Cynthia Yin

But students of all years, majors and genders are more than welcome at our events. Many who don’t necessarily identify as women or engineers come because they’re interested in what we’re doing and it’s great to have their support as well.

I’m a computer science major and my favorite class so far has been CS 124: From Languages to Information. In this class, I used natural language processing techniques to code a spellchecker, simulate a web search engine and answer Jeopardy questions. I also built a chat bot that identified positive and negative movie reviews and then made movie recommendations. These projects really opened up my eyes to the powers of computer science and it was amazing to see how intelligent technology can be.

For me, the most important component of SWE is the community. The people I get to interact with in this group are incredible. Even if we have different majors, it’s exciting to hear about their accomplishments and approach to engineering. It’s easy to get completely absorbed in your own field and forget to look around, but SWE is a refreshing space where you can learn about different engineering experiences and perspectives. These people inspire and build me up every day.