What’s your name, year, pronouns, major, and hometown?

I'm Rachel, currently a senior, pronouns are she / her, hometown is North Potomac, Maryland. So it's near DC, and my major is computer science.

In SAAS, what are your past and present committees and positions?

So I joined in Fall 2018, and I was in CX. And then in Spring 2019, I was in web dev. And then Fall 2019 to Spring 2020, I was web dev director, and then Fall 2020 to Spring 2021, I was Internal Vice President. And then from Fall 2021 to Spring 2022, I was exec advisor.

When, why, and how did you narrow down a CS major?

When I came into Berkeley, I knew I wanted to do something quantitative. I spent high school thinking I wanted to do something more related to the social sciences. But I realized that I really did genuinely enjoy working with numbers and quantitative problem solving. So I was looking at stats, data science, applied math, CS. I ruled out applied math pretty fast because I took a look at the upper division classes and realized that I just wasn't interested in more higher level concepts, like theoretical and abstract concepts. And then it was kind of more like a process of elimination. I took some introductory classes and I found that comparatively, I enjoyed CS61A the most. I really enjoyed the projects because I like to build something that users could actually interact with, since I'm a very people oriented person. So I like being able to do things that have a direct impact on people's lives. And that was something I got more with CS rather than stats or data science. I also think quantitative problem solving is fun in general, like when you know what you want the end result to be but the challenge lies in figuring out how to get there.

What’s your fun fact?

I guess the one I used in my #intros post this semester was that I really like Notion, so I have a Notion page for basically everything you can think of. For example, things like kdramas or Bay Area restaurants, or even just clown stories about myself. My entire life is on Notion basically. What entertainment are you into right now? Any new TV shows? Movies? I don't usually watch things during the school year because when I start watching something I want to binge it and finish it super fast. I don’t binge in the sense that I finish something in only 24 hours, but to me it just means not having to stop for school or other responsibilities. I mostly like kdramas in terms of TV shows. Actually, okay, I lied, I am watching one right now. I just watch one episode a week with some of my hometown friends, and we’re watching Our Beloved Summer. It's a rom com and it’s just really, really cute. I've been watching a lot of more intense dramas lately, and it's just gotten to be a bit too much. So now I need some chill rom coms.

Do you have more hobbies? You're very well rounded.

I just wanted to mention that I really like MBTI. I just like personality tests and typology in general. A lot of people think I'm a psych major because I'm so into this. I do really like just understanding human behavior and personality. Personality frameworks are a good way for me to get to know how people might think differently than I do, and try to understand myself better. Other main interests would be food, I have a food Instagram, and like I mentioned, the Bay Area Food Notion. And then as for professional interests, right now it’s mostly software engineering. That's what I'll be doing full time after graduation. Like I said, why I like computer science in general is because I was able to build something that has an impact on people. And I especially gravitate more towards front end because with that, you’re building things the user can directly interact with. I’m also slightly interested in UI/UX design, thinking intentionally about how information is presented to users. For example, what types of buttons to use, like radio buttons or checkboxes. I think those are very small things, but thinking intentionally about them goes a long way in making the user experience. Last summer, I did an internship in product management. I decided to try it out because of my interest in like UI/UX design and thinking more about the product as a whole, and what kind of value it brings, how it meet user needs, and what problems that it solves rather than focusing on different technical aspects. But I realized that I did miss the quantitative problem solving aspects of pure coding or software engineering. And I think starting out my career in software engineering helps keep my options open for the future and gives me time to get to know the industry I'll be working in, and then in the future I can either continue with software engineering and become an engineering leader or I can do product management. It's definitely easier to switch from SWE to PM than vice versa.

How do you use statistics in software engineering or in your daily quantitative problem solving?

This is a good question. This question wasn't around when I was managing member profiles last year. Nothing comes to mind right now for software engineering. But I guess in product management, metrics are really important. So that involves determining what things to measure to determine the success of the product, and focusing on how to improve the metrics. And then there's also things like A/B testing, like if you want to assess the efficacy of a particular feature or some change that you want to make, then you can test it on one subset of users first and compare that with the control group to see whether or not the new feature made a difference.

You've already touched on your PM internship experience. Have you done any other internships?

