Fall 2025
This fall semester slipped through my fingers…
Sarah's Blog
About me
I’m a senior at Columbia University, studying CS and math. I’m interested in IoT and robotics, as the application of my CS education to real-world impact.
New to my blog? Start here
I’ve written three series of blog posts which span the essential bits of who I am and what I’ve been thinking about over the past year.
I also write enjoy writing poetry! A friend told me he thinks writing poetry helps him learn more about himself. You can see my attempts at that here.
Projects
I’m currently involved in two research projects.
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MOSES (Columbia Gang Lab) - An information-minimizing algorithm applying the group theoretic concept of ‘symmetry’ to enable DNA origami self-assembly. Published in ACS Nano and featured on the front cover!
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TuneBuddy (NYU Dennis Shasha Group) - An opinionated practice tool for musicians, which compares a user’s recording to a MIDI score and computes the user’s mistakes in real-time. Under supervision of the kind NYU professor Dennis Shasha.
I also help lead the Columbia Robotics Club—encompassed in which lie two more projects.
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MakeCU - Columbia’s flagship hardware hackathon. I was the co-director in planning this event, alongside Joseph (the goat). I wroteup a retrospective of the event here.
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CCBR - An open-source modular humanoid project, in collaboration with some friends I met at ICRA. I’m the Columbia liason and a founding software member of the team.
For fun, I also play violin in the Barrio Tango Orchestra with some amazing friends.
Recent posts
On burnout
Hesitancy It was November 13th, and I was staring down the big, scary “December 1st” deadline on the MIT EECS program website. I’d just recovered from planni...
The MakeCU retrospective
Seedlings of MakeCU MakeCU planning started in June, shortly after I got back from ICRA.
Thoughts, and the lack thereof
The problem of fragmentation Premise: Chronically overworked, and sick of it! After overworking myself sophomore and junior year, this semester I tried final...
Alcohol is my culture!
Alcohol is my culture! Over the summer, I spent time learning more about food and alcohol as part of my “learning more about the world” era. This semester, c...
Explaining the Binding Library project
This semester, I was tasked with finishing up the binding library project for Dan Redeker, and packaging it into a user-friendly interface. This blog post ai...
Tightrope Walker
Visual analysis essay written for my Art Humanities class at Columbia.
Splash?
Splash?
Jellyfish
Jellyfish
Summer 2025
Through Columbia’s Work Exemption Program, I’ve had the unique opportunity to spend my 2025 summer working at the Gang Lab in New York.
On catsitting, motivation, and responsibility
Last week, Juyoun (“soul sister,” lawyer, and director of the Barrio Tango Orchestra) asked me if I was interested in catsitting for her while she catsits fo...
Systems of cruelty: The ants and the starlings
Yesterday I was at CAVA with Sean, a recent Columbia grad from Singapore.
Elevated alcoholism
Disclaimer: I am and was 21 years old at the time of drinking anything
Dating apps, discipline, and Sisyphus
Returning to dating apps A binge-like approach to life I tend to go through life in binges. Binging one TV show, book, project, friendship, hobby, type of fo...
Sunfall
Sunfall
3:00 AM
3:00 AM
On mechanical keyboards and consumerism
As part of my “learning more about the world and robotics” era, I went on a shopping spree trying to redefine myself.
An analysis of organizations
CCBR: A project that bloomed from ICRA After ICRA, Donny reached out to our group chat proposing a project idea over the summer: building a modular, open sou...
The ICRA retrospective
The ICRA retrospective It had been 3 weeks since we’d last caught up—Raghav and I independently ended up at two different conferences happening at the same t...
On procrastination and bioinformatics
A groundbreaking revelation I was today years old when I realized the convoluted and “novel” data structure I’d been bashing my head against for the past few...
Object permanence, powerlessness, and the mystery of the night sky
A monthly malaise At the start of each month, I get these annoying bouts of malaise, perhaps due to the personal reflections which the start of each month in...
How MOSES paints with symmetries
Gang lab: Self assembling materials The Gang lab is a materials science lab focused on the fascinating problem of self assembling materials.
Theorems are like libraries
Theorems are like libraries
Why are vectors vertical?
My math professors in college would often intimidate us into writing vectors as vertical, transposing them when convenient, without explaining why. This alwa...
A comprehensive look into the YIN algorithm
For my Numerical Methods course last semester, we had to create a final project on a computational project of some interest to us. We were given the entire l...
A rough introduction to groups
I’m currently taking an abstract algebra course, taught by the amazing but quirky Michael Thaddeus. On the first day of class, he told us that this would be ...
Poetic naturalism and the pursuit of truth
Does free will exist? One day, Raghav asked me if I believed free will was real. I thought for a bit, but before I could even respond—like a 5th grader smili...
A day in the life at Gang lab
A day in the life at Gang lab I’m grateful to the Work Exemption Program for enabing me to continue working with the Gang Lab for my Spring 2025 semester at ...
Visualizing the string edit algorithm
For my research with Professor Dennis Shasha from NYU, we’re using the string edit algorithm to compare two ‘strings’, user-notes and midi-notes, to return a...
A life lesson I learned from a violent video game
I watched a documentary this morning on Silent Hill 2, a Crime and Punishment-esque video game about a man who killed his own terminally ill wife out of love...
Visualizing combinatorics with trees
In all counting problems, we have some $n$ number of items and we want to choose some $k$ of them. There are two fundamental tools for computing this - permu...
WTF is compactness
A compact set is one where every open cover has a finite subcover. WTF?
Balls and sets: Topological logic gates
In my Modern Analysis class, we went over a significant amount of basic topology. I was confused at first, but I found it ultimately gave us a toolkit of con...
The art of naming variables
The helix problem Just as I thought I had finally debugged all of the edge cases of the algorithm, last week I went into the lab and was asked to try out the...
A foray into metric and vector spaces
The metric space bridges real analysis with topology by introducing the notion of a distance onto a set of elements. They are a general setting for studying ...
The real numbers are an ordered field
Real numbers The set of real numbers $\mathbb{R}$ is an ordered field, meaning it’s defined as being a “tuple” of four elements, which includes An ordered...
My monitor problem; an algorithm
The monitor problem I ordered a new monitor for my dorm last week, and it arrived yesterday! But it’s 16 inches large, and I’m quite lazy to retrieve it from...
A gentle introduction to the MOSES algorithm
Ganglab - Fall 2024 This past summer, I started working with the Gang Lab at Columbia University as a chemical engineering research assistant. I received a g...