May 27, 2021

Somehow, someway, 14 months at home have already passed. I'm a junior* now, though I still feel completely like a freshman (perhaps because we haven't been on campus since 2/3 through our first year). Y'all remember the first stage of quarantine, when we were still drawing tomatoes and baking batch after batch of bread? Since then, it feels like time has distorted—each day melts into the next, with few defining boundaries. Still, here are some things that happened:

I worked on some really cool projects.

1. My team and I made some major advancements with **Wave Learning Festival** this semester. We celebrated our 1-year anniversary (!), strengthened our free tutoring platform (which now sees waves of students daily), got funded, closely supported two in-need schools, launched a podcast, improved our technical backend, promoted a new COO, and more. We're only at the beginning of our journey, with big, big dreams ahead of us.

This work has pushed me, more than anything else I've ever taken on, to grow and reflect. It's kept me up at night and brought me so much joy. I'll save the monologue for another post, but I do want to say a huge thank-you to every single volunteer for making our mission a reality and to the Harvard iLab, Overdeck Foundation, and individual adult mentors for standing with us.

A few faces of the Wave team at our summer kickoff!

2. I started research in Professor Venkatesh Murthy's computational neuroscience lab. I have to admit that I've never spent so much time thinking about ants, but there's some surprisingly** fascinating science here. Special shoutout to Dong Hur, a graduating student in our group, for being a great teacher. I've already learned so much about data visualization, math, and physics, and can't wait to continue contributing to the project.

One of many figures created modeling ant behavior.

3. I worked on a short-term project at Universidad Mayor (in Chile, virtually) through Harvard DRCLAS's winternship program. I researched gendered differences in intergenerational mobility of education, wealth, and opportunity across Latin American countries. It was the perfect combination of a bunch of my interests: education, women's empowerment, and economics. It's always exciting when learnings from different parts of your life come together, and that happened here: in my reading and writing, I found myself incorporating concepts from the Microeconomics course I took last fall AND research around educational equity from my work at Wave. Cool stuff. I also refreshed my rusty español.

4. The WECode team and I organized and ran an incredible 3-day online conference for 1100 attendees globally, celebrating women trailblazing innovation in technology. My favorite talks were by Rana el Kaliouby and Jane Dunlevie, and I personally got to moderate a super cool research panel with Alix Lacoste, Finale Doshi-Velez, Marynel Vázquez, and Leslie Kaelbling.

The 14 faces behind the Harvard WECode Conference. Look at these absolute cuties :)

5. I led my fantastic CBE consulting team in taking on one of the most challenging cases I've seen yet. Historically, I've been pretty skeptical about the value of college consulting groups, but I genuinely think we delivered some pretty cool stuff*** this semester. Still, I'm leaving the club to turn to more personally interesting endeavors.

Another team picture (slightly sabotaged by Zoom video flip), because look at these amazing smiles.

6. I redid my personal website (mostly to share my art, but also because the one I built in high school was getting pretty clunky).

I also learned so much through independent exploration!

The best part about time off from school was the amount of unstructured time I had to indulge in all my independent interests. I'm the kind of person who wants to try everything after seeing it done once, and rather than suppressing those curiosities to get my problem sets done, I got to just follow them.

• I learned how to draw on a tablet. I also learned how to animate on Procreate.
• I learned how to edit photos on Adobe Lightroom (shoutout to Harvard for providing us free CC subscriptions). Never going back to the random internet apps I used before.
• I tried new things with art, but I'll save elaborations for later.