Matthew Tesch 

A rising senior at Olin College, Matt always has the feeling there will not be enough time to do and learn everything he wants--so he tries to cram it all in as soon as possible.  He is a systems engineer because he wanted so badly to take courses from every discipline, and so decided to split the difference. His first experience in coding was in elementary school, on an IBM-XT with Q-BASIC (in monochrome), but he has since become fond of many other languages, especially python.  Although he once had thought about minoring in music, he decided to stick firmly with engineering after coming to Olin--instead, he just chooses to direct orchestras for musicals, compose in his free time, and fiddle around with his bass trombone. 

Oh, and he thinks it's fascinating to make poor little physical simulations beat each other to smitherines.

Mel Chua

Mel used to be an artist, oblivious to the fact that there was a thing called "programming." That changed in high school when she got drafted to do graphics for a game several friends were coding. Several months later, Mel found herself debugging C++ at 5am, caffeinated... and happy. Four years and several programming languages later, Mel is pursuing her love of coding as an Electrical and Computer Engineering major at Olin College (who's trying to learn everything else on the side). She is notorious across campus for sleeping too little and doing too much, including TAing, theatre tech, piano, design research, cooking chemistry, and recreational mathematics. Future aspirations include developing educational technology, becoming an ECE professor, and learning to swing dance.

Andrew Bouchard

Resume

A native of Tennessee, Andrew is currently seeking to be the first person to graduate from Olin College with two degrees: one in Mechanical Engineering, and one in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He involves himself in many projects and activities, including swing dancing, PaperBike competitions, singing, political activism, and much more. Through the experience he gained during this project, Andrew gained a passion for programming and exploring learning algorithms to a level that he had not before, and he hopes to continue his exploration of the field during Google's Summer of Code 2006.