

At ESF, which is located on Syracuse University’s campus, she petitioned the program so she could take a British literature class at Syracuse. Then, once she realized she wanted a university experience with easier interdisciplinary options, she transferred to Cornell. There, she happily took classes on Roman history and Jane Austen.

For Hiciano, having an interdisciplinary mindset is essential for what she wants to do — connecting the field work and data collection aspects of ecology and conservation to the predictive modeling and decision-making parts.

“Being a person that can explain multiple sides is really important,” Hiciano said. “It’s kind of like being a front-end and a back-end developer. You need to learn all sides of your issue in order to make an impact.”

To her, the link between ecology and computer science is obvious. But she definitely hears from people who are curious why a bird-catching field technician is so fascinated by code. For those who want to know, she has an answer ready.

“One big thing I loved about ecology is that you’re learning systems in a different way. The natural ecosystem is the original system: how things work together, how changing one thing is going to have an impact on all other parts of the ecosystem,” Hiciano said. “That’s why I like CS too. You’re learning different parts, how they work together, and how to build things.”

Overcoming challenges

Despite her passion, she freely admits that her time in Align has been challenging. Until very recently, she was still working more than 20 hours a week at MIT while taking difficult classes on campus. And in the fall, she struggled with imposter syndrome because she lacked any solid computer science background. But getting to know the other students in her cohort made a big difference.

“Things got a lot better when I started meeting people and working with people,” Hiciano said. “You start to realize that, in this program, you really do need to work together through problems. Being vulnerable and going through problems together and asking for help totally changed the game.”

Although she isn’t sure yet what she wants to specialize in, she’s particularly interested in information security and data science because she loves the debugging and testing process. She said she’s excited to move past the basic projects and apply her skills to something bigger.

“Most people are like this — when you do meaningful work, when I do meaningful work, I just work so much better,” Hiciano said. “This program is hard — hard does not even cover it. But it’s just so meaningful when you’re done.”