It’s amazing what one can find on the internet: new ideas, fascinating people, and of course cats.  It is so delightful to discover a deep well of knowledge, learn more about something new to you, or finally grasp the appropriate context needed to gain understanding.

Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that the ease of this insta-knowledge can lead to quick conclusions and easy answers, lulling some to think they “know” something or someone: all of the intimacy with none of the time, and little work.

As a journalist, I was aware of how extensive research can lead to smarter questions. But for this assignment, I was curious to see what goes missing when the process is reversed: Would relying on a trail of facts from the internet create a accurate picture, an appropriate analysis? How close could it come to the truth of an experience, or the essence of an individual? What goes missing? What is assumed?

Sophie Chou describes herself as a cat, reader, writer, and Hacker girl.

She told me she was a first year graduate student at MIT, working at the Media Lab. I “knew” this, and a bit more, from what I learned researching her online.

Sophie’s all over the internet, giving a talk about how to democratize data science to a major conference for computer professionals, cooking up really delicious looking inventive food (YUM), and sharing thoughtful and insightful social media and blog posts about her varied interests.

But becoming a computer scientist, and a creative, was quite the journey.

Sophie told me she was born in West Philadelphia, where her dad, a scientist, came to study for his doctorate at Drexel University.

Her parents met in Beijing, where they knew each other since they were young, before the revolution took her mom to the Sorbonne in Paris. 

Her family moved to Scotch Plains, New Jersey, where she was raised with her older sister, Cleo.

Here’s how she describes what she wanted as a child in this blog denouncing Boy Scout policies:

“When I was a little girl I had two main (American-as-apple-pie) agendas on my wish list: one, to be the proud owner of an American Girl doll, and two, to join the Girl Scout Brownie troup. My mother was a steadfast soldier against both fronts, no matter how much a begged and pleaded and whined, flipping the pages of the beloved catalog and circling favorite items until the staples wore off.”  [source]

From the age of five to fifteen, her world was with filled with reading and rhythmic gymnastics.  (I asked her if the two were connected. “There was definitely no causation, because I always liked reading,” she said)

Matilda was her favorite book as child. Reading began her love affair with words, and later writing.”The only reason I ever really liked school was from reading and writing was the other way to get to reading.”

Here are the words she used in 2013 to describe her time as a competitive gymnast:

“As maybe a few of you know, I had a rather interesting adolescence training as a competitive Rhythmic Gymnast for 10 years of my life. this included summer training camps in Canada and Russia, along with 20 hours a week of practice in middle school and other such crazy experiences. As it was occasionally traumatizing, most of the time I prefer to shove these memories in the back of my mind. However, sometimes, I do stumble upon them, and think of various things I’ve gained and/or lost from this decade of my life.

She didn’t consider herself “particularly good” though she placed in sport, and for a decade, pursued it like a career. On February 26, 2013, Sophie shared what she learned:

you can only really excel at doing something if and when

Young Sophie in competitive gymnastics.

you love what you do. This does not mean that the practice has to come easily; often, challenges are essential to enjoyment. However, make sure that the issues you are fighting are worthy pursuits.

and

 The relentless pursuit of perfectionism is lethal. The enjoyment of life and culture is not only pleasant, but has great artistic and social worth.

By fifteen, she stopped gymnastics (“the short version is I hurt my back, but I was like, this is too much”, she told me), took up dance classes, and joined the schools tennis team:  “It was really fun.”

Sophie was inducted in the National Honor Society, was named a National Merit finalist and distinguished scholar and involved in science competitions. She worked at Hunan Wok, and the local library.

She applied for college. “My entrance essay to Columbia was a narrative about growing up in the library, and I wouldn’t have gained admission without it.” [source]

On December 10, 2009, she shared with her Facebook friends that she “got into Columbia!”

Sophie chose to pursue chemistry when she began the fall semester of 2010, a subject she loved in high school. But her first year of college, she “hated” every class she took – except writing.

Computer science, she told me, was a lot like writing. “The fact that you do have a concept…and then you figure out how to get that across, and you model it and you draft it in a similar way.” Computer science theory was something with which she was aligned – a language she could understand.  Internships at OMGPOP, a failed gaming startup  secured her new path.

But it wasn’t all coding and programming. She also studied philosophy, and wrote four essays for the Spectrum opinion section of the Spectator newspaper. One piece examined how industry jargon “gets in the way of our ability to learn more and connect with interesting characters.”

Her most personal piece was her first one, written while a sophomore in college.

“I used to dream of communes and utopias,” she wrote. “Gradually and grudgingly, I have realized that when one relies so fully on the image of oneself, it can be heart-wrenching when this vision is shattered.”  With two years left on my plate, I hope to remind myself that when we stop hedging all our bets on a definitive notion of good, stop expecting our lives to be magical, that it becomes good. It’s a work in progress.”

She was a hackNY fellow, met a mentor mathbabe in the summer of 2012. She interned at Knewton, an education technology company, in the summer of 2013.

In 2014, she graduated with a degree in computer science, with a focus on machine learning.

