Grace Su

Grace began independently following online programming courses in the fifth grade. She has continued developing her interest in computer science throughout all four years of high school. In 2017, she wrote an award-winning essay titled “Unemployment in the AI Age,” which was published in the ACM newsletter AI Matters. She furthered her interest by writing the science fiction story “The Guardian” to imagine how AI could be used to benefit society and encourage the public to embrace the development of safe AI. This story received an Honorable Mention from the Minnesota Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. In 2018, Grace was selected to attend the three-week long CMU AI4ALL summer program, where she participated in classes led by the School of Computer Science’s faculty and developed a housing price prediction model using the Python scikit-learn library. Recently, she was hired as a summer software engineering intern in the Trading Partner Development Engineering team at SPS Commerce, developing a software tool in Python to automate the management of Jira Agile issue tickets and help improve managers’ productivity.

In high school, Grace played flute with the Minnesota Youth Symphonies and was a National Merit Finalist. She has also been actively involved in Science Olympiad since the seventh grade, competing in local, state and national tournaments. Meanwhile, she founded the Girls App Development & AI club, the first STEM club dedicated to girls in her high school, and led two teams to develop apps and business plans to compete in Technovation. Grace is also involved in her local community to create and lead outreach programs for female students to explore the opportunities technology can offer. She created and led Girls’ APPspirations, a summer program for middle school girls to learn how to program and develop apps to tackle social issues of their interest. In 2019, she received a National Honorable Mention award from NCWIT. In her free time, Grace enjoys perusing a variety of books and music.

At Columbia, Grace hopes to explore path-planning in AI and how to promote socially responsible technology development in order to help the world become an AI-integrated society that is inclusive and human-centered.