For the second consecutive year, Eliza B. ’19 has been named a Greater New York Affiliate Winner of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Award for Aspirations in Computing.

 

Eliza’s interest in computing started with her Grade 7 robotics class with Ms. Hope Chafiian. The class, made up of four students, built LEGO robots that wrestled each other and used sensors to follow a path the students created.

 

“Because we had so much independent work with the teacher, we were able to accomplish a lot,” Eliza said. “I really loved it.”

 

Since then, she has pursued her interest in computing each year through computer science classes, an independent study with Mr. Christopher York and now Independent Science Research (ISR). Eliza’s ISR project relates to artificial intelligence; right now she is building her own 20 Questions game.

 

“It’s been a lot of fun because I had to learn a whole new language [Python] to be able to do it,” Eliza said. “I’ve been making it so that the more times you play, the fewer questions it will need to ask in future games. It gets to know the type of answers that users will be thinking of so that it can gear its questions more toward those answers.”

 

Eliza said the NCWIT contest is not like most coding competitions in which the participants create an app or project. Instead, Eliza described her achievements and leadership in computing and talked about her aspirations. In addition to her win this year and last year, Eliza also earned an honorable mention in her freshman year.

 

In this year’s application, Eliza explained how she has used technology in her various leadership roles. She talked about her work as one of the editors in chief of The Voice, using InDesign and other newspaper software to make designing the paper more efficient. She also talked about how she has implemented Excel and PowerPoint in her student council role as class president for the juniors.

 

As a winner of the NCWIT award, Eliza will attend an awards ceremony in March, and she will also be able to attend meet-ups with other winners. In addition, NCWIT has a Facebook group where the winners share internships and experiences with each other.

 

“It’s really great to have access to all these different people talking about girls in computing and talking about what they’re working on,” Eliza said. “Everybody is always asking questions and giving each other advice.”

 

Last summer, Eliza interned at Group Nine Media, which is the parent company for NowThis, Thrillist and The Dodo. Through the internship, she learned about natural language processing while making an app for Google Assistant alongside a product manager. This summer, she hopes to find a stage management internship because she is also interested in theater. Looking ahead, Eliza said she would like to advance her computer science studies after graduating from Spence.

 

“I definitely want to take more computer science classes in college, but I also think it’s really important to see how that can be linked with other fields like community service and social advocacy,” she said.

 

Following the Parkland shooting in Florida, one woman Eliza met through the NCWIT Facebook group announced she was working on a project that uses predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to monitor social media and attempts to predict attacks. She said she was looking for volunteers to get involved, so now Eliza has joined her project.

 

“It’s great because I had never been able to work on any of my projects with a large group of people,” Eliza said. “I’m able to work with all these other girls on this super-pressing issue, and it’s cool that it’s mostly college and high school students who are pioneering it.”