I’m Selena Qian, and I graduated in December 2020 from Duke University with a degree in computer science and visual and media studies. I enjoy cooking and baking and have recently discovered a love for growing edible plants (initially started from the ends of eaten things like carrot tops! and now growing from seeds). I am now working as a Games Engineer for PBS KIDS.
In summer 2020, I was a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress on the Digital Strategy team. I created a project that seeks to make the recently digitized and now publicly available Sanborn Maps more accessible and intuitive for the casual user to navigate. To create this project, I learned about the Library of Congress API and how to access it in Jupyter notebooks (Python). I also learned how to use the D3 library for JavaScript and the JSON file format (and TopoJSON and GeoJSON) to dynamically create objects on a website.
In summer 2019, I interned at Pew Research Center as part of their design team. I worked on a variety of projects, from the lead graphic and featured images of a major report on Americans’ trust in science, to an illustration for the Center’s Medium blog, Decoded.
This site is a portfolio of various projects, including a game I created from scratch and two augmented reality mobile apps. It also includes my art and design work, much of it through DIDA (Duke Innovative Design Agency), the Duke school paper, The Chronicle, and my internship at Pew. I’m interested in working on projects that explore visual applications of technology and use tech to create an impactful product.
I’ve also included writing samples: my articles for The Chronicle, my experience advocating for New Voices Indiana state legislation, and my work for the Carmel High School paper and magazine, HiLite and Acumen.
Outside of art, writing, and coding, I play ultimate (previously for Swerve, the womxn’s club team at Duke and now in the DC area) and climb. I was president of Duke Science Olympiad from 2019-2020. I also was part of a Bass Connections research team exploring the impact of problem-based learning on girls’ math identity.
Selena Qian 