Yeah, so before that, in Summer 2020, which was the summer after my sophomore year, I did an internship at Fidelity Investments in software engineering. That was a really fun experience despite everything being online, because that was when COVID was just getting started. So I worked in a team with two other interns, so three of us total. I think maybe it was a little unconventional for a software engineering internship, or it wasn’t how my internship was supposed to go if it was in person. A lot of the time, you are put into an existing team and you help that team with their tasks and projects versus doing a dedicated intern project. Our first project was building an internal search tool from scratch. That was really cool because we got to work directly with the end user. I think that project is what sparked my interest in PM as well. We got to really work with the end user to define her business needs. She said she would throw us a parade in Animal Crossing if we were able to successfully build the tool. It was something that would solve a lot of her problems and save a lot of time for her. So yeah, I got to work on the frontend for that, and also some of the UI design. So that was pretty cool. And then our second project was adding features to an existing internal report management tool that our manager had been working on as his personal side project. We got to build our own code from scratch for the first project, but we also got to see what an existing codebase is like and try to understand that and build on top of someone else's work. I got to work on two types of projects. And then before that summer, I did a more research type internship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which is maybe 45 minutes from my house, so I was home for that summer. The project was related to citizen science, so using information from citizens, in this case from Twitter and tweets about precipitation, and trying to reconcile that with data about precipitation from satellites and seeing how people's tweets can augment or verify existing data. For example, if someone tweets saying it's raining really hard today, and they're in London, you can look at what the satellite data says for London. That was the overarching goal of what my mentors and our team was working on. I specifically focused on the data management aspect, like figuring out how to store Twitter data in a format that was compatible with the way satellite data is stored. From that experience, I realized that maybe I wanted to create something more tangible, like something that you could actually use.

In using all of that citizen data, did you have to use any statistics to work with such a large amount of data?

It was three years ago at this point so my memory is slightly fuzzy. But I remember just using pandas or NumPy to format the data. There was a lot of work with arrays because the satellite data kind of came in not directly an array format, but it was a data format that utilized arrays. So more so just working with data structures and formats.

Do you have any other things you'd like to add to your professional experience, like how you use stats or data science, or any other experiences?

I used college internships as an opportunity to really explore different fields. And that's because I think that's the best time to explore different fields. Because as an intern, the expectations aren't super high, and it's not as demanding as a full time job. The goal is more sothat you learn something. There's a lot of shadowing opportunities, you can sit in on meetings, and talk to people outside your department to soak in as much information as possible and be a sponge. That's how my manager last summer would put it. I'm just really glad that I was able to explore so many different things through my internships, and it's helped me narrow down what I want to do full-time post-grad.

How did you find out about the club if it was SUSA or USA? Why did you join?

I joined when it was SUSA. I found out about the club initially through Facebook or something. But the first real meaningful interaction where I learned about SUSA was May, before freshman year, after the semester had ended at Berkeley. So my mom is in all these WeChat groups to connect with other parents of students who go to Berkeley. And she found someone who lives like 10 minutes away from us, went to one of the high schools in my county, and had just finished her sophomore year at Berkeley. Her name was Winne Luo. So my mom arranged a time for me to go to Winne’s house and ask her questions about Berkeley. I asked her what clubs are you involved in, and she mentioned the statistics club, SUSA. She was really involved and she was an officer (RP director) and she just really enjoyed the community and also the professional development and statistics skill development and opportunities; she seemed to really enjoy her experience. I was like, “Okay, cool, I guess I'll put that on my radar.” And then over the summer—I do not recommend doing this—I went through the entire list of orgs on Callink and marked down what I was interested in. I knew I definitely wanted to join at least one major-related club to connect with students in my major. I actually wasn't planning on joining my first semester because I wanted to take it more chill my first semester, but during Calapalooza, I got flyered on Sproul by Adish, who was president at the time. I looked at the description, and it looked interesting, but I didn’t really have any experience. Like, I’d only taken AP Stats in high school. And Adish was like, “Oh, you don’t need experience, we have the Career Exploration committee.” And then I guess I really appreciated that CX existed—well, still exists—as an introduction into the world of statistics and data science for people like me with limited or no experience. I think that makes the club a lot more accessible to people. So I applied to CX, and here I am.

What was your favorite committee you've been in, and why?

