Research, The Great Outdoors, Art Exhibitions, and Sunsets

Letter? I Hardly Know Her! - December 2023-June 2024

Welcome, WELCOME to Letter? I Hardly Know Her! I’m Apoorva (the her in question), a researcher, keynote speaker, artist, writer, and advocate for youth and gender minorities in STEAM. I’m currently an undergraduate at Stanford studying math, political science, and CS. This newsletter is a means for me to keep track of my personal & professional growth, and to share the stuff I’m working on! First-timers: it’s great to meet you, I’m so glad you’re here! For my regular hardly-knowers, here’s your promised, extra special greeting: welcome you cool breeze on a hot summer day—you make the heat bearable.

If you too want an extra greeting, you better subscribe:

I try to publish newsletters on each MONTH/MONTH, i.e. 1/1, 2/2, 3/3, … , 12/12. Is it the most efficient system? Frankly, no. But is it the most funky fresh? Absolutely it is.

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Oops, it’s been a hot minute. Time has a way of escaping me, and I somehow have just wrapped up my freshman year at Stanford. I have no idea how this happened, but let me tell you how it went!

Publication in Mathematics of Computation

Exciting news! A paper that I worked on with my professors at San Jose State, Dr. Daniel Goldston and Dr. Jordan Schettler, was accepted for publication in the Mathematics of Computation journal. In the paper, we derive explicit formulas/computations to obtain the current best-known gaps between multiple E2-numbers (which are integers that are the products of two distinct primes). You can check out the paper below:

Explicit Calculations for Sono's Multidimensional Sieve of E2-Numbers

(If you’re curious, you can see all my previous research here.)

IWD 2024 Art Auction

"Do not give up. Keep on your quest.”
- Junko Tabei, First woman to summit Mount Everest.

Since 2019, I have painted a portrait every Women's History Month to celebrate the incredible women that have shaped the world we live in.

For International Women’s Day 2024, for my sixth portrait, I painted Junko Tabei, an inspiring Japanese mountaineer, environmentalist, author, and, with a spectacular team of women, the first woman to summit Mount Everest. Throughout her life, she showed relentless determination, from figuring out how to fund her climbs to eventually creating history. Despite being knocked unconscious by an avalanche on her way to the summit, the thought of giving up never crossed her mind. She had a tremendous strength of spirit that she brought to all her climbs.

With the eBay auction for the portrait, we raised an incredible $1,000 with bidding and company matches! An enormous thank you to Pats Pena, MBA (she/her) and Renee La Londe for all their support over the years and in this auction! And of course a huge thank you to all the lovely people who shared the auction!

Since Tabei sadly passed away from stomach cancer in 2016, 100% of the funds from this auction, excluding shipping and auction costs, went towards the Fred Hutch Cancer Center to provide patient-centered care and accelerate research in the latest cancer treatment options worldwide. If you're looking for another way to support this fund, you can visit my Redbubble store with various items featuring my painting, like prints, canvases, phone cases, stickers, and more.

Thank you all for an amazing IWD and Women’s History Month 2024 celebration!

(If you're interested, you can see all my previous IWD portraits here!)

Adventures in the Great Outdoors

This year has brought a lot of adventure and new experiences, especially in the outdoors. Like I mentioned in my last newsletter, I had the chance to go backpacking for the first time in the fall and I loved it so much that I went again in the winter in Joshua Tree!

Backpacking in Joshua Tree

As a part of a outdoor leadership course, we spent our spring break backpacking through Joshua Tree. The trip was 6 days in total, and we hiked about 25 miles over 4 days. As we each took turns leading a day of hiking, it was a week of so much learning, from planning our days, creating our meal plans, navigating off-trail, and preparing for the weather and climate conditions. At one point, our tents were at risk of blowing away from the insane 50mph winds!

The people I went camping with were the best group I could’ve asked for; the days were filled with laughter, card games, a few accidental small fires (immediately put out!), cooking, and dealing with unfortunate cacti attacks. What a week!

Outfitting Specialist at the Stanford Outdoors Center

I didn’t grow up camping, my first time was actually through Stanford’s SPOT program (a pre-orientation camping trip). After my incredible experience with SPOT, I wanted to learn more about the outdoors and how to exist in it safely and respectfully.

So, I applied for a job at Stanford’s Outdoor Center, and I’m now an Outfitting Specialist there (with some of my dearest friends)! In my job, I help prep our adventure trips and be part of ensuring others have a safe and enjoyable outdoors experience like I did. So far, I’ve gotten so much hands-on experience from restocking med, repair, and duty kits to food packing to gear repairs. This job is teaching me me the ins and outs of the responsibility it takes to be a trip leader and the importance of managing risk in the outdoors. I’m constantly learning new things there!

