From Hacking to Hong Kong: A Computer Science Student Explores Her Possibilities

Interning with Google. Studying in Hong Kong. Mentoring members of the Science Club for Girls. Earning first place honors at the 2013 Comedy Hack Day, an event that pairs coders and comedians to summon the creativity of both groups. These are just a few of the experiences Sarah LaPlante has had since coming to Northeastern.

The College of Computer and Information Science (CCIS) senior chose Northeastern for its computer science and cooperative education programs and initially was interested in cybersecurity. Participating in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition for two years gave her an opportunity to develop her skills and also determine that cybersecurity wasn’t the direction she wanted to take her career.

Instead, she gravitated to natural language processing. LaPlante, who added minors in linguistics and math to her computer science major, gained related work experience through a co-op at Basis Technology, a language analysis and digital forensics software company. She also enrolled in a graduate-level natural language processing course and says, “If you ask, you can take any graduate course as long as you’ve proven you can do it.”

Though she has left cybersecurity behind, LaPlante remains interested in hacking of a different kind. She joined the NU Hacks student club and has participated in several Boston-area hackathons, including the Comedy Hack Day held at the MIT Media Lab, the Berklee Music Therapy Hack, and the recent HackBeanpot 2015. LaPlante believes the mix of people from different backgrounds leads to generating new and creative ideas, as her team’s first-place finish in the Comedy Hack Day confirmed.

That’s not the only way LaPlante has become involved in the community beyond campus. She has given her time and talents to several local organizations, volunteering as a developer for Code for Boston, teaching young people to rebuild bikes, and introducing girls to programming. LaPlante began these activities to meet her civic engagement requirements as a National Merit Scholarship winner but says, “It has been really valuable to me. It turned out to be personally fulfilling, great experience.”

Another of LaPlante’s rewarding experiences was her fall 2014 semester abroad at the University of Hong Kong. LaPlante began learning Mandarin, completed a linguistics course related to the Chinese language, and studied computer vision and compilers. She took in the beauty of Hong Kong and traveled to Shenzhen on the Chinese mainland, intrigued by the city’s large maker and start-up community.

“Being there gave me a different perspective, things I didn’t know to think about or question,” LaPlante says of her time in Hong Kong. “If I could have found the time to do a year abroad instead of a semester, I would have.”

Before leaving for Hong Kong, LaPlante spent the summer as a Google intern involved with site reliability engineering. She was excited to work for Google, saying,“Everything they do is at such a large scale. And now I have a job at Google after graduation.”

– As seen in the February 2015 E-Newsletter –