Being Internal Vice President for sure. I guess that’s the exec committee, but also the Internal Affairs Committee because I ran my own committee. Even when I first joined the club, I cared about social culture a lot. Maybe that was where my heart really was. Joining SAAS, I wanted to be able to find a community of people, not just for academic and professional support but also socially. I just wanted to be able to find friends and people to hit up for anything. And that was part of my vision for SAAS social culture. I was always invested in social culture and wanted to make it better. It was like, be the change you want to see in the world, you know, so I decided to run for IVP and enact those changes myself. I thought it was really fun because I got to think intentionally about how to bring people together and introduce new social structures. I wanted people to be able to have a good experience in SAAS and be able to find a community and just overall build a stronger community, which involved fostering smaller scale, more intimate connections through Big/Little and houses, and just providing as many opportunities as possible for people to meet each other and learn about other members. I feel like a lot of this is like, I don't know how to explain why exactly I like it, I just do. It’s nice seeing other people have a positive experience and make friends in the community, whatever community means to them. That could be just making one friend or developing a really close relationship with their Big. Just seeing them be able to find a community is very fulfilling. It was also nice to feel a deep sense of ownership over the club and especially social culture, and I feel like I really got to understand SAAS as an organization and a community, and the people in it.

Could you highlight the one biggest thing you learned from your experiences in CX, Web Dev, and currently as an Exec advisor?

For CX, honestly, I feel like maybe this isn't the answer you're looking for, but my biggest takeaway from CX was that I didn't really enjoy higher level data science concepts because CX exposes you to what upper division data science classes would be like, or industry-level data science. And for some people, CX helps to solidify that data science that they want to do. But for me, it was the opposite because it helped me solidify what I didn’t want to do, which I think is still very helpful and in line with the SAAS value of exploration. I think CX and Web Dev, my main takeaways were related to my own professional development and career path, like Web Dev helped me realize that on the other hand, I do enjoy web development and software engineering. I did a project on UCPD crime rates, like making a visualization of crime rates in Berkeley. And I really enjoyed doing that because I felt like crime rates were something that we all care about a lot, and my parents do too because they want me to be safe here. So it was nice to build a tool that helps people understand crime in Berkeley better, the trends, and what areas to avoid. Being able to make something that people can visually interact with was very important for me. And then for Exec Advisor, I feel like I have definitely learned a lot of things, but I don't really have anything that comes to mind. If you have a specific area, maybe that can help me.

How has SAAS helped you with your professional career and development?

Oh, I guess I already answered this. But just to quickly recap, CX helped me realize that I didn't really enjoy data science and I didn't really see myself doing that in the future, but Web Dev helped me realize I liked software engineering.

Are there any events you went to, professional development advisors, maybe coffee chats to help you with your software engineering journey?

There were some resume workshops during my freshman year. The inaugural recruitment workshop was during my sophomore spring. It was a little late in my personal recruiting timeline, so it was after I already signed an offer, but it was still helpful in terms of knowing what classes to take to prepare for software engineering interviews, and general interview prep tips that I could use in the future. Generally just having a lot of casual conversations with upperclassmen, like in retreat cars, where they were just talking about their philosophy towards taking classes and how to estimate your workload, and just general career things. There's nothing specific that I can really put a finger on, but I think it's just general interactions with people because things just come up in conversation.

What is your favorite SAAS memory?

I’ve thought about this question a lot, and I don't know if there's one favorite memory, but more so a lot of intangible things. Sometimes spontaneous things will just come up. For example, things like the uwu-bruh, baby-not baby chart. I don't remember how exactly it originated, but that's something that I associate very strongly with SAAS. I also had a lot of fun placing people on the red panda / fox / raccoon triangle during my advisor office hours this semester. (Shoutout to Allison, Alex, Minh, and Kevin for contributing to that!) So it’s a lot of memey stuff like that. Other specific examples that do come to mind are Spring 2021 Welcome Night – we did it on gather.town. On gather.town you can change your avatar, so we decided to play this snowman game. It wasn't part of the agenda, but it was basically like some people change their avatar to a snowman, and the snowmen run around chasing people. If you got cornered by four snowmen, meaning you're trapped and would have to press a key to escape, and then you become a snowman yourself and help chase other people. That's just something that Michael Wang just came up with on the fly, and we played that for like 30 minutes. So it’s just a lot of the impromptu things that come up. And then this is also just like very specific anecdotes. Also during that gather.town Welcome Night, Ellis and I were in a corner just chatting about whatever. There was a pool in the gather space, and we suddenly saw someone run right across the pool and we thought that was the funniest thing ever because we didn’t know you could go inside the pool. And there was one time when after drawing games night last spring, somehow we started playing poker. That was the period of time that semester where people got really into poker. And then eventually it was just me, Alex, Frank, and Kish in the breakout room for the drawing games social, still playing poker for three hours after the social ended because we really want to finish the game. It became a head-to-head thing with me and Frank. Alex and Kish were already out, but they were just saying things like, “Oh, I bet Rachel has a straight” or things like that. So yeah, just the spontaneous, meme-y, impromptu things.

