Women Who Reign: Tanya Balaraju

“Just keep following the heartlines on your hand” — Florence + The Machine’s song “Heartlines”

Tell us about yourself along with a fun fact!
I’m a junior majoring in Computer Science at Rutgers University with special interests in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. I’m an organizer at HackRU and the Community Director of USACS, the undergraduate computer science organization at Rutgers. Over the past year, my peers and I at USACS have worked incredibly hard over the past year to make our our organization truly representative of our community. More specifically, I’ve been heavily involved in leading our effort to diversify our community; a large part of this effort has involved boosting our online presence to encourage more students to get involved with USACS. My peers and I have also worked on reaching out to prominent and interesting developers outside of Rutgers to join us for our Speaker Series.

When I’m not coding (these days, that means writing search algorithms for AI), I enjoy photography, writing poetry, making mini sculptures, working out, and being outdoors (in no particular order).

Fun facts: I love the Harry Potter series (proud Gryffindor here!), and I also have two black cats named Boo and Pepper.