2022-23
Junior year is the year to get things done, and true to form, this is where most of my upper-division elective courses happened. I kept my role as a squad leader in the marching band and played first clarinet for the campus band, with a concert of Studio Ghibli music in the spring with Music for Charity. I spent a quarter in an introductory aikido class. I kept working in the library and got awarded a scholarship for performance there, as well as two from the history department and one for the economics department.
The artifact for this class is a short homework assignment that asked me to check some calculations we’d glossed over in class. I’m including it because it’s the only physical evidence I have of a class that was extremely not focused on these kinds of tasks. This class wanted analytical discussion, a lively discussion by memory of our readings and textbook. This is probably the only class that’s relied so much on speaking and definitely the only one in the economics department. There is a heavy divide between being able to explain something with pen and paper and time and being asked to express that out loud. I found that this homework was simple, but explaining it in class the next day was not; discussion was not a skill I cultivated in years of taking exam- and paper-based courses, and was a notable weak spot that I hadn’t really noticed because it wasn’t something that had come up. I've also included an image of my first grade in the class, among my lowest, which improved with practice throughout the quarter. I found it extremely useful to bring notes and just chat to other students about the readings before class started for ten or fifteen minutes to get used to summarizing them out loud on the spot, and I have since relied on being able to explain out loud to a non-expert as a check for how prepared I am for anything.
Econ 471 International Trade
Info 201 Intro to R
This class was fully based in R, but moved beyond what I expected in statistical analysis to app and thus webpage design. I hadn’t been expecting this extra element, because I don’t consider R to generally be a webpage tool; instead, the appropriate languages are closer to HTML. I gained a new skill with a language I already had a base in. This class also supported the ongoing ties between data science and ethics, largely by relying on the book Data Feminism, a work which I referenced in later reflective data science courses and now own a physical copy of. The attached webpage is a group analysis of US mass shooting data, a macabre subject, and we struggled a lot with how to represent it fairly, discarding several avenues of analysis. For example, there was a lot of null data for things like mental health, but we could have put together a disingenuous analysis and attributed these shootings to that. Instead, we looked at more basic data: locations, type of weapon, and change over time. While there is an argument in our conclusion for more gun reform, we didn’t twist the graphs to explicitly support it, and recognize that there is a lot more and better data that would be needed about what programs are functional and where they work and many, many things for which we didn’t have the data. Functionally, this was an exercise in data integrity and not relying too much on flimsy data to make a sweeping argument, skills which have continually served me well to better read and interpret the news.
Scand 232 Fairy Tales
My classes at UW are very defined, as is necessary to fill two majors and a minor. The reason there’s a Scandinavian Studies course here is because I studied abroad with the department and realized that actually, this is a really interesting area that I’d never interacted with before. This particular course brought in another longstanding interest of mine: fairy tales. I’ve had a small shelf of collected works from around the world for years, but never considered them something academic or to be analyzed. This course allowed me to analyze these works, as I’ve done in the attached short essay, but also to compare different interpretations of the texts by different critics and find what elements of others’ works I agree with. Generally, I don’t do literary criticism, which has this kind of ambiguity. My history classes often provide books and journal articles that agree with lectures in substance and argument, where it doesn't make much sense to disagree with mostly historical fact. This class offered one angle but left me to pick and choose bits of it to make the reading of the tales my own. I read a few critics here whose interpretations I disagreed with, and that was fine, because the goal wasn’t to have everyone interpret it the same way.
Econ 424 Computational Finance
I took this class because I got an internship at Goldman Sachs for the following summer and wanted an introduction to what investment banking would look like. This class wasn’t quite the intro to corporate banking that I thought I needed, but it was my first class in the economics department to meaningfully use code and analyze economic data: here, portfolio risk and returns. The attachment is my final project, which compared portfolios of various stocks over time and reinforced the vague indicators of financial advice I’d heard for years. It turns out, a lot of that advice has data to back it up. It might not be the professional career springboard, but works as a tool for personal finance in the future. I feel more confident in diversification and now have a relevant programming skill that includes useful graphs and charts, much more than the various statistical calculations I’d done in R previously.