Victoria Prisco - About Me

My "Mission Statement"

I have been interested in Computer Science since I was 10. After teaching myself extremely rudimentary HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I took CS classes in high school and came back to my 10-year-old self’s realization that Computer Science may possibly be the coolest thing in the world. I have been studying in the field for 2 years and I think my initial assessment was right; Computer Science is cool. It allows for miraculous power and innovation literally at your fingertips, and you are only constrained by the limits you impose on yourself. At WashU, I have taken very different but nonetheless very fascinating classes on different skills in CS that further my philosophy that there is truly nothing that cannot be accomplished. I have taken classes that have absolutely no relation to STEM or CS and I found more of an appreciation for the art of what I do. In my very first week in college, I became a TA for CSE131 - Introduction to Computer Science. Showing people — many of whom are not CS majors and have expressed to me that they are only in the class to meet a requirement — the joys of writing code, finding bugs, and creating new things, has been the highlight of my college experience. I want to discover new things that I have either taken for granted or have never thought of myself, and see the development of them in real time. I want to fail, which I undoubtedly will, and learn why, and what to fix for the next iteration.

I feel incredibly lucky and excited to learn from more experienced computer scientists and my peers and be a part of any team that is using the unfathomable power of computer science to develop something new.

My Relevant Experience and Involvement

Teaching Assistant for CSE131: Introduction to Computer Science

I have been a TA for CSE131 since my first semester at WashU, and I have TA'd every semester since. As a base-level TA, I contributed the following to the class:

Leading "studios", which are 80 minute class sessions once a week for 2 to 4 small groups of 2 to 5 students. Each studio, students had given problems to work through relating to that weeks module. Depending on their understand of the material, I would help them get through the problems and review the material taught.
Working between 2 and 8 hours of office hours a week, where I helped students with issues from detail-level bugs to helping them understand broader concepts.
Proctoring and grading exams, three times per semester.

After 2 semesters, I became a section lead for the class, where I made more administrative contributions:

Taking attendance and managing around 20 to 30 TAs during classtime
Helping TAs and students with bugs and issues that they may not have been able to navigate
Serving as a contact point between TAs and supervisors

After another 2 semesters, I was selected to be the head TA for the class. As Head TA, I:

Read over 200 applications and selected 80 to 100 TAs for the upcoming semesters
Trained first-time TAs on both logistics and how to best help students
Worked with the lead instructor to modernize old course materials and improve class flow to optimize students' learning experience and class experience

Research Assistant in Dr. Caitlin Kelleher's Code Stories lab

As a part of WashU's CSREU: Computer Science Research Experience for Undergraduates, a 10-week summer program where I worked with Dr. Kelleher and PhD student John Allen as a part of their research.

The lab has been performing Human-Computer Interaction research, where they have developed a tool called the "Code History". The history shows the development process of an entire project, with the main goal of reducing the pain in navigating a foreign code base. The idea behind the story is to show web searches, code changes, and other decisions that a programmer made while working on a project. More information about Dr. Kelleher's lab can be found here. My goals over the summer included:

Preparing the lab for a user study, where we read other research in order to design the most effective and conclusive study possible.
After creating a study design, we prepared the application to be sent to the review board and transitioned into creating Code History integration into an IDE (integrated development environment). I started using Visual Studio Code's API to create an extension in the app, where my goal was to seamlessly integrate the actual code base with our developed stories.

KWUR 90.3FM Webmaster

I have served as Webmaster for WashU's underground radio station, KWUR, beginning in Spring semester of 2023.

I have rebuilt and recreated the station's website and internal system into a self-contained website that more effectively fits their needs and style. The website lives at kwur.wustl.edu.
I formerly managed the station's scheduling system, built with Django, to allow DJs to pick their show times and to deal with show collisions.
With the old veroisn of the website: I maintained and updated the station's website, which was formerly built in Ruby. I most recently overhauled the content management system used on the website. The new CMS allows other people in the club to create and edit blog posts, which are then published onto the website.