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Possessing a willingness to step out of her comfort zone has given international student Tennille Eremas a taste of research and an opportunity to experience a new way of learning.

Eremas is one of eight members of the fourth class of Future Innovators of America, which is chosen by the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering at ����Ӱ��. Recipients are awarded $5,000 with $4,500 as a stipend and $500 to cover the cost of lab supplies or travel to disseminate the results of their project.   

The fellowships were created to provide unique research opportunities for undergraduate students in the college. Any student is eligible to apply as long as they are attending full time and have a GPA of 3.0 or higher. Application deadline was Nov. 5.   

Each student worked with a potential project mentor, who must be a faculty or research staff member, to develop and submit a research plan that entails learning by doing.

Eremas came to SDSU in August 2024 with about 50 STEM majors from Papua New Guinea, an island nation north of Australia. An inaugural class of 30 students arrived at SDSU in August 2023 from the English-speaking nation. A group of 13 students came this school year. She said there are currently 92 Papua New Guinea students at SDSU.

Uncle spurs her computer interest

“I come from a country where we don’t have a lot of resources in terms of technology,” but her uncle does computer repair.

She remembers watching him and playing video games as a 14-year-old. “That’s where my interest began.” In high school she did a little bit of web development. It unlocked a new world to her. “Once you learn how to code, and have a laptop and an internet connection, you can do amazing things.”  

Coming to America, and SDSU in particular, meant a lot of adjustments. Eremas choose to tackle another adjustment by getting involved in research.

“I learned a lot from my research experience. I had to learn a different approach to learning in general. In class you are given something, and you have to learn it. Here I was given an assignment and never knew anything about it,” she said.

Python paves way for converting data

For her Future Innovator project, Eremas worked under associate professor Kwanghee Won and Sungyong Jung, head of the McComish Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, on a surface water monitoring project. She created sensor models that converted raw measurements from multiple sensors (ultraviolet-LED, photodiode and electrochemical sensor) into water contamination estimates, along with using a machine learning algorithm to calibrate the recorded measurements from the sensor.

Her work was a piece of graduate student Moditha Reddy’s computer science doctoral project.

The aim of the project is to create a more accurate means of estimating contaminant levels in surface water.

The work required Eremas to learn Python computer language. “I couldn’t learn it and then attack the problem. I had to learn it while attacking the problem.”

She also needed to learn to ask questions. “Sometimes I would spend a week on a problem because I didn’t know the answer. Learning how to communicate with lab members and know it’s OK to ask questions and ask for help and advice is a big part of what I learned as well.”

Using python, linear regression and data manipulation, Eremas was able to convert the data into water contaminant readings .

The title of Reddy’s project is "Development of Novel Sensor System for Water Quality Analysis in Agricultural Watersheds."

Getting out of comfort zone

Eremas said she “enjoyed learning new concepts and learning how to learn differently. I also enjoyed that I was contributing something that was meaningful and learning something I wouldn’t be able to learn in the classroom.”

She also was happy to discover she enjoyed manipulating data to get the data she wanted and learning how there can be bias in data and how to work with a team to determine if data is clean. She also learned skills like communicating with researchers and how to tackle new ideas, complex math data and new programming data.

Eremas said the transition from being a high school student in Papua New Guinea to a college student in South Dakota was tough at first.

The weather was completely different, the education system was pretty different and the pace of life was faster. However, Eremas was determined to not hole up in her room in Waneta Hall.

“I made it a point to talk to people, talking to professors. I put myself into clubs and research opportunities to get out of my comfort zone. Now I’m a lot more comfortable,” said Eremas, who in her second year at Waneta Hall is now a community assistant. She also is secretary of the Papua New Guinea student association.

Eremas is to graduate in May 2028 and would like to follow that with a master’s degree. However, she also wants to get experience outside of academia.