Everyone I’ve met so far at the Outdoor Center has been the epitome of kind and welcoming, with a shared love for an adventure. My favorite part of my time here has been seeing how much diversity and inclusion in the outdoors is valued, as we engage in meaningful discussion on how to make sure we are actively making space for others in the outdoors and understanding the history of the lands we stand on. I can’t wait for what’s to come next year!

Wilderness First Responder Certified!

To finish the requirements to become a trip leader at the Outdoors Center, I took a Wilderness First Responder class last quarter and am now officially certified!

Wilderness First Responders are people trained to respond to emergency situations in, as you probably have guessed, the wilderness. We learned how to deal with medical emergences in remote locations, from splints to foot care to knowing when to evacuate. It was a class I feel like everyone should take to be better prepared to deal with emergencies anywhere.

Data Science Intern at ClimateAi

During our winter quarter, as a part of a team in the Data and Mapping for Society Club at Stanford, I worked with ClimateAi (a climate resilience tech company) to model and create data visualizations for reservoirs, leveraging remote sensing to monitor reservoir levels.

Using a huge dataset (from the OPERA project) at JPL, we created the dashboard above to provide real-time data on water levels, enabling policymakers, water managers, and researchers to make informed decisions regarding water allocation, drought management, flood control, and more.

Research at the Graduate School of Business

This quarter, I started as a Research Assistant at the Stanford Graduate School of Business! Our lab conducts research on human memory, judgement, and decision-making. Utilizing NLP, machine learning, and statistical methods, I help analyze experimental and online text data for potential business applications. It’s been a lot of fun so far! It’s a very interesting intersection of psychology and business, and I’ve learned a lot about understanding consumer behavior.

Winter Quarter Recap

I’ve been really lucky to take some fascinating classes this year. In the winter, some class I took were:

• POLISCI 113: Understanding Russia: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order

  As the big paper for POLISCI 113, we had to write a 4000 word policy memo addressing a contemporary policy debate concerning Russia's role in the world.

  For my policy memo, I decided to write as the late Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia, on what he would recommend to Putin regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Having read his last memoir, Midnight Diaries, in which he wrote about his belief in the integration of Russia with its neighbors to create a “united Europe” without dominant force or war, I thought it would be interesting to explore his perspective and recommendations as the one who handed the baton to Putin, the authoritarian driver of the invasion.
  
  I also wrote an op-ed on Putin’s superweapons (such as the Poseidon, a nuclear-powered underwater drone that is claimed to be able to cause a massive tsunami that can go 1500 km inland). I explored the implications of these weapons in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, past presidential elections, and Putin’s image as a leader.
  
  This class has been one of my absolute favorites this year; our professor Kathryn Stoner is an incredible lecturer and every class I learned an insane amount of information about Russian history and politics.

• MATH 151: Intro to Probability Theory

  MATH 151 was a huge learning opportunity and great intro to probability theory (and how hard it can be). We learned about random variables, expected value, variance, inequalities, and the class culminated with the proof of the Central Limit Theorem.

• MATH 152: Number Theory
  MATH 152 ended up surprising me as another one of my favorite classes this quarter. Every week we had some very interesting problems to work on, albeit difficult ones! In the final half of the class, we discussed Dirichlet’s theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions. Professor Alex de Faveri is a great lecturer, and I’m glad I decided to take it (even though juggling two rigorous math classes along with intensive writing classes proved to be a bit of a challenge).

• ITALIC 95W: Immersion in the Arts

  I had to take my first required writing class this quarter, in which we developed a research-based argument on a topic of our choosing related to any sort of arts practice. I ended up writing my (very long) essay on the real-world implications of the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits”, analyzing its predictions for our digital economy, privacy, and relationship to reality in our increasingly digitalized world. With the theories of philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Zygmunt Bauman, and Hans Jonas, the essay discusses the current moment’s awareness of technology, digitalization, and surveillance in conversation with the episode.

  
  In the society the episode constructs, every service must be paid for, even quiet and darkness for sleep. In such a world, each person’s body and mind are co-opted as tools for profit—as rapper, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Jay-Z succinctly puts it, “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.” When physical reality is conflated with virtual reality, “Fifteen Million Merits” predicts that we risk losing autonomy and individuality. As the world becomes increasingly digitized, the line between private and public existence is dissipating in a surveilled, hyper-connected, and ultimately irreversible tech-governed society. To be part of the new connected world, one must buy into it.

(Feel free to ask if you’d like to read any of the papers above!)

Declared Math Major!

Earlier this spring quarter, I declared my math major! Super exciting stuff—I got a free shirt! I’m very lucky to have Dr. Ravi Vakil as my major advisor, my professor for the abstract algebra class I took in the fall and the newly elected president of the American Mathematical Society for 2025-27.

