About
I am a Release Engineer at InterSystems, Inc., at our headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our company builds data solutions to unite, analyze and process data across disjointed systems and services.
I studied my Bachelor of Arts at St. Olaf College, where I earned a double major in Computer Science and History. I then earned my Master of Engineering in Computer Science at Cornell University, at the Tech campus in New York City. I graduated from these programs in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
I am originally from Naperville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. I've been interested in computer science since a young age, when I spent plenty of time browsing through System32
and destroying my mom's computer with viruses (not on purpose, I swear). Though my first word was "snow", my second was "dot com". I started officially taking introductory coding courses in high school on Python and web design, and I found I had a knack for it.
Software development has taken me to places I never thought possible as a child. I've used federal supercomputers to optimize compilers for a language from the 1950s, helped virologists pinpoint important proteins in the COVID-19 infection process and built a user interface at the forefront of InterSystems' Docker image distribution process. I feel very lucky to work in a field I've been passionate about my whole life. Software development demands constant trial and error, usually with no obvious solutions or paths to success, and I thrive on iteratively pursuing these solutions.
In addition to computer science, I've always been very interested in history and political science. I love staring at maps and scouring Wikipedia articles on the gunpowder empires. My favorite games as a kid were Civilization III and IV, and I've spent an absurd amount of hours playing Europa Universalis IV in recent years. Understanding the past is imperative to understanding the present, and I find that studying history reveals some very intriguing (and uncomfortable) insights on modern systems and societies.
In the past few years, I've also delved into teaching. I've worked with hundreds of students from eighth graders to senior citizens. At St. Olaf, I was a grader, tutor, Supplemental Instruction (SI) Leader, and SI Mentor of the Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Department. I tutored students one-on-one, provided detailed feedback on homework assignments, taught evening classes and managed fellow Instructors. I later worked for Inspirit AI, where I taught several cohorts of high schoolers the fundamentals of Python and machine learning. Finally, for a research project at Cornell, I taught a course on technological literacy at the Roosevelt Island Senior Center, an experience later highlighted during the graduation commencement speech. I love teaching computer science, which serves to introduce people to a curious new field while also contextualizing the increasingly computerized world around us.