Hey, I'm April! At Reed College, I received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, and also spent time (when I could) fitting in some other subjects I love like Economics and Linguistics. My thesis was on explainability in Large Language Models, where I discussed coding my own neural network from scratch in Python and working with a simple language model from HuggingFace to investigate how filtering methods used in Anthropic's influence function research could be improved. I...
Hey, I'm April! At Reed College, I received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, and also spent time (when I could) fitting in some other subjects I love like Economics and Linguistics. My thesis was on explainability in Large Language Models, where I discussed coding my own neural network from scratch in Python and working with a simple language model from HuggingFace to investigate how filtering methods used in Anthropic's influence function research could be improved. I really enjoyed my time studying at Reed—in most of my classes, I was supported in trying to understand formulae, definitions, and theorems more completely, which I've always had a much better time with than rote memorization or the like. I was able to find a much deeper appreciation for topics like Calculus, vectors, and matrices than I ever had the chance to in high school. As someone who loves these subjects, when I'm tutoring I want to help students understand what's happening on a deeper level, beyond just the surface level details.
I've always been interested in opportunities to support students in their learning. For several years when I was in middle and high school, I volunteered with the Sunday school program at my family's parish, where I helped supervise and teach a class of five year olds. More recently, at Reed I worked as a tutor in Calculus, Intro to Analysis, and Computer Science Fundamentals, and as a TA in Linear Algebra and Algorithms and Data Structures, where I ran weekly study sessions and graded homework assignments.
In my free time, I hang out with friends, read, work on silly video game ROM hacking projects, and occasionally speedrun. More recently, I've started blogging. Back in high school I used to volunteer as a head moderator of the Minecraft speedrun leaderboards, and had the opportunity to try to teach some concepts in statistics more widely while investigating a high-profile case of suspected cheating. I still sometimes hear that this really helped someone in their AP Statistics class!
