Humans of SymSys: Jenny Han

Jenny is a SymSys graduate ‘19 and coterm ‘21. She is building SYMSYS1 Through Science Fiction, a repository of science fiction short stories that are related to SymSys 1 (or Symbolic Systems in general). Contribute here! bit.ly/symsys-scifi

Who are you in a nutshell?

I did my undergrad in the learning track of SymSys, then took a gap year to work in Hong Kong and do research as a Fulbrighter in China this past February — I did not make it to China this year, as you might guess why!* Currently I'm back in school coterming in Computer Science, and I'm also having a blast TAing SYMSYS1. Outside of school, I like to bike around town, listen to Reply All the podcast, and attempt to train my brother's parakeet. Also ask me about my work with the design studio Next Shift Learning!

*reason being the pandemic! --added for future context by the SymSys Society.

Why SymSys?

I started out as a chemistry major! But then I went to a career fair and learned about the interdisciplinary majors: Human Biology, Earth Systems, STS, Symbolic Systems, etc., and I knew instantly that I was going to major in one of these. 

I remember sitting in bed after the career fair mulling over the options, but to be honest, it took a while for me to understand what SymSys was. I had a friend in my freshman dorm, Sandhini, who really pitched it to me, and eventually, I chose Symbolic Systems because I was interested in learning about how people learn.

What is your concentration and why?

In undergrad, I was drawn to the learning concentration because I have wanted to be a public educator since I was in the first grade. It just happened that the courses I wanted to take in psychology and education lent themselves to the learning concentration. I also got to think a lot about designing for equity, especially when it comes to computer science education and learning technologies. 

What’s your favorite SymSys-related class that you’ve taken?

EDUC 236: Beyond Bits and Atoms (no longer at Stanford), which was an introduction to designing learning technologies. This was such a formative class for me because it combined a rigorous introduction to learning theories with hands-on experiences in the makerspace with projects in the community. 

It showed me what was possible within a dedicated and thoughtful learning community: everyone in that class was there to learn with each other rather than for a grade, and I have very fond memories of staying up late in the makerspace with other classmates munching on snacks and talking about the readings. My group got to travel to Norway with others in the class to present at the Interaction Design and Children conference that summer, which was a nice perk too.

This class is probably tied with Language and Thought, which I took with Michael Frank while in BOSP Santiago. Linguistic relativity?? Mindblowing.

Are you involved in research? If so, what are you working on?

I work with the Stanford HCI research group as well as the Transformative Learning Technologies Lab at Columbia. 

Storycoder, a project that I worked on as a research assistant for my mentor Griffin Dietz (co-advised by James Landay and Hyo Gweon), was recently accepted to the ACM CHI conference! The project involved designing a voice-based app for pre-literate learners to engage with computational concepts.

What is one piece of advice you'd like to offer to younger students?

Take non-SYMSYS courses too; you have the space for it! When I think about the courses that I took which altered my world view, I think of courses in Urban Studies, Art Studio, Human Biology as much as I think of courses from my actual program sheet.

Also, go to office hours. You don't need to have anything prepared before you go. You can bring your work. There's no such thing as a stupid question when you need help. As someone who is now a TA, I wish I had internalized that myself as a student.

Coolest topic that you’re excited about right now?

I'm excited about designing meaningful projects with code that are beginner-friendly. Currently, I'm co-designing a new assignment for the SYMSYS1 course which involves building a Twitter bot using context-free grammar. 

More broadly, I'm excited about the history of the internet. It's fascinating to read about what the future of the internet USED to look like and then to juxtapose that with the ugliest parts of the internet that we have to reckon with today. I want to be able to find ways to bring the sort of tinkering and low-fi playfulness that used to exist on the internet back to the present. 

(Some related inspirations include Jia Tolentino's essay "The I in the Internet" and Social Computing, the CS course taught by Michael Bernstein.)

Future plans?

To be honest, I'm not 100% positive! I do plan on getting a teaching credential to teach and develop curriculum for computer science education. I'm also interested in contributing to out-of-school learning experiences, from museums to Wikipedia to edtech apps.

Humans of SymSys: Emily Hu

Who are you in a nutshell?

I'm a recent graduate of Stanford Computer Science (2020, the year of Zoom Graduation!) and a current coterminal Master's student in Symbolic Systems. My focus for both degrees is human-computer interaction, and I am broadly interested in using technology as a lens to understand human behavior. How does technology change the way we communicate and organize ourselves, and, in turn, how do we use it as a lens to view these changes?

