Noelle Merclich

My History with Computer Science

My fascination with computer science didn't start until almost my senior year of high school. This may seem a bit surprising since my first computer science class was during my sophomore year. However, unlike many of my classmates, I wasn't immediately smitten with writing programs and devoting countless hours of my life to debugging. Instead, in between making virtual versions of hangman and tic-tac-toe, I was researching culinary schools because for a long time I wanted to become an executive pastry chef. Rather than decipher lines of binary, I wanted to pipe lines of frosting.

So how did I end up as your TA? The summer before my senior year I did some research in machine learning for UW's DataLab (I would be remiss as a programmer if I didn't manage to incorporate that buzzword at least once in my bio). My project was meant to help improve a model meant to predict the presence of rumors on Twitter during crisis events. As my mentor liked to say, I was "saving babies". Seeing computer science directly applied in a way that allowed me to be creative, innovative, and actually help people really inspired me. So after that, I applied to UW, was admitted as a direct admit to the Allen School, and have loved it ever since.

In my last couple of years here I have managed to be a teaching assistant for Startup, an introductory programming class for Human Centered Design and Engineering, and the Direct Admit Seminar (so let me know if you have any questions about this seemingly random seminar we had you sign up for). I've also focused a lot of my time on computer science outreach and have worked with HCDE's Alternative Spring Break group for two years now.