What I learned by engaging enthusiastically with my courses and seeking connections between and beyond coursework.
ANTH/LING 203: Language in Practice (AU21)
Coming into my first quarter at UW, I had no idea what I wanted to study. Lacking any semblance of a plan, I signed up for my courses just based on what sounded interesting. One of these classes was ANTH/LING 203: Introduction to Anthropological Linguistics. This was my first exposure to linguistics, and to the surprise of my freshman-year self, I loved it. Even now, it remains one of my favorite classes that I've taken at UW. While I wouldn't say that I was necessarily bored by my classes in high school, this was the first time I was actually finding assigned readings to be interesting, rather than a chore.
One of the reasons I was so taken with this class was because of how connected the content was to the world. Instead of the concepts remaining confined to the classroom, we discussed many examples of how they manifested in society. This bled over into my life outside of class as well, and I even began seeing the phenomena we discussed in my own life–evidence of linguistic ideology in social media comments or hedging in the speech of my friends.
Towards the end of the quarter, I began working on my final project for this class. We were required to conduct an ethnography on a "rich point", which refers to a particular usage of language that is the site of tension or change. Half jokingly, I decided to write my paper on the usages of the word "bitch". While I admit I chose this word partly just to see if I could get away with putting "bad words" in my academic work–something that would have been swiftly shut down in my high school courses–I found it to be an unexpectedly interesting topic. Moreover, I found that I really enjoyed the process of writing it. This class taught me the value of engaging enthusiastically with my courses. Not only do I learn better when I am interested in something, but the things that I learn also enrich my perception of the world.
ASTR 101: Gaining Insight into Art (WI22)
The winter quarter of my freshman year, I decided on a whim to take ASTR 101. I had always liked stargazing, and though I knew next to nothing about the actual science of space, I figured it would be interesting to learn. In this class, we briefly covered a wide range of topics, including stars, black holes, and the evolution of galaxies. As expected, I found the class content to be very fascinating. What I didn't expect was how this knowledge would affect other areas of my life outside of the classroom. As I learned more about space, I began to recognize more references to astronomy in art. For example, the song "Saturn" by Sleeping at Last contains the lyric "light carries on endlessly even after death". From lecture, I learned that the universe is expanding. As such, light that has been emitted will never "run out" of space, and will continue to travel forever. "Saturn" uses this fact as a metaphor for carrying on a loved one's memory after they have passed away. This song is very meaningful to me, and I have been listening to it for years, but the things I learned in ASTR 101 helped me to gain an even deeper appreciation for it. This experience allowed me to see how STEM and art–which are often seen as opposites of each other–are actually heavily intertwined.
AMATH 301 and Facial Recognition (AU22)
Coming into the fall of my sophomore year, I was beginning to feel like I had finally found my footing at UW, at least academically. By this point I had taken a full year of classes–enough to really begin to see how much overlap there could be between disciplines. One memorable example of this was in my AMATH 301 class, where we spent the last few weeks learning about the math behind facial recognition. For one of the problems on the final exam, we were asked to code a simple facial recognition system that could differentiate between pictures of the professor's two cats. We briefly covered the topic of biased models in class, for example by looking at the effect of training dataset sizes. However, we didn't discuss how these biased technologies could be used to harm people. It troubles me to imagine how I probably wouldn't have even thought about the negative real world consequences of such technology if I hadn't previously taken HONORS 222B, a class revolving around the effects of AI on society. While I was taking AMATH 301, I often found myself going back to the readings I had done in HONORS 222B. Though AMATH 301 was an entirely technical class with no social science element, I found that my own intellectual curiosity wasn't satisfied unless I engaged with both disciplines.
The combination of these two courses highlighted the value in learning about topics from multiple different perspectives–in this case, the technical and the social. AMATH 301 taught me how these models are created, which helped me understand where the bias in these models comes from. HONORS 222B helped me understand the effects that such bias can have in the real world, on real people. The two different perspectives enriched each other and allowed me to gain a more in-depth, nuanced understanding of facial recognition technology than if I had just taken one class or the other.
