Hey there! I'm Nicholas Ayat, a Bay Area native and Computer Science student at UC Santa Cruz. When I'm not debugging code or training machine learning models, you might find me hiking the Santa Cruz mountains or composing music.

I'm on track to finish my CS degree a year early by June 2026, while balancing my passion projects with coursework. I'm excited to share that I'll be joining Jefferies in New York as a Risk Technology Intern for Summer 2025, where I'll be working on their enterprise risk platform and getting hands-on with cloud technologies and financial analytics.

My tech journey started with a love for problem-solving that evolved into building projects that would deepen my knowledge of CS and its fundamentals. During my time at Sonoma State, I developed a predictive analytics system that helped identify at-risk students, and my personal project NickelPal combines my interests in finance and AI through an automated trading platform.

I'm particularly drawn to projects that bridge technical challenges with practical applications—whether that's visualizing pathfinding algorithms to help fellow CS students or optimizing trading strategies through machine learning. I'm happy to know that I've found my sweet spot at the intersection of data science, software engineering, and financial technology.

Feel free to check out my projects and drop me a line if you want to chat tech, finance, or the best food in the Bay!