How did you make friends with people in SAAS? How did you meet them and grow closer?

So for this, I think it's really just getting super involved, mostly going to a lot of events and really putting yourself out there. I definitely tried to go to every social if I was available for it. Doing donutbots was really helpful, and more small scale interactions. I think sometimes when you become friends with someone, you don't know why, but you just click. And I think there's no way to really find that out unless you really try to meet as many people as possible to see who you click with. Committees also helped a lot because it's easy to find people to walk home with together after committee meetings. I remember that in my first semester, I walked back from CX meetings with this girl who also lived in Blackwell. In web dev as well, I would walk back with Megan, Abhinav, Ruhi, and others, and we would stop at Sheng Kee. Yeah, fun memories of that. Just from these small committee interactions, I was able to ask people, “Do you want to get dinner before the SAAS whole club movie night?” So, just building up from there. I think, as a freshman, it's also very helpful to interact with other freshmen because you're kind of in the same boat, like new to the club and Berkeley. We're all trying to figure things out, so it's nice to have buddies to do that with. Being in leadership helps a lot too because you get to interact with more people in the club in a mandatory way, if that makes sense. You get to interact with other directors and get to know what's going on in the club a lot more. Being IVP helped a lot, especially, because I'm sure I've had to slide into everyone’s DMs at least once to talk about IVP-related things. Also, for houses, it helps to be around people with similar interests and hang out more regularly with the same group of people to help you make deeper connections with them. And then for Big/Little, we didn’t have that when I joined, so I didn't have a Big, but Andre says he's my Big and I will accept that. But that's not official. But yeah, just having littles that I can help integrate into the club. That's just a really nice way to get close with someone fast.

You've elaborated on this earlier, so I'm not sure if we need to go into this. But I was gonna ask about one of the SAAS values: community, exploration, and mentorship. Pick one and what does it mean to you, but I feel like you mentioned exploration quite a bit. So is there anything else you wanted to add to that?

I want to talk about community because my specific vision for the SAAS community is that SAAS is a place where you can go to for anything. There's professional support if you need it through all our advisory services, like coffee chats, resume reviews, workshops, things like that. The professional development Notion and the #advice Slack channel. And then for academic support, I’d like to highlight the classes spreadsheet because I've participated a lot in class group chats during my time, and they definitely are all really helpful, especially the CS ones. Jai Sankar carried all of us in CS 170. Classes in general are a good way to make friends because we all have to study and do the homework, so it's just a lot more fun if you do it with friends. So, just doing homework with people and weekly homework checks help a lot. Finally, on the social side, I think SAAS’ major strength in terms of community is the pure number of people we have and how many different interests are represented. There's a Slack channel for basically anything now. Whenever people mention, “Oh, I'm interested in, I don't know, climbing,” I can think of, “Oh, Danny and Joe love climbing, you should go climbing with them.” So, it's just like, whatever you're interested in, there's definitely other SAAS people that are into the same thing, no matter how niche it is. I went through a whole OfflineTV phase and Jackie was also into OfflineTV, so we were able to bond over that. If you want to like do a particular activity, you can always find people who are down. That’s what community means to me.

What advice would you give to newer SAAS members?

Really put yourself out there. I know it might seem scary, but it's very rewarding once you get over your initial fear. You’ll find that the socials are very fun, and the people are very nice. I especially want to plug professional development advisor resources here. The advisors are very willing to help because we want to give back now after spending many many semesters in SAAS and at Berkeley. People are very willing to help in general, not just advisors. As long as you go to these events and take advantage of the resources, that'll really help you get the most out of your SAAS experience.

What's your favorite class?

