**Title**: Energy in the North - Jenae Matson
**Date**: October 16, 2024
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Jenae Matson

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;08;09 [Jenae Matson] I feel like anyone you ask here about finding data, they're like, God, we need some better way to do this.

00;00;08;09 - 00;00;14;22 [Amanda Byrd] This week on Energy in the North, we speak with Jennie Mattson, a summer intern in the ten week National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at the the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Jenae is from Nome, is in her junior year and a computer science major at UAF. Her internship is centered around collecting, arranging and storing large data sets for ASAP researchers.

00;00;30;11 - 00;00;42;05 [Jenae Matson] One of the big problems here is all of the data that people produce in all of their many projects is all over the place in Google drives and random laptops and stuff. So trying to find that stuff is kind of hard. I feel like anyone you ask here about finding data, they're like, God, we need some better way to do this. So this data catalog
is supposed to be kind of the solution for that. Just like a simple central place where all the researchers put their stuff and anyone else can go in and find it.

00;01;10;07 - 00;01;22;13 [Amanda Byrd] In order to get started, Jenae conducted interviews with researchers on their data sets, how they wanted to use them and how they would like to access them in the future. She used a software development tool called User Stories. Essentially what people want in using a data set.

00;01;25;12 - 00;01;29;19 [Jenae Matson] Figured out what people want, and then making that happen. So I had to learn a lot about the software that we're using called C-KAN C-KAN making it specific and specialized for a sub. So figuring out how to make those happen, so we kind of have it sectioned into two big chunks. There's like the public stuff that ACEP has produced and we want people to see and then kind of a more internal chunk of, you know, these are data sets that ACEP researchers can use. They aren't ours, but we want to have a central place for ACEP people to be able to find them.

00;02;03;08 - 00;02;05;20 [Amanda Byrd] Why data? Why are you interested in data?

00;02;05;22 - 00;02;06;22 [Jenae Matson] Before this, I worked for a while at Bering Air, of the local airlines in Nome. The main thing I went there to work on was a system to organize old aircraft maintenance records, it's kind of an older company, they've got like a whole bunch of papers in boxes. I was basically putting those on to an Excel spreadsheet to make them more organized. But thinking about those systems of how how to organize data and make it more usable,
that job kind of sparked an interest in that data management stuff for me. So then looking at
the internship project for this summer, the data librarian position was immediately like, Hey, I've kind of done that before. That's cool. So that's what really drew me into the ACEP internship was the specific project. You know, in computer science, there's like all sorts of different specialties you can kind of go into. And I'm kind of keeping my options open on that. But data management is kind of one field that's that's drawn me in more.

00;03;09;05 - 00;03;12;18 [Amanda Byrd] I'm glad we have people like you. Data management is not my strong suit.

00;03;12;18 - 00;03;21;09 [Jenae Matson] Lke I'm not an engineer or like a scientist or anything like that, but I want to be able to use my computer science skills to like, support those and make it easier for those to happen, make them more organized,

00;03;26;02 - 00;03;30;25 [Amanda Byrd] Data is so important and you were able to work with Liz Dobbins on the data team.

00;03;30;26 - 00;03;33;00 [Jenae Matson] It's been especially nice being able to see an older woman in STEM because, you know, kind of in computer science, you know, all of my professors are kind of old white men.

00;03;42;05 - 00;03;52;07 [Amanda Byrd] Jenae Matson is an undergraduate intern at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power at UAF. Find this story and more information about ACEP at uaf.edu/acep.