Ian Curtis

CV

For those looking to find some more details on what I've done professionally, see below. If you'd prefer to see them in a different format, you might be interested in my LinkedIn profile.

Education

I currently am a senior at Grand Valley State University (Allendale, MI) looking to obtain a major in Statistics and French as well as a minor in Mathematics and Psychology. Beyond college, I also have a Python Developer Certificate from Zero to Mastery Academy (2021) and a high school diploma from Grandville High School (2019).

Following my undergraduate programs, I plan to continue my education with a Master's degree in Data Science & Analytics.

Professional Experience

I currently work part time at ALDI, U.S., where I have been since July 2019. I also work part time for the GVSU Libraries' Open Educational Resources (OER) department (since 2021) as an editorial assistant promoting OER and converting existing textbooks to accessible online editions (using PreTeXt and Pressbooks).

In the past I have had positions at CoreLife Eatery: Team Member from 2017-2018 and Lead Grill Cook from 2018-2019. Earlier than that, I was an umpire for local Little League baseball games.

Community Experience

I currently serve as the President of the GVSU French Club, Les Francophiles (elected in 2020). I am also a member of the GVSU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences's Student Advisory Committee. Outside of school, I currently lead a recycling program at my local ALDI store and am in the process of proposing a recycling program nationwide.

In the past, I served as a tour guide (2019-2020) and a Freshman mentor (2020) for the GVSU Honors College. In high school, I was the president of the local chapter of the National Honor Society.

Research Experience

At GVSU, I participated in three research programs: Library Summer Scholars (Humanities, mentor: Amber Dierking), Student Summer Scholars (Humanities, mentor: Dr. David Eick), and Undergraduate Reserach Assistant (Humanities, under Dr. David Eick). I also conducted an original project for my Honors Senior Project (Computer Science, mentor: Dr. Erin Carrier). You may read more about these projects in the section titled Projects and Publications.

On the side, as casual research projects, I like to analyze my baseball card collection, record my Aldi perfomance data, and experiment with the Spotify API.

Publications and Projects

I have published several pieces on the French Encyclopédie: An annotated bibliography, a website housing select scholary sources, an essay on plagiarism of the plates, and a collaboration with Drs. David Eick and Gretchen Galbraith on their RTTP game.

I also created a recommendation algorithm for Spotify users (with future research potential) and recently wrote an introduction to Git, GitHub, and the command line. For a final project for the Grand Valley graduate course on data mining (CIS 635) I performed an introductory exploratory analysis on predicting hit distance for MLB players.

Presentations

I have presented my research at the GVSU Student Scholars Day, once with a recorded poster presentation (2020) and once with an in-person poster presentation (2021). In November of 2022, I gave a presenation to the West Michigan R User Group on the R package `baseballr`. The files for that presentation can be found on my GitHub page and on a corresponding webpage.

Recently, I was featured on the podcast College Matters hosted by Venkat Raman where I discuss my time and experience at Grand Valley as well as my research projects.

Professional and Scholarly Associations

Since 2019, I have been a member of the GVSU Honors College. I am also a member of Phi Kappa Phi (active member since 2021), Pi Delta Phi (French Honor Society, inducted 2022), and Psi Chi (Psychology Honor Society, inducted 2022).

Languages

I am a native speaker of English and am working to obtain a bachelor's degree in French (I consider myself around the Advanced level).

When it comes to programming languages, I have the most experience with Python, R, and PreTeXt but also know a decent amount of HTML, CSS, and LaTeX. With these latter three and a handful of other langauges / databases, I try to learn as I go.

Awards and Honors

In 2019, I was the recipient of the I Am GV Service Award (2019) and in 2022, the Excellence in a Discipline Award for French. In addition, my 2021 summer reserach project was granted the Les and Jackie (Ott) Stiner Fellowship in Historical and Humanistic Studies and I received the title of Stiner Scholar.

Activities

In my free time, I usually am doing something related to music, whether it be composing, writing, recording, or playing an instrument. I can play piano and violin and have a few various instruments I am mediocre at. I am a member of the GVSU Symphony Orchestra and was also a part of the symphony orchestra in high school.

Over the years I have written and recorded my own original songs. For more details see my music page.