Bern Switzerland 2022

Part of my Europe 2022 backpacking trip

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UCSC Frisbee 2024

Full extension Layout

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Idyllwild 2023

Hiking to Suicide Rock in San Jacinto Wilderness

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Munich Germany 2022

Part of my Europe 2022 backpacking trip

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Prague Czech Republic

Part of my Europe 2022 backpacking trip

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San Bernardino Peak

Summited Mount San Bernardino, 10,649 feet

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About Me

Hello, I'm Peter Van Esch, currently in my senior year at the University of California, Santa Cruz, majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics. I have a deep passion for learning and problem-solving, particularly in algorithms, mathematics, and physics. I'm eager to pursue full-time opportunities (or internships) starting in the summer of 2025.

Summer Fellowship

I’m excited to announce that I’m a fellow in the 2024 Headstarter AI Fellowship. Over the course of this 7-week program, I am working on five AI-driven projects with the goal of launching products that can reach 1,000+ users. This fellowship is focused on building practical skills and advancing towards becoming a "top 1% software engineer."

My Mobile App: Findr

I co-developed an iOS app called Findr with Devin Studdard using SwiftUI. Initially designed in Figma, we quickly transitioned to development, integrating Firebase for backend data storage. Findr allows users to recreate and share each other's posts through a unique photo challenge, utilizing Apple’s camera and location services. We implemented Google Authentication for seamless user sign-in. Although Findr is fully functional and can support multiple users, it is not yet available on any platform.

Recreating a four century old experiment

Johannes Kepler was able to find the orbit of Earth and Mars with only his wits and recorded directions of Mars. With his clever thinking he was able to build the orbits by carfully selecting certain observations. Now a simple modern redintion, using observation data from the past century.

NutriCards: Ingredients in flash, Health at a glance

One of my recent projects as part of the Headstarter AI Fellowship is Nutricards. Built using OpenAI, Firebase, Stripe, and Clerk, Nutricards is a monthly subscription service that generates personalized recipes for subscribers, providing a detailed nutritional breakdown of each ingredient. This project integrates AI-driven recipe creation with a seamless user experience and secure payment processing.

Redlands Corners

A fun website I made using Vue, designed for my hometown of Redlands CA. It is a Wordle inspired game where the user has to find the daily local Redlands house in five attempts.

Geeking out over Celestial Mechanics

This project, built with Three.js, currently models the solar system and simulates basic orbital mechanics. The long-term goal is to allow users to modify the six orbital elements of celestial bodies and observe how these changes affect the simulation in real-time.

Timeline

Here are some acheiments, other notable projects, and previous employments

Deans' Honor Roll

Member of Dean's honor role all but one quarter here at UCSC. Currently have 3.90 GPA

Digit Classifaction Nueral Network

Written in python to aid my Sudoku Solver, this two hidden layer neural network relied on small images of written numbers from the MNIST data set. Using thousands of images for training, the network was able to correctly identify numbers with 84 % accuracy.

Code that writes Youtube Videos

Developed in python, a script that takes celebrity images and names off the web and puts them into a slide show for the audience to rank by favoritism. The script then screen records the slide show to make a final video ready to upload to Youtube.

Finished 3rd in class

Image Classification Vision Transformer written in python for my deep learning final project, this model makes use of transfer learning. Using the VIT-16 from facebook research I froze the layers of the pretrained model, and replaced the head with my own linear layers to classify 1000 images making up 100 different classes

RSA Encryption Project

Written in C, using the product of two large primes numbers as the basis for a public and private exponents. Program could create or open text files and images to encrypt and decrypt.

Huffman Encoding Project

Developed in C, implemented stacks, priority queues, linked lists, and binary trees to create Huffman Encoding. Any file could be encoded and decoded dramatically reducing the size of the file

Course Tutor: Stat 131 Introduction to Probability Theory

With great success in Introduction to Probability Theory, I was able to further demonstrate my skills by becoming a course tutor. Similar to my other tutor role, my responsibilities revolved around providing general assistance to students.

Course Tutor: CSE 144 Applied ML

After taking the course in deep learning and tremendously succeeding, I transitioned into being a course tutor. This involved helping students understand course concepts, preparing them for exams and giving guidance on homework.

Enviorment California

Summer job building a campain to expand Marine Protected areas off of California Coast.

Headstarter AI Fellowship

Fellow of the 2024 Headstarter AI Fellowship. A seven week program build an AI project.

Childrens Book?

Since writting my paper on Celestial Mechanics, I have thought a lot about how I can share my knowledge with others. I would love to write a childrens hitory book on the history of our worlds greatest mathematicians and astronomers.

Expanding Findr !

My goal is get my app offically on the app store an get users to play my game.

So much more

There is so much more to me. You might have seen I love Ultimate Frisbee and hiking but I also love other activies like woodworking, running, cliff jumping and cooking!

Observation from an Ancient World

Concpet art for my childrends book from chapter 1

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Hand made chessboard

Built this chessboard summer 2023 out of Walnut and Curly Maple

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Athens Greece 2022

Part of my Europe 2022 backpacking trip

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Aristotle's Shape for the Earth

Concpet art for my childrends book from chapter 2

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Refurbished Capinets

Found some cabinets in horrible shape, and refurbished them in 2023

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Bern Switzerland

Part of my Europe 2022 backpacking trip

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Hippacrus and the Moon

Concpet art for my childrends book from Chapter 3

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Milan Italy

Part of my Europe 2022 backpacking trip

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A Most deligent Observer

Concpet art for my childrends book from Chapter 7

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Paris France

Part of my Europe 2022 backpacking trip

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The Well of Syene

Concpet art for my childrends book from Chapter 4

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Book Cover

Work in Progress Book Cover

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Athens Greecek

Part of my Europe 2022 backpacking trip

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