Women Software Engineers in Boston Episode 2: Claire Sun
Claire Sun, Programmer at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California
Claire graduated with a B.S. in Neuroscience and Computer Science from Brandeis University in 2018. She is interested in systems neuroscience and how neurological behavior can be described computationally. During school, Claire worked at a software design firm where she investigated the possibilities of developing a voice assistant directly connected to EHR to decrease the amount of transcription needed by practitioners. Since graduating, she has been working at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California at their Boston base. Claire developed algorithms for quantifying laser speckle contrast imaging (a medical imaging technique for determining blood flow) and currently works on the NLP team for cross-language translation for low resource languages, that is languages that do not have a lot of previous English
translations.
I have included some of my favorite quotes from the interview:
On translation:
A lot of what makes translation hard is the linguistic aspect. You can have a much more accurate translation from English to Spanish that has similar structures, than you can from english to Chinese, but not with Chinese. Because of that you cannot have many one-to-one translation of sentences. There are so many edge cases just like in a computer system.
On being fulfilled:
Claire says “Like I said, computer science is an experience field, the more experience you get the faster you go. You should never criticize someone for their seemingly simplistic questions and we as more experienced people need to be aware of the struggles and weed them with that respect, they are going to you for help, that means they want to get better, it does not matter if they are asking what is an array, because one day they will learn.”
On being a new grad…
People that have hired you do not expect you to know everything.
On the future…
Claire cares a lot about the up and coming people because they need to be guided.
On being true to yourself…
Claire says “the most important thing is to be true to yourself”, “sometimes we lead our selves astray by thinking we should be interested in this field or that field. It is really important to know yourself as you are moving into a career. Being straightforward with yourself and others is very beneficial.
Shoutouts to all the amazing women that Claire looks up to:
Talie Massachi, who is pursuing her PhD at Brown University
Sofiya Semenova, who is also pursuing a PhD at the University of Buffalo
Antonella DiLillo, Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University
You can connect with Claire at:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-sun/
Twitter: @codesforaday
It was such a pleasure getting to know Claire. If you know of any awesome early career women+ in software in the Boston area, I would love to connect.