about me

My name is Karina Chow and I am currently a Junior in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Though a student in one of the most prestigious computer science universities in the world, I consider myself more of a designer. I aspire to be a UX and interaction designer and programmer; to identify problems and to fix them with elegant and usable devices and interfaces. I've worked toward this aspiration by taking classes in Android development, communication design, cognitive psychology, and the software structures of usable interfaces at the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon. I plan to double major in Human-Computer Interaction.

I also partake in hackathons, and am a flexible member of the team able to act as both a designer and programmer. My latest hackathon was TartanHacks, hosted by a student organization at CMU and sponsored by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and Ideelis. The project we made can be seen in the "projects" section of this site.

This past summer, I interned for Adobe Systems and worked on an internal project management tool that visualizes a team or individual's progress on tasks and features. It allowed customizeable searches to include or exclude individuals and task status'. The project was done in Flex: a Flash based programming environment ideal for making web and mobile applications.

In my free time, I love to play jazz and rag piano as well as alto saxophone. I play alto saxophone in the marching band at Carnegie Mellon (appropriately called the "Kiltie Band" because of Andrew Carnegie's Scottish heritage) as well as act as Vice President of Public Relations. I love to play badminton and practice Aikido, a modern Japanese martial art. I also am a freelance designer, and accept commissions from local bands and non-profit organizations. Some of my work from these projects can be seen in the "portfolio" section of this site. As most students do, I also have a couple of campus jobs to help pay for college: I work as both a cook at the Waffle Shop, an interdisciplinary experiment mixing a talkshow and a breakfast restaurant into one hell of a place to be, and an Andrew Ambassador, the fancy name for the campus tour guides and the students who give panels, write admission blogs, and answer emails to the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.

The last, and in my opinion the most important, thing to say about me is that I am half Chinese and half German. I am both a citizen of the United States and Germany, and having grown up in such a culturally diverse house (both my parents are foreigners, not nth generation Americans) I highly value culture and heritage. My mother is German, and as like any other German, loves to travel. I spent much of my childhood traveling all around the globe, from China to Canada to Spain to Poland. Traveling to me is very important, as is studying other cultures. As such, I spend a lot of my time exploring the foods and traditions of other cultures (hence why I practice Aikido), and am currently learning to speak Spanish and German.