Stories

As a child, Evvie had always shown a bent toward the analytic. She was drawn to science
topics and any topic that involved classification and innovation. At age 11, she caught the
“design bug” and, after a brief stop in fashion design, threw herself into interior design, and
delighted in creating imagined spaces, always well-organized and coordinated. At 13, this
interest took an abrupt leap into the world of modern architecture and created an independent
study project to do a deep dive into the forms of Lloyd-Wright, van der Rohe, Gropius, and Le
Corbusier. With her curiosity satisfied in that department, her parents encouraged her to keep
pursuing design by taking a week-long summer program in Graphic Design. Evvie proudly
showed off her projects . . . then declared that she’d had enough of graphic design! Here’s
what high school looked like after that:

Freshman year– a newfound fascination with the languages and pop cultures of other
countries, particularly those with non-Roman scripts. The entire year was accompanied by a
soundtrack of Bollywood and Korean Pop songs. Evvie started teaching herself Hindi as her
foreign language, using online videos and a textbook. Meanwhile, she kept up with the latest K-
pop videos. She also filled every notebook and paper margin with lyrics in Devanagari and
Hangul scripts.
Sophomore year – Evvie wasn’t done with visual design just yet. Inspired by her love of video
games, she spent part of the summer exploring 3-D modelling and character development and
fell in love with computers. Between this new focus, and her natural curiosity about languages,
coding was the logical next step. She began exploring coding by self-learning Processing 3.0, a
Java variant with graphics output, and she was hooked. She soon set her sights on a career in
video game design.
Junior year– brought a self-study of AP Computer Science A and a college course in video
game design she took as dual enrollment. She was completely energized by these
experiences and researched colleges with strong computer science departments with video
game design concentration.
Senior year– At her dad’s suggestion, Evvie did an independent study in machine learning and
automata theory using a college textbook. Though she spent most of her time in the
introductory chapters, her world expanded as she glimpsed the possibilities in cognitive
computing. She upgraded her college plans from video game design to machine learning and
for her senior project, she chose to study a real-world business scenario and propose machine
learning solutions for solving problems.
Evvie’s path from a pre-teen interest in fashion design to a vocation in computer science isn’t an
unusual progression. She leveraged the flexibility of her self-directed learning to delve into fun
outlets for her evolving interests. In this way, Evvie could extend or rule out possible paths in a
way that was authentic to her development as whole person. She wasn’t limited by traditional
school curriculum subjects, so her learning centered on what was she was actually interested in
and gave her the space to grow in her knowledge of herself and her capabilities. And, when it
came time to apply to colleges, the highly selective school she chose to attend commented that
her application was the most “individualistic” of the applicants’.