BOARDING PASS Class: Aerospace Engineering + Mathematics

Nikhil Adapala

Software, robotics, and flight. Student pilot working toward a Private Pilot's License.

AUSAustin, TX

B.S.Spring 2029

CarrierUT Austin

GPA4.00

RatingsPPL (est.), CSWA, PCPP

Work eligibilityU.S., no restriction

Experience

The City of Austin, I.T. Division — Software Development Intern Summer 2025

Austin, TX

Architected the React front end for TradeRoots, a full-stack skill-exchange platform for the Austin community.
Engineered messaging and reviews using React, Node.js, REST APIs, and SQL for the full trade workflow.
Directed a 5-person engineering team through the full build cycle, winning the 2025 Entrepreneurship Award.

HearingTracker — Software Development Intern Spring 2024 – Summer 2025

Remote

Designed a SQL schema managing 500+ hearing aid models across 12 brands with 10+ spec fields each.
Built a React/Node.js app serving personalized recommendations to 30,000+ users from 20+ filter criteria.
Integrated Phonak and Oticon APIs to pull live device specs and pricing into the recommendation engine.

StarForge — Procedural 3D space engineSummer 2026

Built a procedural 3D space engine, generating full star systems of numerous worlds from one seed.
Solved floating-point drift on 47,000-unit planets with dynamic origin recentering every 3,000 units.
Architected multithreaded terrain streaming holding ~100K scatter instances in view at any altitude.

Multimodal Deep Learning for Financial Market PredictionSummer 2025

Led a peer-reviewed study benchmarking six architectures for equity price forecasting.
Cut forecast error 34% and doubled R² to 0.68 by fusing market data with FinBERT sentiment signals.
Designed a custom hybrid architecture and ran ablations isolating top predictive feature contributors.

5 D.O.F. Robotic HandSummer 2026

Designed and 3D-printed a robotic hand, modeling all finger assemblies in SolidWorks.
Programmed an Arduino to independently actuate 5 servos via a custom serial protocol.
Built two Python pipelines for real-time gesture recognition and speech-driven ASL fingerspelling.

N-Body Orbital Mechanics SimulatorSummer 2026

Built a real-time, 2,400-line N-body gravitational simulator in vanilla JavaScript and Three.js.
Implemented a symplectic leapfrog integrator conserving orbital energy indefinitely at 60 FPS.
Modeled tidal disruption and momentum-conserving mergers with custom GLSL shaders.

Private Pilot's License (PPL)Fall 2026 (estimated)

Certified SolidWorks Associate (CSWA)Summer 2026

Certified Professional Python Programmer (PCPP)Summer 2025

Languages: Python, Java, C++, JavaScript, C#, R, SQL, HTML/CSS
Libraries & frameworks: TensorFlow/Keras, Keras Tuner, scikit-learn, pandas, NumPy, MediaPipe, OpenCV, React.js, Node.js, REST APIs, Google APIs, Firebase, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Airtable
Applications & tools: SolidWorks, MATLAB, Excel, Arduino IDE, Git, Figma, 3D Printing, Soldering
Interests: Piloting, basketball, running, sports, programming, mathematics, learning, traveling, geography