!! ARTWORK ALERT !!

Of course, I couldn’t let the year go by without ample art (especially because I lived in the arts dorm).

As a part of my ITALIC 93 class this spring, we studied the ways that art and artists have moved around the world and how they move us as viewers. We were then asked to create an artwork that addresses these themes in a place that’s central on our campus map: the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, engaging either with artwork on view at the Cantor or with the space of the Cantor itself.

I teamed up with two friends, Maya and Kylan, to create a piece that explores the questions: who is America? What does it mean to preserve one’s culture when the history is still living? Because the Cantor has one curator for the Americas, Oceania, and Africa, we want to interact with the diversity within these places and the amount of people it takes to tell these stories.

We created a multi-media collage in which we examined our own cultural identities in relation to our personal history, from paintings to pictures to written stories, interspersed with family photos. In this space, the three of us come together, triangulating to find our position in the world. We encourage the viewer to move inside the display, able to touch or feel anything. The space is meant to be a contemplative and collaborative one, displaying a spectrum of experience that we hope sparked conversation within the walls of the Cantor.

This was my side of the display, where I combined family photos, drawings, and my painting of my mom to bring into conversation the immigrant experience.

Events!

Speaker for Pi515’s Girls’ Entrepreneurship Incubator 2024

At the end of March, I had the opportunity to be a returning speaker at the Pi515 Girls Entrepreneurship Incubator this year! I spoke to young girls in Iowa about sparking innovation, and how they can jump start it for their own goals. We talked about asking crazy “what if?” questions and making unconventional combinations to find their niche to solve big problems. Huge thank you to the amazing Pi515 team for inviting me and running such an empowering event!

Discover Citadel | Citadel Securities 2024

I was invited to attend the Discover Citadel | Citadel Securities event, a two-day, all-expenses paid immersive experience in New York City. It was a fun weekend getaway, and a great opportunity to catch up with some old friends that were also there!

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The Fun, the Fresh, & the Funky

Thankfully, there was no shortage of fun, fresh, and funky activities this year. Here's some snapshots of just a few of them:

We met Sal Khan!

Two of my closest friends (Maya and Weston) and I teamed up for our dorm San Francisco scavenger hunt, and we won! (Thank god, because we were in SF until 11pm doing the tasks, from eating dim sum to visiting the Japanese Tea Garden to going to the top floors of random hotels.)

I went tide pooling with my sister at Natural Bridges State Beach!

We took a trip to celebrate Mother’s Day at home:

Showed around RSI 23 kids at Stanford Admit Weekend!

The last day of finals, we sat on the Oval to watch the sunset <3

Ventured to Sunset State Beach to, of course, watch the sunset (again)

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Coming up next…

• SURIM 2024

  This week I’m moving back to Stanford for SURIM, their undergraduate math research program. For the next 10 weeks, I’ll be conducting research with a small group. About what? No idea, TBD!

• GLAM Event with Cisco

  Team GLAM is super excited to have another in-person event coming up next week! We’re partnering with Cisco to host this two-day event.

• Speaking on a Panel for Women in Engineering

  Details to come in next newsletter!

• Discovering Monterey Bay Sophomore College (SoCo)

  This September, I’ll be boarding the Western Flyer (the ship famous author John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts took to the Gulf of California in 1940) to explore the incredible diverse ecosystem of Monterey Bay. As a part of a small group of students and professors, we’ll be collecting oceanographic and biological data at sea using a variety of research instruments to create projects of our own design at the Hopkins Marine Station. It’ll be a whale of a time!

• DEI Coordinator for SUMO 2024-25

  I was elected to be the DEI Coordinator for the Stanford University Mathematical Organization (SUMO) next year! I’ll be responsible for organizing DEI-themed events, and for fostering community within individuals of marginalized identities within the mathematical community here. Very excited!

• Project Lead for Cardinal Policy Group 2024-25

  This year, I worked as a policy analyst in a group project on mining and Indigenous rights, researching mining permits and company policies and potential alternatives to mining in collaboration with the SIRGE Coalition and Earthworks. Next year, I’ll be a project lead! I’ll be designing it this summer with my co-lead and we’ll build it out with a team in fall quarter.

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A Quarter for Your Quote?

"You're never ready for what you have to do. You just do it. That makes you ready."

— Journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber

Very fitting words for this year. Anyways, that’s it from me, Hardly-Knowers! Sorry this was so long, thanks for sticking around. Until next time!

Sincerely,
Her (Apoorva)

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Feel free to contact me about speaker events, comments, and anything else at apoorvapanidapu@gmail.com! You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Medium, and check out my art gallery, personal website, speaker website, or Instagram.

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