STUDENT PROFILES
Rebecca Nesson
Area
Computer ScienceFocus
Nesson’s research concerns the study of computational linguistics, a subfield of artificial intelligence that involves building computers that can communicate in languages such as English. She also helped create the first Harvard class conducted completely in Second Life.Education
Harvard University, A.B. in Folklore and Mythology; Harvard Law School, J.D.I knew immediately it was something I would like to do. Pretty much since I graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High, I have been doing tutoring there.
Rindge is a tough school system because students come in with low skill levels when they start in ninth grade, and teachers are not necessarily in a position, with classes as large as they are, to catch everyone up.What the students do love is technology.
I am committed to getting to the bottom of whatever it is that makes many girls and minority students lose interest in computer science before they even have a chance to see how cool it is.
Tutoring lets me watch this process up close and gives me the opportunity to start working on it right away.
Admittedly, learning computer science is hard and requires students to push through logical thinking. They are going to make mistakes. So, if we are working on sorting an array of numbers, we will take numbers on a piece of paper and stand at the front of the class and run the sorting algorithm ourselves.
The students then can get a sense that the information is already there in their heads, making it easier to put it into the code.
Trying to figure out what does and what doesn’t work teaches perseverance. In science and engineering, failure is likely—but that’s not a bad thing. Failure often inspires creativity.