Meet Olga Zinoveva '12

Studying Computer Science at Harvard has unleashed Zinoveva's creativity

Photo courtesy of Olga Zinoveva.

Name Olga Zinoveva '12

Concentration Computer Science

Hometown Chicago, Illinois

"When you go into Harvard," says Olga Zinoveva, "you can't possibly expect what is going to happen to you for the next four years."

Entering Harvard, Zinoveva thought she wanted to follow a "traditional" pre-med track and found comfort in the thought of having her life and all her courses planned out for years to come—until she took Computer Science 50 at SEAS and found herself bursting with creativity.

That one course—the fourth most popular class at Harvard—"drastically turned my path," she says.

"I realized that Computer Science can be a ton of fun. It wasn't just something where I would sit in front of my computer for hours and hours (which is a fun thing to do anyway!) but it was also a very social experience. It was a great mental challenge."

For her final project in CS 50, Zinoveva designed and coded an Android app for people walking in unfamiliar cities. It would search crime data for their location and warn them if they were entering a dangerous part of town.

Having always imagined herself conducting surgery or laboratory research, Zinoveva is amazed at how satisfying the creative process can be in Computer Science, despite the many long nights she now spends working on problem sets.

"It's always very invigorating when you're done," she says, "and it's absolutely awesome to feel like, 'I have accomplished this. It's finished, and it's working.' It's a feeling that I haven't really experienced doing biology p-sets."

"It's [like] beating your head against a wall for hours and then getting it. It's great."

Zinoveva is a member of the Harvard College Interactive Media Group, a student club that designs and develops new video games (as well as hosting frequent tournaments), and she teaches at an after-school theater program for kids in Boston. Her creativity is also finding an outlet in CS 161, a course in which students collaborate to design and build a complete operating system.

"The Computer Science department just has this really great energy," she says. "They're very young, they're very energetic, and they're always very much open to the students coming up to them and saying, 'Oh, hey, I have this great idea. Would you be willing to help me figure this out?'"

"It feels liberating almost to be able to go in and say, 'I want to do x, y, and z,' and to do x, y, and z, instead of being constrained to a path," she adds.

Now in her junior year at Harvard, Zinoveva reflects on her time here and looks ahead to the new opportunities that have presented themselves.

"It's not at all what I expected it would be," she says, "but it's awesome."