Zoe Liu
What's your year and major, and what semester is this for you in SAAS?
I'm a second year, first semester in SAAS, and majoring in data science and minoring in CS.
How's the semester been for you so far?
It's been pretty good so far, I've hit my goal of joining a club with some cool and interesting people, and I'm glad to have made some new friends. Classes wise I'm taking CS170 and CS61C, both of which are challenging and interesting.
That's interesting, having a goal be joining a more social club.
Yeah, SAAS is the first club I'm a part of that contains members that have the same interests/career goals as me. Previously, I was in CalSol, the UC Berkeley Solar Car team, and I really enjoyed being a team member and getting to work on the solar car. CalSol had some super cool and intelligent people, but I did feel a little out of my depth since most of the club was EECS or MechE. Although I loved what I was learning (how to make molds, working with polycarbonate and fiberglass, etc.), I felt that I wasn't getting to grow as a data scientist/computer scientist.
I'm not trying to bash on CalSol or anything, I truly enjoyed my time there. I actually raced with them over the summer in Nebraska at the Formula Sun Grand Prix (our track race) and won second place with our six-year-old car, and that was a really cool experience. I got to meet a bunch of other solar car teams (the Russian car was signed by Putin himself, so I touched his autograph lmao) and got to bond with my team members.
On to SAAS, and R&P; what are you working on?
My research project centers around the relationship between speech patterns and personality, specifically level of neuroticism (negative emotionality). Research has shown that people with more tendency towards neuroticism tend to use more first-person pronouns like I and me. I'm testing to see if that's true, and I'm also just doing a lot of feature engineering to find the features in speech that best predict negative emotionality, like maybe the number of "like"s used, of "uh"s…
So, kind of like linguistics, with some psychology.
Yep, I was actually drawn to this question due to what I was learning in my Psych 1 class. We learned that Facebook could pretty accurately predict personality traits like extroversion, agreeableness, etc. by looking at the pages you liked. For example, people who liked Kesha and, say, Jack Daniels tended to be more extroverted. I was wondering if I could do the same thing with speech, effectively "data mining" speech patterns to predict for personality.
How did you decide on the design of the experiment?
Originally, I wanted to look at the relationship between dreams and personality, so I wanted to follow a group of people and have them anonymously document their dreams and send it to me via google forms, but that was way too complicated and had too much variability. I decided it would be cool instead to look at speech vs personality, since it was close enough to what I was interested in, which is basically predictors of personality. I read up on the design of psychology experiments, and drafted my own intro, which I read to everyone before our recorded conversation begins. I drafted questions I would ask, like "how are your midterms going?" etc. etc., which I hoped would get my interviewees talking for a long time (people tend to be passionate about midterms and talk for a while about them) and not be too personal. I tried to follow the ethics of human-based experiments as much as I possibly can, in short. Ethics are really important to me, since they guide good research.
How do you plan on analyzing the data?
I'm planning on conducting sentiment analysis on the words to see if people that tend towards neuroticism tend to use more negative words. I also plan on using feature engineering to look at which features of the text best predict neuroticism, like I mentioned above. It's a lot from what I learned in Data100 (a fantastic class btw, really useful), and some other members of SAAS also recommended tools I could look into to help with analysis.
You mentioned earlier that you wanted kind of like a close-knit environment in a club and that's why you really enjoyed being in SAAS now; could you elaborate on your experiences in SAAS?
Our R&P social was a lot of fun. We went to Uji Time after a Saturday meeting and played a board game by Cyanide and Happiness. Kind of like Cards Against Humanity, except in comic form and a lot funnier. Echo won that round by playing some pretty fucked up cards, which was hilarious and surprising, and narrowly beat out Yehchan. Welcome night with Jeopardy was also really fun (I love Jeopardy rip Alex Trebec). Yeah, I just like board games and games in general so I guess it's not surprising that some of my favorite memories from SAAS include them.
Would you say that most of the people you interact with in SAAS for whatever reasons are people in your committee?
Yep, I guess that's just the nature of it. A lot of the other clubs on campus have a similar trend, where people tend to be closest with others in their committee. I suppose it's unavoidable, given how big SAAS is, and there's not a lot of reason to interact with others outside your committee besides going to socials. One solution is to limit club size, but then you start becoming exclusive, which I understand SAAS actively tries to avoid.
I wasn't going to ask if you didn't bring it up but since you did, how do you feel about SAAS's structure?
I really like that SAAS has a CX team that focuses on developing their members. A lot of clubs on campus look for "stacked" people, a term I've actually heard being used and bragged about. I don't think SAAS should trade a closer community for a more exclusive and less individual-development-oriented one. Since Cal is such a large campus which already so much inherent competition, we should pride ourselves in having an inclusive environment and helping those struggling to get started in their career. I'm kind of speaking for myself here, since I was totally blind to the CS community before college and had a really hard time getting experience to actually join the clubs on campus I was interested in. I'm really proud of communities like CS/Data Scholars and SAAS that actively develop their members.
Do you have anything you want to say to people in SAAS who may not have known about you before or R&P or just anything in general to people who are reading this?
It's easy to get caught up in the competitive environment and compare yourself to others in a negative light. Remember that you're young, you're at Berkeley and in a really cool club on campus. Statistically speaking, if you keep the same trajectory you're at right now, you'll do pretty well for yourself in life. So keep working hard, but remember to enjoy your time on campus and make physical and mental health a priority.