Punter Jackson Hubbard made the most of his summer balancing two opportunities in the tech industry on top of training for the 2019 season. The junior from Dallas, Texas, recounted his summer in Durham, N.C. in his own words.
Going into this summer, I set a goal for myself to get a clearer picture of what I wanted to do as a career. I knew that I was passionate about tech, but was unsure of which specific career I would like to pursue in the technology sector. By working two jobs, networking with technology professionals and former Duke football players, and asking lots of questions, I began to figure out what I am passionate about.
After waking up each morning to workout at 6:00, I finished football around 8:45, got to my internship by 9:15 and worked there until 4:00, and then made my way to my second job from 4:00 to 6:30. Afterwards, I went to our team dinner, and then a couple days a week I worked on my punting. This made my days pretty full, but I wouldn't want it any other way. Although I was busy, I learned to maximize my time to provide the most development as possible, as both a football player and future professional.
I interned with a program on campus called Data+, an initiative sponsored by the Rhodes Information Institute. Data+ offers Duke students a 10-week summer research internship where we work on specific project teams in different fields of data science. Given my love for sports, I applied for a project on Basketball Analytics that focused on using player-tracking data to model and visualize Duke Basketball games. My partner and I generated several different kinds of visualizations to summarize a basketball game. We also built an interactive web application that automatically generates and compares each of these graphs for any Duke basketball game. If you want to check out the app we made, please go to: tinyurl.com/duke-bball-viz. (the app works best on a computer in full screen mode).
Moving forward, I am interested in how my Data+ project applies to our football team, as we also have cameras capable of similar player-tracking mechanisms. I plan on implementing what I learned and using the data we already have available from our football practices and games.
In addition to my internship, I also worked at the Innovation Co-Lab on campus for about 10 hours a week at night. The Co-Lab is a studio that has over 80 3D printers, several laser cutters, and a lot of other machinery for designing and engineering models. I was in charge of running the professional-grade printing studio, where I printed about 40 jobs a month on high-end 3D printers. Most of these jobs were for researchers, labs, and doctors from Duke Hospital. Some of the most interesting jobs I worked on were a 3D printed replica of a heart for a cardiologist, as well as a replica of a brain for a neurosurgeon. Both of these doctors wanted to have a life size model of their patient's organs in order to visualize their upcoming surgeries.
My coworkers and I also 3D printed a skull, which was a project we worked on with a representative of a foreign government (I cannot provide the exact details). This country's Prime Minister died in the 18th century and was then mummified. The mummy was recently dug up and it was discovered that there was a previously unknown bullet wound in his head. In order to document this, they scanned the skull of the mummy and sent that file with the representative to Duke in order to figure out how to print it. A couple weeks later, we gave the government representative a life size print of the mummy's head that clearly shows the bullet's path, which is now in a museum helping rewrite the history that had been covered up.
When the freshmen football student-athletes got to campus, they participated in their own orientation program since the general study body orientation program is during fall camp. One afternoon of their program, my teammates came to the Co-Lab, where I led a workshop and tour for them. I showed them how to use the 3D printers and the laser cutters, and they all walked away with their own 3D printed design. They also had a chance to use our Virtual Reality room, where they played a variety of video games in 360-degree virtual reality. I also was able to show representatives from the ACC affiliated bowl games around the Co-Lab as a way to showcase what distinguishes Duke from other universities.
It was an amazing summer full of very long days but looking back I have learned more about myself, as well as my interests, than I ever could have asked for. Moving into the fall, I am looking forward to a successful football season. In between classes, practices and games, I am planning on applying for internships for this upcoming summer in Software Engineering and Data Science. I am very thankful for the Data+ program and the Innovation Co-Lab for the opportunities I was given this past summer and am especially grateful for all that Duke Football has done to prepare me on and off the field.
