I love tackling problems with complex, interconnected components. First as an undergraduate at Haverford, I completed a Bachelor's in Computer Science while also minoring in Economics and Chinese. This breadth of subject area forced me to constantly adapt my approach to problem solving. For example, I was a coding teaching assistant for Intermediate Microeconomics, where I mentored students in how to bring a quantitative angle to a subject that is often quite ambiguous. I also brought this mindset to my activities outside of class, such as when I revived the bike share program on campus, coordinating with donors, students, administrators, vendors, and community members to provide an essential service to my college.

Now as a Master's student at the University of Pennsylvania, I've applied this interest in a setting with serious technical depth. As part of my computer science degree, I've taken rigorous systems courses such as Internet and Web Systems, Networked Systems, Operating Systems, and Databases. Each of these courses have involved serious hands-on projects. For example, I built a web search engine from scratch, which required careful thinking about scalability tradeoffs as I deployed my engine to EC2. Links to all of my most impressive projects can be found here.

Outside of these systems courses, I've also benefited from a strong theoretical foundation in the math behind computer science, taking courses in Probability, Convex Optimization, Algorithms, and Machine Learning. Each of these courses has strengthened my mathematical depth while helping me develop a creative approach to problem solving. For example, I leveraged neural networks to solve a unique problem in Chinese language translation, which has been an interest of mine as a student of the language. You can learn more about it here.

Most recently, I work as a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania, where I process geospatial data pipelines used for machine learning with Python and Google Cloud. I am graduating in May and looking for full time software engineering jobs with a backend focus. If you know of any opportunities and are interested in getting in touch, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or directly at my email address: jtreed@seas.upenn.edu.