I used to say STAT 140. I mean, I still like it, but I also want to say CS 170 now just because of my overall experience in the class. The CS170 group chat was definitely very helpful. It really solidified how helpful it is to have a study group. In the problem sets, you have to design an algorithm for something. The thinking is the hard part–you really have to think of a good solution, and just being able to collaborate with other people on that was helpful. So, I had a very positive experience with my CS170 study group. The content is also very useful for software engineering interviews; I just like the content a lot in general. The whole premise is kind of like how to design efficient algorithms to solve certain problems. It sounds a bit nerdy I guess, but the optimal solution is always quite simple. So, if your solution looks super complicated, you’re probably doing something wrong. The whole process of trying to figure out the very simple solution, figuring out how to distill a problem down to its basic elements, I think, is very intellectually rewarding.

Who’s your favorite professor?

I feel like it's been so long since I had good freshman year professors. I’d have to go with Professor Garcia for CS61A. You could tell how much he cared that we actually learned the content and did well in the class and came out of 61A with an appreciation for computer science. He would always say that this class isn't curved and he’d be really happy if all of the students got A's and if he could give out 1300 A's because there were 1300 people in the class. Fun fact, I commented about that on a Facebook post once and he liked my comment. I just really appreciated his support, and he's very engaging.

What’s your favorite Berkeley memory?

I think in general, retreats or just any weekend trips are good Berkeley memories. It’s nice to explore California and not have to worry about any other responsibilities for the weekend.

What’s your favorite spot on campus that more people should know about?

I used to say Esh 3rd floor, but I think it’s still closed to the public. Basically, it used to be like, clubs would have cubicles there, and SAAS had a cubicle there one year. You’d need keycard access to get in, or you could follow someone in who has keycard access. It was very productive before 5pm each day, but then when it hits 5pm, it's absolute chaos and clubs would have meetings there, and people would even have birthday parties. It's very chaotic. But it was a good place to go after 5pm if you don’t really need to be super productive. You can just go there with your friends and just mess around and talk. Other than that, probably the top of the Campanile. It's not a super niche spot, but I think the views from there are really nice. It's not high enough to be scary, at least for me. I wouldn't say I’m scared of heights, but I'm scared of dropping my phone. I feel like it's a perfect height where you're high enough that everything looks like Legos. It's nice to have a spot to appreciate Berkeley's geographical location because you can see the Bay, you can see the hills, you can see all of campus. It's a nice place to take a step back and look at the bigger picture and appreciate Berkeley.

What’s your favorite place to study on campus?

Okay, Esh third floor, but I went through a Main Stacks phase as well. I really liked how quiet it was, like I know Main Stacks is very controversial because some people don't like that there's no windows, but I like that because it helps a lot with studying and just being focused. I’ve been disillusioned with campus libraries lately because now that Moffitt’s closed, there's no spots anywhere. Oh, I like the Bancroft Reading Room a lot. I think it's very aesthetic. The one that kind of looks like Hogwarts.

What’s the prettiest and ugliest building on campus?

For prettiest building, probably Doe. I think it's a very nice place to take grad photos at, with the columns and everything. And then the interior is pretty as well, like the Bancroft Reading Room that I mentioned. And then for ugliest, the obvious answer is Evans. I remember once in freshman year or something, someone put on their Snapchat story “views [heart eyes emoji]” and it was a view of Evans from the Moffitt window. And I was like, “Where are the views?” I guess those are my kind of generic answers.

How do you feel that Evans is going to be demolished?

I'm ambivalent because I'm graduating so it's not gonna affect me. But I am glad because it's also a very earthquake-unsafe building.

What’s your favorite bathroom to use on campus?

Not the VLSB bathrooms. I think Moffitt's fourth floor is nice, but the third floor is terrible. Yeah, just not VLSB. Esh 3rd floor has a really nice bathroom, but I just haven't really been there since COVID because it's been closed.

Well, that's so funny. Some people's favorites have been VLSB.

Oh, okay, maybe it's changed since then. Pre-COVID was just not it, so I still avoid it.

What’s your favorite restaurant?

There's too many, and also restaurants have changed a lot over the years. Let me pull up my Notion. I think Sliver, but I feel like it's something I only get for large groups. I wouldn't go and eat a whole pizza by myself, you know? I really like Sodoi, the coffee shop. Kelly works there actually. It's a very nice place to study. Their drinks are good. I'm taking a break from actual coffee, but they have non caffeinated drinks. Berkeley Social Club for the vibes, but that's really a once-a-semester special occasion type thing.

What’s your favorite boba shop, and what's your go-to order?

I like Yifang’s pineapple fruit tea or U-Cha’s honeydew milk tea.