I've spent some time as a product manager in industry (I was a Google APM this past summer), and I'm also a TA at Stanford. I most recently staffed Minds and Machines (Fall 2020) and Social Computing (Spring 2020)! Teaching virtual sections has been unexpectedly fun. Pre-pandemic, I was heavily involved in the social dancing community, and co-directed the latest Stanford Viennese Ball (back in February 2020--- what turned out to be the last weekend of viable social activity). Dancing has translated somewhat poorly into our quarantine-world, but I certainly dance on my own, and according to Spotify, have listened to over 60,000 minutes of music this year. Outside of all of that, I love to doodle and have picked up calligraphy. I occasionally cook things and enjoy making (and drinking) both coffee and tea.

Why SymSys?

I think I'll have a different answer to this than most people, and that's because I was a Computer Science major (undergrad), but I'm a SymSys coterm (Master's). Whenever I tell people this, I feel like I surprise them a little, because most people do it the other way around --- SymSys undergrad, Computer Science coterm. However, I wouldn't change anything about my path; I loved being part of the Computer Science department, and doing a "deep dive" on the technology aspect gave me a solid foundation from which to branch out and understand the human-centered implications that I'm now focused on.

I chose the SymSys coterm, as opposed to the CS coterm, for a few reasons:

1. It's a research-based degree program. In college, I unexpectedly discovered research as a genuine passion. Whereas a CS coterm would require me to take more classes, a SymSys coterm is designed around the research, and ends in a capstone thesis. This doesn't mean I don't get to take awesome classes (I do!) but it means that I also get to tie it all together with a project that I love, and that I get to call my own.

2. It's more flexible and interdisciplinary. You can see from my introduction of myself that, while my work is rooted in my computer science background, I also bring in elements of psychology and social science. I study humans and technology as interlocking systems---and what better way to do so than via Symbolic *Systems*?

3. The community is smaller --- and therefore closer. Each quarter during the coterm, we have biweekly meetings with all the Master's students, and we get to hear about each other's research progress. You genuinely feel supported; that personal touch is really important to me.

What is your concentration and why?

Human-computer interaction. I was a CS major for undergrad, but the SymSys HCI program is fairly analogous. Both of my best friends and close study buddies/collaborators were SymSys HCI, and we shared almost all of our classes in undergrad. The main difference, I think, was that I took a few more computer science / engineering classes in the end, and they did a little more philosophy/linguistics.

My first exposure to HCI was very early on in my career, where I did the CS Undergraduate Research Internship (CURIS) and joined a project in the HCI lab. I spent the whole summer listening to talks about research from all the different concentrations (AI, Systems, Theory, etc.), and HCI just seemed to resonate with me the most. For me, studying computation was interesting because it gave me a toolkit with which to solve human problems. And that was really the initial reasoning for me --- I wanted to major in something that allowed me to impact humans.

Over the years, as I took more classes and started carving out my own niche, I've only been more convinced that HCI was the right choice.

What’s your favorite SymSys-related class that you’ve taken?

I have two -- CS 247 and CS 124.

I loved CS 247. Human-computer interaction classes are so fun, because they're very hands-on---focused on working in groups and practical applications. When I took 247, they broke the quarter into a few smaller projects, and I had a fantastic time learning about all the design and prototyping techniques in each one. This is probably the single class I draw on the most in my everyday work, whether it's industry or research, because knowing the interaction design process is essential everywhere you go.

I also loved CS 124. This is probably the most "SymSys-y" class I've taken, since it's quite literally a combination of computation and linguistics (to study NLP), and in the end, we made a bot (which brought in a little bit of psychology, especially when we discussed early versions of mental health-focused bots). I had so much fun in this class. When we made the bot, we basically went wild with extensions, and it was just so fun to be creative and hands-on.

Are you involved in research? If so, what are you working on?

Yes! I mentioned this before, but I study the intersection of technology and humans---specifically, organizations, groups, and teams. My undergraduate honors thesis was about the decision-making of online groups. I wanted to know whether groups make consistent decisions together; so, I designed an online jury study, where we had participants decide one pair of analogous scenarios by themselves, and another pair while participating in a jury. This was a within-subjects study, since each participant experienced both conditions (in a random and counterbalanced order). 

We then measured whether groups decided more consistently than individuals. To my (and my collaborators') surprise, groups and individuals were equally consistent. Also interesting was the fact that aggregating individual decisions into a non-deliberative "vote" led to decisions that were nearly random. We found that deliberation was able to secure a stronger winning majority, whereas voting on your own meant that one or two swing voters could completely flip the result.

A project that I'm working on more recently is understanding how people transition from collaborating in-person to collaborating remotely. Here, I'm doing a field study of a real organization, and trying to understand what you need to change about your practices and decision-making processes in order to work as a distributed team.

