NCCC Success Story
Yang Sherpa
Lab Science Technology
Research Intern
Where are you from?
NYC, Queens.
What is your degree program?
Lab Science Technology AAS.
What is your primary communication style – ASL, spoken English, both, or another language?
Both.
Tell us the date of your co-op/internship, your position title, and the company you worked for:
Date: May 18 to July 26 2025. Position title: Research Intern. Company: North Carolina State University Lab.
What was your role and what kinds of projects or tasks did you work on during your co-op/internship?
My role was to help mentor/PI with the research project. I was involved in training algorithm to segment and track cancer cells, light coding on Matlab using python as well as finding information from published research articles on image segmentation to help with our project.
How did your experience at RIT/NTID prepare you for this job?
Outside my lab work, we had other projects as well as undergraduate research symposium to present our research poster. Having experienced creating research poster and presenting during NTID research fair was helpful to me as I was familiar with the process due to my experience at NTID research fair. One of my responsibilities was to read and find information from scientific research article. My classes at NTID has prepared me when it comes to reading and picking important information from scientific journal articles. I was able to gain lots of wet lab experience at NTID but my lab work was solely dry lab.
Choose 3 to 5 other questions to respond to. Please include as much information as you can!
What skills did you gain or strengthen during your time at the company?
I got to learn about the behind the scenes that goes into training algorithm as well as AI. I also gained knowledge about performing quantitative and qualitative analysis using microscopy tools.
How did you communicate with your coworkers and supervisors (e.g., ASL, speech, writing, texting, etc.)?
I communicated with my coworkers by speech. At times I also used speech to text during long meetings. ASL interpreter was also provided to me during noisy events.
Was there a moment when effective communication made a big difference in your success on the job?
Since the concepts used in lab work was new to me, it was integral that I fully understood everything being said by my PI. During that time, captioning was my best mate. Without it, I wouldn’t have missed out a whole bunch of information. So, I would say effective communication made a big difference in the success of my job. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to continue my work.
What accessibility tools or technology were most helpful to you at work (e.g., visual alerts, CART, captioned training videos, etc.)? Captioning app on phone plus CART.
Did your employer provide accommodations proactively, or did you request them? What was that process like?
They provided the accommodations proactively and made sure to confirm with me the type of accommodations I wanted based on the event happening.