More Reasons Why CS Kids are Awesome
The school year is wrapping up alarmingly quickly, seniors are cleaning out their apartments, and underclassmen are scrambling for internships. At least, some are scrambling. All I ever write about is the computer science department, but that’s mainly due to all of the fantastic students and their incredible projects. This summer I have friends working at big-name companies, developing for tiny startups, and doing cutting-edge research. It’s great to be a part of a community that is so involved and passionate about what they do, so for your reading pleasure, and in no particular order, I present:
AN ASSORTMENT OF COOL COMP SCI KIDS’ SUMMER PLANS
I met Jonathan Wilde in my orientation group. He had worked at a startup in San Francisco for a year in high school, and made jokes about JavaScript and Ubuntu that I didn’t understand. Now he’s heading back to the Bay for his second year at Mozilla, where he’ll be working on Firefox’s Mobile User Interfaces team, potentially doing Firefox for Windows 8. I understand closer to 85% of what he says now.
Tony Cannistra is a biology/comp-sci double major; he’ll be doing research at Tufts with Ben Hescott. Recently, Ben developed a new way to calculate distance between points on a graph, so Tony will be investigating applications for this new metric in protein-protein interaction networks. He’s also scoping out non-biological data, from places like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp, to see how the relatedness metric applies to human networks. He’ll probably have written a paper by the end of summer.
Will Clarkson is the kind of kid who thinks, “you know what would be cool? A terminal that prints ASCII art of my professors every time you open it,” and then goes and learns Ruby and makes it happen. That kind of attitude is probably why he’s working at Microsoft this summer, developing Windows 8 apps with a team of students.
Michael James is heading off to San Francisco to work at a Nomic, a 15-person startup creating a street network of local businesses. It’s a way for small companies to network and create “a healthier society and a better functioning economy”. In his free time, Michael takes beautiful photos and hacks web servers.
Amadou Crookes is heading off to the big city to work at Google’s NYC office. He’ll be creating a testing interface for the speech recognition team, doing work with natural language processing. He’s also the creator of iJumbo, the fantastic Tufts app for iPhone and Android. Amadou has rad taste in pants.
There are a couple of guys working in security: Brendan Conron is doing cyber security for Pegasystems when he’s not developing apps and building up the startup community at Tufts, and Dennis Chen will be researching two new functional programming languages with MIT Lincoln Labs that are specifically designed to control information flow: they’re written with explicit support for confidentiality.
When I asked Cyrus what he was doing this summer, I received the following email:
Hi Marcella,
I have the honor of working an internship for NASA this summer. I got the job by winning a contest from a box of cheerios. I plan to fly down to Florida to help the US government hack the Chinese space program's servers in an attempt to rescue several US civilian and military personnel from the Chinese international space prison. While there, I hope to stow away on a classified manned mars mission, reprogram the rocket to fly out of the solar system, and start a new life of adventure in deep space.
Sincerely,
Cyrus Cousins
A day later, I got this update:
Dear Marcella,
After sending my previous email over an unencrypted telnet connection, the CIA intercepted the bits with a beta class packet sniffing dog, and my employment offer at NASA has ceased. I have managed to erase most of my web presence with a self replicating perl script, and the government seems to be off my tail. I recently contacted Microsoft corporation, and they've agreed to employ me based on my ability to traverse linked lists in O(n) time. To answer your previous questions about my new employer:
I am working for Microsoft Corporation in Cambridge. I got the job after 7 fun interviews (phone, web, and in person) where I got to answer cool questions about data structures. I accidentally also started a startup centered around automated music analysis, so I guess I should probably work there in my spare time (12 hour work days, woohoo!) I run a pretty cool website at www.cyruscousinspizza.com, feel free to link to it in your article.
Lols,
Cyrus
I did not make this up.
I’ll actually be joining Amadou in New York. I’m on the Double-Click for Publishers team, which is a part of Google’s advertising network, writing a client alert system. I’m planning in keeping up the blog-writing all summer, so look forward to posts about take-out food, Google intern life, and our attempts to convince everybody at Tufts to road-trip to NYC.
Want to talk to one of these people? Think it's cool that everyone in this list is a sophomore? Have other questions about CS or engineering life at Tufts? Comment here or tweet at me (@marsella_h) and I’ll hook you up.