Sarah Ridley

Sarah Ridley

I am a computer science concentrator at Brown University graduating in May 2026. I am interested in software engineering, software security, and data privacy.

Please see below for information on my professional experience, research participation, personal projects, and awards.

Resume

Transcript

Professional Experiences

My most recent professional experience is working as a Software Development Engineering Intern at Amazon Audible in Summer 2024. I joined the Player team to work on a backend project for 12 weeks in Newark, New Jersey.

Previously, I spent Summer 2023 working as a Site Reliability Engineering Intern at Pearson Education in Durham, North Carolina. I spent 10 weeks at Pearson working on creating a cloud-based AI chatbot to query internal Pearson documentation. In this role, I also studied for and earned my AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification.

Research Experience

In the winter of 2024, I joined the ETOS research group at Brown University. I've had the opportunity to learn Rust and work on a research project focusing on privacy preserving systems, specifically using policy-protected data. I'm excited about future opportunities to continue expanding my skills in a research context.

Projects

Hack@Brown

In my first semester of college, I joined Hack@Brown, which organizes Brown University's annual hackathon. Students at Brown and from colleges across the US come to Brown to compete in the hackathon. I became a part of the Dev team, where I learned React to help create the 2023 website for the hackathon. The following year, I became a co-lead for the Dev team, where I led the development of the 2024 website.

Rideshare Fare Predictor

This rideshare fare predictor was my first project in my Advanced CS: Data Science and AI class that I took in my senior year of high school. This project is entirely written in Python. I used the pandas library functions to make an SVC (Support Vector Classification) predictive model for based on data about the prices of rideshare services found on Kaggle. I also used geopandas to make the map that shows up on the right side of the GUI. To make the GUI, I used the tkinter library.

Alpha-Beta Pruning Mancala

This game of mancala is also written in Python. The player plays against the computer, which uses search trees and alpha-beta pruning to pick its moves. The computer makes a tree with every possible move, pruning some branches with alpha-beta cutoffs, and then chooses the best move. Depending on how many moves you let the computer look ahead to (which correlates with how many layers of the tree it will create), the computer can become virtually unbeatable.

Relevant Coursework

Fall 2022

CSCI 0190 Accelerated Intro to Computer Science: functional programming, data structures, algorithms
MATH 0180 Multivariable Calculus: partial derivatives, double and triple integrals, vector calculus in 2- and 3-space

Spring 2023

CSCI 0220 Discrete Math: logic, number theory, set theory, graph theory
CSCI 0300 Fundamentals of Computer Systems: C, C++, computer memory, operating systems, distributed systems
MATH 0520 Linear Algebra: vector spaces, lines and planes, linear transformations
APMA 1650 Statistical Inference I: probability, sampling distributions, hypothesis testing

Fall 2023

CSCI 0320 Intro to Software Engineering: Java, Typescript, React, API interaction, mocking, user accessibility
CSCI 1650 Software Security and Exploitation: assembly language, buffer overflow, return-oriented programming

Spring 2024

CSCI 1040 Basics of Cryptographic Systems: RSA encryption, differential privacy, cryptocurrency
CSCI 1690 Operating Systems: threading and scheduling, disk interaction, device I/O, file systems, networking
CSCI 1710 Logic for Systems: Forge, Z3, formal methods, SAT and SMT solving

Additionally, I was hired as a teaching assistant for CSCI 0190 in Fall 2023, CSCI 0300 in Spring 2024, and CSCI 0320 in Fall 2024.

Awards and Scholarships

Brown Alumni of DTrace Teaching Assistant Endowment

In the fall of 2023, I was selected as the Brown Alumni of DTrace Teaching Assistant Endowment recipient as a teaching assistant for CSCI 0190. This meant that my teaching assistant compensation was provided by donors' endowment.

Rewriting the Code Grace Hopper Scholarship

For working with Rewriting the Code as a Rising Leader Intern, I was awarded a scholarship to cover my attendance to Grace Hopper Celebration in Orlando, Florida in 2023.

National Merit Finalist

For high achievement on the PSAT and SAT, I was chosen as a National Merit Finalist in 2021. Along with this distinction, I won a scholarship of $2,500 to contribute to the cost of attending Brown University.

AP Scholar with Distinction

After achieving scores of 5 on all AP classes I took (AP Computer Science A, AP US History, AP Spanish Language, AP Calculus BC, AP Physics C: Mechanics, AP Statistics, and AP European History) I earned the award of AP Scholar with Distinction.

Presidential Scholar Candidate

During my senior year of high school, I was nominated as a US Presidential Scholar Candidate, along with only about 5,000 other students in the country.

Durham Academy

In my senior year at Durham Academy, I was awarded the Senior Technology Award for my contributions to technology programs. This includes my leadership as a captain on the DARC SIDE Robotics Team, exceling in computer science classes, and technology outreach to younger students. I also was awarded the Algebra II award for achieving the highest performance of all students taking Algebra II in my first year of high school.

Personal Interests - Sewing

Face Masks

In the summer of 2020, I sewed 50 face masks and donated them to a birth center in Western North Carolina. I had never sewn face masks before, but during the beginning of the pandemic, demand for face masks was high. I chose bright, colorful fabrics for the face masks, and I found it fulfilling to know that my sewing skills have helped strangers. I have continued looking for other ways to use this passion to help others.

Tote Bags

One of the most recent sewing projects I completed was a cream and pink tote bag. After my success with this tote bag, I decided to sew DARC SIDE inspired tote bags as my parting gift to my robotics mentor and my co-captain. DARC SIDE is the name of my high school's robotics team. I used a very similar technique on these tote bags as my first tote bag, but I had to learn how to sew circular blocks. In the future, I hope to use this technique to make circular patterns on quilts.

Quilts

My absolute favorite type of sewing project is quilting. Quilts take much more time than any other sewing project on this page, and they are so incredibly rewarding. The pictures I included below show the process of one of my quilts, which I made as part of an English project last year. The quilt is about how the sewing machine simultaneously reduced women's work load to make clothes for their family, but also emphasized their domestic familial role. The symbols I show in this quilt are the Venus symbol, the globe, an old sewing machine, a new sewing machine, and a factory along the bottom. The factory and the globe represent how today, the labor of sewing clothing is outsourced to third world countries. This makes the price of clothing incredibly cheap, encouraging consumers to buy and subsequently waste more clothing. This process of harmful to our world because the workers do not earn living wages and because rising clothing production and waste have horrible implications for our climate.