Michael Hobson, a Computer Science teacher from Centennial High School in Howard County, Maryland, was our Summer Teacher Extern for the summer of 2024. The Teacher Externship program with Howard County Public School System is a unique professional development opportunity connecting the classroom to the workplace.

Michael shares how he will extract from his insights gained to further help his students succeed:

This summer with BI&A has provided me invaluable experience with the software industry, which will benefit my students as I prepare them to participate in it.

Before this externship, I completed an online course in working with large language models (LLMs) and vector databases. Using this technical understanding, I worked with a development team that included college interns tasked with creating an LLM agent to select tools for providing responses from relevant documents based on user subscriptions.

Once the agile development process was modeled by a BI&A employee, I served as an assistant scrum master, helping interns set goals and monitor their progress, and connecting them with resources for solving problems. I gained an appreciation for the different contributions of each member of a development team – including my own, which tended toward “soft skills” (communication, morale, team-building) that proved vital for keeping project requirements in sight. It is easy to miss the forest for the trees!

In high school academia, computer science students rarely develop projects for multiple users. This was such a critical aspect of our project that I am committed to helping my students think through privacy and security issues in multi-user environments.

Additionally, I wrote a whitepaper on how an LLM might improve one of BI&A’s in-house workflows, proposing a chain of tools for accomplishing this. In speaking with employees to gather requirements for a prototype, I gained an appreciation for AI’s potential to contribute thoroughness and reliability to human endeavors, allowing developers to spend more time on mission-critical projects. Our society often worries about AI replacing people; I’m grateful that I will be able to explain to my students that I have seen real employees seeking to harness AI as a tool that can allow them to focus on what matters most.

Most importantly, I have been inspired by so many BI&A professionals who approach technology as more than a set of skills to learn and apply. Instead, it is a way of thinking that continually adopts new tools, which in turn opens up new fields of opportunities. I return to school with a renewed commitment to shifting the culture of my classroom from “This curriculum will prepare you for your college / career” to “How is the field of computer science advancing, and how can you participate?”