Story by Tricia Miller Klapheke
Courtesy Photo
This CSB student is taking advantage of travel opportunities.
Everything Vrushti Patel ’26 does, she looks at through a global lens. Patel was born in India and moved with her family to New Jersey in 2015. When she started in the Computer Science and Business (CSB) program at Lehigh in 2022, she had not been to any other countries, but in her three years at Lehigh, she has participated in FIVE study abroad programs. Even when she is in Pennsylvania, she is thinking internationally, participating in programs such as Passport to Success, Global Citizenship and Creative Inquiry.
At Lehigh, Patel has traveled to Canada, the Philippines, Mexico, Spain and Sierra Leone through different programs. Each trip was impactful in different ways. She went to the Philippines and Sierra Leone as part of Creative Inquiry. In the Philippines, she helped design a curriculum that would teach women how to fight local food insecurity. In Sierra Leone, she worked with a small group of students to use conversational AI to give healthcare workers better access to information. Patel spent the summer of 2024 in Barcelona, taking a class with other Computer Science and Business honors program students and interning at an AI company where she analyzed data on consumer behavior.
Patel is also a Clare Booth Luce research scholar. CBL scholars are high-achieving women undergraduates who study in the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The program supports these women scholars in their research for up to two years. Patel used her fellowship to gather open-source data, helping to revitalize the Cherokee language through natural language processing.
“The problem with endangered languages is that they don’t have a lot of data, so it’s hard to use NLP techniques to revive them. I found it interesting to solve these challenges where there isn’t a lot of data by using data science,” she said. It was a contrast to her experience in Barcelona, where she had a wealth of data to analyze.
This summer, Patel is staying in the United States, interning in software engineering at Walmart Global Tech. The interdisciplinary CSB program was a good fit for Patel since she has always been interested in business and software engineering. This particular internship was a way to build up her software engineering experience. Her communication business classes were helpful for this internship, she says.
“I did not realize how much communication software engineering required. I have to talk to different teams apart from my own team. I also talk to product managers, and I will need to present all my work at the end of the internship.”
After graduation, Patel hopes to find a software engineering role, but only after she does some more traveling.
“I think Lehigh definitely spoiled me in that sense,” she says. “I really look forward to traveling and exploring different cultures. After my travel, I’ll look for a software engineering role.”