I entered Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science with little prior programming experience and only my enthusiasm for learning. Over the course of freshman year, I struggled through my classes, but also developed a passion for computer science. It shaped and changed the way I saw the world: I wondered how I could use the Gale-Shapley algorithm in my relationships, or pondered how I could analyze my social networks with Dijkstra.My passion for learning and computer science led me to research, where I worked with Dr. Robert Murphy to develop machine learning campaigns to drive active learning in the computational biology field. I developed classification campaigns using SVMs and clustering methods to serve as a comparison for new models being built by our lab. Though the research is still in progress, we were able to conduct preliminary testing, yielding promising results.Seeking industry experience, I worked for General Dynamics the next summer as a Software Engineering Intern. Utilizing my front-end development skills, I collaborated with other developers to build a web-application and wrote unit tests to ensure our application behaved as required. The application was deployed by the end of my internship, and by initial reports has greatly improved client workflows.During the school year, I teach labs and develop course content as a teaching assistant. I love helping people understand concepts they were struggling with before and spreading my own love for functional programming along the way (functions are values!). In my next role, I seek to further explore my passions, while evolving as a developer and person.