Raaid Iqbal is a Carleton College Class of 2027 student studying Computer Science with substantial work in statistics and software engineering. His research interests focus on reliable software systems, applied AI, and how evaluation, observability, and user feedback can be used to make technical tools more useful and robust.

Previous research experience: I have worked as an undergraduate research assistant at Carleton and previously participated in the UC Santa Cruz Science Internship Program. My engineering work has also pushed me toward research-style questions: at Tabs I worked on an MCP server, tool-response efficiency, observability, evaluations, and product usage metrics. In a campus research setting, I would be most interested in building evaluation pipelines, analyzing system behavior, and testing how different design choices affect performance.

How I got started: I got started by building things first and then becoming curious about why some approaches worked better than others. That made faculty research feel like a natural extension of software engineering. I approached a professor after developing enough technical confidence to contribute to a concrete piece of a project.

Open to being contacted: Maybe, ask me first

Preferred contact: LinkedIn

Advice/notes: computer science research; AI evaluation; software engineering; developer tools; research engineering; Git and coding workflows; finding a CS faculty mentor; internships versus academic research; turning product questions into research questions

Location

Northfield

Northfield, MN 55057, USA