Connecting the Dots: Our Scholar Mersiha in Dayton — Bosnia & Herzegovina Futures Foundation

If you are interested in learning and educating yourself then in your dictionary there is no words such as „too far“. Our scholarship recipient Mersiha Ćeranić had this amazing opportunity to spend two weeks of internship in Dayton, USA. You may think that she is just lucky, but… Hmm.

If you want to discover how she connected the dots between Mentorship program in BH Futures Foundation and this internship in America, please scroll down to read her story!

„Hello everyone! My name is Mersiha Ćeranić and I was doing my internship at University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI), in the field of Machine learning and Deep learning. I am very happy because I made a great connection between internship in the USA, and my Mentorship program in Bosnia and Herzegovina Futures Foundation. All the knowledge I adopted at UDRI will fit perfectly in mentorship process.

Interns from BiH with Americans who made this internship happen

This internship was organised by Dayton Sister City Committee from Dayton, and Intera Technology park from Mostar with the help of City of Dayton. At first day of my Internship I met my great mentor Joshua Gold, Team Lead/System Architect, Software Systems/Software & Sensor Systems Division in UDRI. He introduced me UDRI environment, and where I will spend my next two weeks of internship. After researching more about Machine Learning libraries, with the help of my mentor, I started researching about TensorFlow and Keras, and Azure ML studio. TensorFlow is the second machine learning framework that Google created and used to design, build, and train deep learning models. After researching of this library, I started to do small project of recognition of picture. I explained to my mentor that I’m still new in this field, but this is where I want to upgrade myself.

Beside my work at the UDRI, all the six interns with our coordinators Ana Bogdanović and Gorana Ćorić had a lot of activities after 5 pm (end time of our internships). I am so happy that I was able to feel a little bit of American lifestyle through all these activities. One day was reserved for visit of National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton. This is the second biggest museum of this type in the USA. I was so amazed with all planes from World War I, World War II, Cold War, Presidential planes, and many more. There is also a space area where the visitors can see rocket, space food, and even a rock from the moon.

One of the things on my ‘’To-Do list while in the USA’’ was the baseball game. And even I don’t completely understand the rules of this game, I enjoyed very much that night. Trivia (American quiz in the local tavern) and karaoke was funny part lately that night. Momentous part of this trip was visit of the tomb of the brothers Wright - two American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world’s first successful airplane.

As a lifelong learner, I love the opportunities it brings to learn new skills, meet new people, be involved in new environments. I also like the opportunities it brings that open new doors to things and people I would maybe never have considered otherwise. I am very grateful for every good chance I can use for development of myself and my environment. And I am pretty sure I don’t want to miss any of these chances. With this article I want to encourage young people to do international internships, and to show them benefits of this program and how important is to make great connections all over the world. I will remember this priceless experience as one of the best periods of my life, filled with great memories, new friendships, a lot of new knowledge and many new ideas about future projects.”