Vishal S.

Learning and optimizing hardware emulation tools like Cadence Palladium Z3 and Synopsys ZeBu Server 5.

As a teaching assistant for 18-341, I host office hours and recitations to sharpen students' skills in advanced digital design principles such as pipelining, networking, design verification, and cryptography through a series of lab assignments.

As a research assistant, I performed recall analysis on Hierarchical Navigable Small World vector databases with KNN clustering to discover discrepancies in recall time between data groups and various topologies. I used tools like scikit, pandas, numpy to perform my analysis.

As a teaching assistant, I facilitate small group discussions, proctor lab sessions, and host office hours to help students appreciate the elegance of digital design. Over the course of Fall 2024, I additionally helped migrate course material to be compatible with new Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA boards. Structure and Design of Digital Systems (18-240) is a course that guides students from the fundamentals of Boolean Algebra and combinational logic, to finite state machines and hardware threads, culminating in an exploration of CPU design through a model “RISC-240” computer architecture.

As the head of the Research Committee at CMU, I aim to engage and connect students into starting research careers. I lead committee meetings where I interview professors and PhD students about their topics of study.

My internship at the D.Sole startup involved working on flexPCB layouts of sensor boards used to assist diabetic patients with foot complications.

At Mathnasium, I tutored students aged 6 to 16 in topics from numerical fluency to pre-calculus through assessing individual learning needs and creating tailored learning plans.

For my senior year, I was the teaching assistant for Physics Honors, AP Physics C Mechanics and E&M. There I created review material, such as problem sets and lab writeups.

In high school, I was the electrical captain to my 170-member high school robotics team, The MidKnight Inventors. Together in 2023, we qualified for the world championship and had scored a total of 7 awards due to our robot’s performance and team sustainability. As the captain, I learned how to supervise a leadership group, communicate effectively through documentation, and most importantly, I learned how to recover from setbacks. My most impactful contributions to the team involve creating easy to use guides on battery maintenance, and robot debugging protocol.

Under the HardwareNXT fellowship program, I learned mechanical engineering skills such as CAD, manufacturing, and engineering design principles.

Integrated Master's Bachelors Degree.

Expected IMB (Integrated Masters-Bachelors Degree) by 2027 with a minor in Physics.