When she was accepted at MIT last year, she wrote this on her blog:

I think if my mother taught me one thing,
it is that
it is not how successful you are
or how wealthy you are
or even how hard you work that matters.
what matters is how interesting you are
because that is your human value.

Interesting people are interested, and Sophie’s world consists of varied interests.

There is food, feminism, and of course, there are the cats.

“I’ve always just liked cats and identified with them personality wise,” she texted when I asked why she identified as a cat.

The cat Pusheen, from the webcomic, adorns her twitter header, and she on Valentine’s Day she tweeted: “Guys really important do u think @Pusheen is the new @hellokitty what does this mean for the easternization of western culture #mynewthesis.”

The other topic that rivals cats in consistency and frequency of posts is food.

“eating a meal is both an event and an action and an

Chef Chou’s interest in food began young.

indication. The food we eat (along with the food that we do not permit ourselves to consume) form little landmarks in our lives.” –September 2013 blog

 

Her food blog, Pika Chews, catalogues her culinary adventures: black sesame cupcakes with matcha buttercreme, butternut squash tacos, baozi, steamed buns.Her S’mores cookie bars were even highlighted on the foodie blog, Serious Eats. Her food favorites — eggs, a pikachu cake, and Super Mario cupcakes are snapped in colorful detail, and posted on Facebook, Instagram, ink361, Twitter.

Cooking, she wrote, is “her favorite way of dealing with stress“.

One could imagine that navigating the world of hackers and coders could be a bit stressful as one of the few females in a male dominated profession criticized for its’ treatment of women.

Sophie hinted at this in a tweet, a facebook post and in her blog.

“Let me tell you that unfortunately, I have *NEVER* worked in a single lab or workplace of a technical nature where I have not experienced some sort of sexism– ranging from inappropriate comments to outright harassment,” she wrote in October 2014. “That is right– not a SINGLE lab or company.”

While she’s been aware of “gender as a social construct“, she has only recently become aware that race may be one. “We seek a logical, scientific proof of the existence of race, yet issues of racial thinking and racism clearly cannot be approached in such matters,” she wrote in a response to her Race and Racism class she took last sememster.

When she took the class, she noticed a similarity between early racial categorization and statistical classification for machine learning. “What we are doing now– what Google does with its personalized search, what Facebook does with its unsettlingly accurate ads– is automating that same thought process of 19th century anthropologists,” she wrote in  October 2014. “We look at a person,… her technological imprint on the web, the traces she leaves, her purchase history, friends, and log-ins, then say: “what sort of human being are you”? And then, using our charts and tables– no longer printed ones, but weights on variables in our algorithms and databases of records– we first classify her, and after, yes, we rank her (sometimes we rank her first and then classify her, as well).”

Her evolving ideas about her identity, are some of the resonant evident of her journey. One of her most lovely essays about identity, reflected in a persimmon tree her parents planted in her yard. “Each one reminds me of my parent’s love and my roots– that I am not as American as apple pie, but that the fruit is sweeter still,” she wrote.

Her blog, which began in 2012 at the encouragement of a mentor, traverses on a range of topics.  A sampling:

 On her personality:  “I’m somewhat hot-headed and a whole lotta stubborn, so it’s very, very easy for me to jump to binary (GOOD || BAD) conclusions about things right off the bat, when in reality, this can be a silly, not to mention dangerous, practice. And if 2013′s taught me anything at all, people (and life) are constantly full of surprises.”

on the death of the first start-up she worked at: “if working for and supporting NYC startups for the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that life is unstable, unpredictable, and not to be taken too seriously. things change, companies boom and burst and are bought and then disappear; the next big thing is already yesterday’s news by the time you download it, but the relationships you make in the office will last far beyond those confines.

on dance: “Sometimes it’s good to want so much to be good at something that isn’t just a desk job.” “It’s a struggle, and so much work, just to be able to express one-tenth of what I want to say in my movement. But in that moment when I’m finally on the beat, and not stumbling over my own feet, I never feel so much alive.”

on creativity: “If you’re bilingual, do you know that feeling, where you kind of just “tune in” to another language, not even switch gears but just slightly adjust the radio knob to receive a different wavelength? That’s how I feel about the creative state of mind. You know that it’s there and a language you can speak but there are others equally adequate and all of them interesting to use, but also that if you don’t speak it for a while all of a sudden you’re fumbling over verbs and names. Whatever language you use in your daily life will be the easiest and sharpest tool, but you know the feelings of the words and sounds of the mother tongue”

Creative communication seem to connect the varied interests of Sophie’s choices: clearly explaining markov chains in text or video; doodling insights from the mind of an introvert; sharing how to make the perfect egg.

This assignment allowed me to deconstruct how we verify information, how we use it construct what we think we know, and how it shapes our assumptions.  I found that for someone with an active, rich online presence, learning about what Sophie did was easy.

But it did not provide the why: Why did she decide to pursue computer engineering? Why did stop gymnastics? Why didn’t she pursue writing? (She didn’t think it was a viable career option until later)

That omission was the difference between knowing and understanding.