Joyce Zhu

Formal Education

University of Rochester

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Bachelor of Arts in Music, May 2017.
• GPA of 3.95/4.0; magna cum laude; with highest distinction in both degrees; Dean's List 8/8 semesters.
• Head teaching assistant for CSC 173 (Computation and Formal Systems): Responsible for hosting and updating the official class website, scheduling workshops and assignment due dates, and writing and releasing solutions for written assignments on formal languages and automata theory. Fall 2015
• Undergraduate Research Assistant, lab of Professor Philip Guo: Over two semesters, I analyzed thousands of forum discussions in a popular MIT MOOC introductory computer science course, wrote Python scripts to interface with a SQLite database and extract data about the frequency of several topics in these forum discussions, and studied the quality of instructional programming videos on YouTube and strategies for helping the audience understand programming concepts through the medium of video. I published a first-author paper as part of Professor Guo's lab in the 2015 VL/HCC conference. 2015
• Volunteer peer tutor for the Computer Science Undergraduate Council. 2014-2015
• Extracurriculars: Symphony Orchestra, Wind Symphony, clarinet lessons at Eastman Conservatory, Music Interest Floor.

Acton-Boxborough Regional High School

• High School Diploma with Honors, 2013.

MOOCs

Introduction to Linux: edX, August 2014.

Cryptography I: Coursera, May 2015.

• 2016 Robert L. Wells Prize

  This engineering school-wide award is awarded to a senior for excellence in both engineering and the humanities; winners are among the highest-ranking engineering seniors GPA-wise.

• Wilder Leadership Scholarship

  This major scholarship is awarded to incoming University of Rochester students who have shown overall excellence in both academics and extracurriculars and thus the ability to contribute to the University in their time there.

• CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers Award, 2016 Honorable Mention

  This annual award given by the Computing Research Association recognizes undergraduates in North American colleges and universities whose work demonstrates outstanding computing research potential.

• 2014 Iota Book Award

  The Iota Book Award was given to 16 University of Rochester sophomore recipients out of a class of 1364; it recognizes outstanding performance at the beginning of a student's academic career at the university. Recipients are selected by the Iota Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa based on scholarly achievement, humanistic values, co-curricular activities, and leadership potential as determined by academic records and nominations from professors, administrators, and university staff members.

• National Merit Scholarship

  I achieved National Merit Finalist status in my home state of Massachusetts in 2013 and was awarded a scholarship by the University of Rochester.

Quip (the productivity tool, not the toothbrush company)

• Software Engineer, summer 2017 - today
• Currently the Accessibility TL.

edX

• Software Engineering Intern, summer 2016
• Migrated various endpoints off the monolithic legacy Open edX service onto the ecommerce microservice and overhauled the receipts page design to reflect several new features.

Pixability

• Python Software Engineering Intern, summer 2015 (full time), September 2015 - April 2016 (part-time remote work)
• Designed and implemented a JSON-based query language for users to create query filters of arbitrary complexity when sending HTTP requests to exposed endpoints to retrieve a subset of records from a MySQL database. This mini-query language continues to be in use at Pixability; engineers have expanded its capabilities and it is now a core library in the backend toolkit.
• Extended these exposed endpoints’ sorting capabilities to allow users to sort on any computed metric; previously, users could only sort on a restricted subset of metrics corresponding with existing database column names.

Bertoldi Group, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

• Programming Intern/Visiting Scholar, summer 2014
• Taught myself rudimentary shell scripting, then wrote bash and Python scripts to help the research group automate the generation and submission of multiple jobs with different parameters to a high-performance computing cluster using the SLURM job scheduling system, then store all jobs' outputs in an easily-parsed central file.
• Wrote a shell scripting crash guide for scientists and researchers who are moderately familiar with Linux and performing tasks with the command line.

Casa Systems

• Software Development Intern, summer 2012
• Taught myself the basics of programming in C, then expanded the capabilities of an existing video streaming program to handle 1000 simultaneous streams instead of just 1 in both IP unicast and multicast applications. Engineers are regularly using this improved streamer for product development and testing.