What is one piece of advice you'd like to offer to younger students?

It's never too late to start something, and it's never too late to stop something.

I never thought research was going to be something I could do, because I hadn't done it in high school---I knew people who had already won multiple science fair competitions by the time they were 18. I was also worried about studying computer science in college, because my only coding experience prior to Stanford was using Macros in Microsoft Excel (LOL) and listening to the first ~4 lectures of Harvard CS50 on edX.

Well, it turns out that it totally wasn't too late, because I'm here today. I often talk to younger students who say that they're worried about trying computer science, or about applying to internships in software engineering and PM because it's "too late to start." I think it's never too late. I promise, there is a place for you here.

Conversely, I think it's never too late to quit doing something, if you realize it's no longer something that you're continuing to learn and benefit from. For the first three years of college, I was an active competitive debater. But over time, I realized that I was no longer pushing myself to learn and grow through debate as I used to, and I had to learn to let something go, despite all the joy that it once brought me.

So, the lesson that I'd tell younger students is that it's never too late to learn something new, and it's also not too late to reflect on something you've done for a long time, and choose to redefine yourself.

New Year’s SymSys Plates!

Over winter break, we kicked off the New Year by organizing virtual ~plates~ aka platonic dates! Twenty-six students signed up, and 13 matches were made! Below are some thoughts from two plate-goers: 

Regina Ta, ‘23:

My plate and I chatted about our shared interest in Webtoon comics, and swapped reading recommendations. We also bonded over our experiences in language classes, and I learned about the initiative to save the Cantonese program at Stanford! We discussed how our respective SymSys concentrations (Natural Language and HCI) intersected, and I came away with great classes to take next.

Spontaneous convos with new faces are hard to come by on Zoom, so I’m glad to have met another fellow SymSys-er! 

Cooper, ‘21:

My plate and I had an incredible conversation covering music, digital art, and our different inspirations to begin working with the psychology of design! We also shared our experiences around CS147: Intro to Human-Computer Interaction Design, a touchstone course for many SymSys students which we happened to both be in, despite my plate being in her first year at Stanford and me being in a Flex term during a gap year from Stanford. We’ve shared our inspirations for choosing concentrations, mine in HCI and hers in HCAI, and she swung me toward her side - I may change course when I return to Stanford because of the conversation we had together. Until then we’ll both be working toward tech for social good.

We had a great time playing matchmaker and we hope you made new friends along the way. Thanks for the conversation & community--until next time! :)

Coffee Chat with Christina Wodtke

Thoughts from Gray Wong ’21

For our coffee chat this time, we invited Christina Wodtke, a lecturer at Stanford in HCI for the CS department and also in product design for the ME department. I’m currently enrolled in her class on game design (CS 247G), and it was so interesting to see her wisdom applied in other areas and to hear her advice for us. Here are just some key points from our chat:

• Perhaps it’s common sense, but when looking for work, don’t work for companies that go against your beliefs! Christina suggested looking into S. H. Schwartz’s universal values as a starting point to gauge a company’s values.

• Being well-versed in both the CS side and the design side of things is something that can make you so unique and marketable; most people typically focus on one or the other, but knowing how the two fields interact together is so important in making something work.

• Advocating for those not in power is so important to tech. There are many opportunities for things in tech to be unethical, and you can help to prevent this. This can be in the form of speaking up when something strikes you wrong, stepping up to positions of power to help advocate and add diversity, making space for such folks, and so on.

Thank you so much for talking with us, Christina!

Faculty-Student Thanksgiving!

Notice the *genius* in sneaking in SymSys references by putting a brain on the turkey.

Week 9 finds students and faculty alike buried under office hours, final projects, and essays. In the depths of this dreary time – in fact, on a Tuesday – 32 members of the SymSys community, including faculty members, postdocs, and students, gathered together for the newly revised 2020 Annual Symbolic Systems Society Faculty-Student Thanksgiving! 

Usually, this event is an opportunity for harried students and faculty to stuff themselves full with Thanksgiving food while casually chatting with those around them. But in the age of Zoom, the SymSys Society board thought hard about somewhat recreating spontaneous, casual vibes virtually. We essentially ended up doing a 6-part concurrent coffee chat. Although we’re always looking to improve our virtual events, we have been excited to hear how fun and free-flowing our Thanksgiving conversations this year were. Through our event, we were able to give people not just a breather from end-of-quarter tasks, but also to connect with each other on a casual, cozier level.

Thank you so much for everyone who came, and special thanks to the faculty who were able to make it: Todd Davies, Rosa Cao, Chelsea Finn, Mike Frank, Dan Lassiter, and Chris Potts!