Redesigning Museums: Study Abroad Project (SU23)
While fascinating, the things that I learned through readings, lectures, and site visits during my study abroad experience in the Netherlands didn't have much to do with my areas of study or academic interest. The program revolved around cultural heritage institutions–namely museums, libraries, and archives–while my classes at UW concentrated on mathematics, and my personal academic interests were in using computing to combat social issues. As my time in the Netherlands drew to a close, I began thinking about how the things I had learned during my program connected with my other interests and coursework. I realized that one common thread between all of them was accessibility. The institutions we'd been studying exist to serve the public, which is what many technologies are also designed to do. However, they often fall short of this mission because the creators haven't considered the needs of various diverse populations. I incorporated these thoughts into my final project, in which I redesigned the main exhibit in the Kroller-Muller Museum to better cater to the needs of various overlooked groups of museumgoers, including children, blind people/people with low vision, and people with dementia.
CFRM 420: I Hate Finance and I Love Graphs (AU 24)
At some point or another, I'm sure everyone has had to take a class that they hate. CFRM 420 was the first time that I found myself in that position. One thing that I didn't realize before applying to the Applied Math: Data Science major was that it requires a certain set of Computational Finance (CFRM) classes. In hindsight, this makes sense. Finance is one of the largest areas of application for the mathematical skills we learn, and it can lead to many secure, high-paying jobs. Unfortunately, understanding why I needed to take these classes did not make them any less painful. I went into CFRM 420 with a small amount of experience in the topic. I had taken economics in high school–which I found to be fairly dull–and a machine learning class the previous Spring quarter that focused on financial applications. From these two experiences, I had gotten the unpleasant impression that finance jobs are mostly just about making rich people richer–something I had no interest in doing. Besides, math can be used to understand so many fun, incredible things! Why would I choose to spend my time thinking about investments and returns when I could be thinking about, say, lightning, or origami, or the metabolic changes bears undergo during hibernation?
I was tempted to just put in the minimum amount of effort to pass the class, but instead I decided that I should try to give this whole finance thing a shot. Who knows, maybe this would end up awakening my passion for stock data.
Spoiler: that did not happen.
While I tried to keep an open mind, I found working with data about stocks to be quite boring–who cares how much money some megacorporation made in a given quarter? By the end of the quarter, I had accepted that finance is just not my thing. That being said, through engaging with the assignments, I was able to discover something that was my thing: creating visualizations in R.
Though my assignments only required the most bare bones visualizations, I found myself unsatisfied with this and started spending more and more time improving my visualizations. I edited titles, legends, and captions, tried different color palettes, and experimented with different types of graphics–all with the ultimate goal of conveying information in a way that is both clear and thorough. This class provided me with the opportunity to see how different visualizations highlight different aspects of the data, which prompted me to think more broadly about scientific communication.
As I mentioned in my Learning Statement, one of my areas of academic interest is AI ethics and technology. As AI tools grow in their capabilities and accessibility, it becomes more and more important for the general public to understand the harms and benefits of such tools. I firmly believe that we must expand the conversation about the future of AI beyond academics and the tech industry and make an effort to engage the general public. This goal is complicated by the fact that AI is a complex, highly technical topic, and communicating information about it to the average person can be a challenge. This is where visualizations can be helpful. Visualizations allow us to present only the data that is necessary, and represent it at a level of abstraction that allows everyone to understand it. This makes them an integral part of outreach and education on AI.
I was able to come to this realization only because I kept an open mind about CFRM 420 and committed myself to engaging earnestly with the classwork. Though the actual content of the class was, to be frank, largely useless to me, I got something far more meaningful out of this experience–the tools, as well as the insight into how to use those tools, to engage in effective scientific communication about a topic I am passionate about.
Saya's Honors Portfolio 
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Learning Beyond the Syllabus
