Campbell Phalen

Schellings Model of Housing Segregation

For my final project in a Function Programming course I also took at the Univeristy of Chicago Masters in Computer Science Program, we designed an application that would model housing segregation. The application itself is really interesting to play around with, and better yet it's written in Haskell which, after this course, is a favorite language of mine. I uploaded the source code here: https://github.com/cphalen/SchellingsModel. If you have Haskell downloaded feel free to give it a run!
Women in STEM Website

In collaboration with the WiSTEM (Women in STEM) club at my school, I worked with another student to create a NodeJS website for the WiSTEM club. The website would allow users to discuss opprotunities and experiences releveant to women operating in the predominantly-male world of STEM. Our plan was to roll this website out across schools in the Chicagoland area. In the end, the club leaders decided they wanted to go in a different direction with the website, but I've included the source code here: https://github.com/cphalen/WiSTEM
Student Council Website

I'm in my 3rd year of operating my school's Student Council website. Working on this website has been an exercise in versatility: whenever the Student Council had a request I had to find some way to work it on the site. As of now, the website supports a system for voting that the school implements during Student Council elections, a system for class offiers to distribute information, a virtual suggestion box, and even a platform for users to sell their used books to incoming students. The website implements PHP and MySQL, take a look at https://sc.ucls.uchicago.edu
Mathematics in LaTeX

I'm enrolled in a topics of mathematics course at my school this year. Formally, we do mostly linear algebra and our plan is to continue with multivariable calculus in the winter. However, we also have weekly problem sets that are more focused on real analysis. My teacher has encouraged the class to write up our solutions in LaTeX — this way we have a digital record of all our proven theorems as well as a way to revise our proofs after an initial write-up. The other benefit is, of course, that we were introduced to the beautiful world of LaTeX formatting! After six or so weeks of writing up these problem sets, I ended up with a number of LaTeX documents chalked full of math. I've uploaded the whole lot here, go take a look if it piques your interest: http://seas.upenn.edu/~cphalen/LaTeX/.
Star Trek Database

I took a databases course at the University of Chicago Masters in Computer Science program junior year and, as my final project, I created a webstie for storing all revelant information for perhaps my favorite TV series: Star Trek! The course specialized in relational databases, so we used MySQL; although the frontend might not demonstrate this directly, there are a number of stored procedures and constraints being run in the background. I also really took advantage of Bootstrap styles (as I did on this website) to compensate for my bad sense of design! Go check out this project at https://mpcs53001.cs.uchicago.edu/~cphalen
Prep Hoops Voting Bot

Junior fall a basketball player from my school was selected along with 7 or so other basketball players in the state to be a part of an online pool on the Prep Hoops website. So, I decided it would be worthwhile to repurpose Selenium WebDriver, a technology I had been using at work which allows you manipulate a web browser. I was able to quickly write a script that voted for my classmate about 8-10 times a minute, and because each driver was distinct, we could vote multiple times from the same machine. Unfortunately, our tactics weren't quite enough to win our classmate the victory! But we still placed about 4000 votes and had a lot of fun. I uploaded to Python code to this address if you're curious: https://github.com/cphalen/PrepHoopsVoting

Penn Labs

Penn Labs is a dedicated team of designers, developers, and engineers who build systems to improve student life on campus. Our solutions help tens of thousands of students with everything from extracurricular exploration and campus involvement, to course planning and lifestyle conveniences. One major project I contribute to is a Python Django web-application called PennClubs that acts as a registry for all student organizations on campus. We completed a major suite of online services that allow new students to engage with on-campus organizations despite being unable to travel to campus due to COVID-19 health restrictions. To read more about Penn Labs you can find us here https://pennlabs.org if you want to checkout PennClubs specifically, our web application is available at https://pennclubs.com
CIS 120 Teaching Assistant

On-campus I work as a teaching assitant for an introductory computer science course called CIS 120. This is a course that I took during my freshman fall, and ever since I have been a TA. I teach a weekly small group lecture to around 20 students whose assignments and exams I am also responsible for grading. Additionally, I hold weekly office hours to meet with students and help them work through the subject material. Being a TA for a computer science course has been a great way to give back to the computer science community at Penn while also meeting lots of really wonderful programmers. You can read more about CIS 120 here https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis120/current

Blizzard Entertainment

I spent the summer of 2020 working remotely at Blizzard Entertainment. During the summer, I wrote C++ code communicating with in-house software to build out new server features for one of our video games. Most notably, I helped decrease wait times for players while still maintaining fairness between teams. I also got to try my hand in making some creative decisions about player experience. This was another intriguing way to introduce some of the social science and psychology we study in my major into my work. Interning at Blizzard was also a really rewarding experience because I got to show up for work every day knowing that the products and features I was working on would be thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated by our players.
Citadel, LLC

I was a software engineering intern for three consecutive summers at Citadel. I worked with professionals at the firm and was given real work. In my first summer I worked 7 weeks 8am-6pm on Gloal Quantitative Strategies — this is the larger long term equities trading team. I developed software that consolidated tasks and simulations running on a number of servers and displayed data in a single dashboard. I was invited back for a second year and worked with the Core Reporting team. With Core Reporting I built software that tracked discontinuties between market and in-house historical trade data. If I were to sum up the entire experience, I think the people were the most important part. I was able to work alongside some really expert and experienced developers. They had not only a lot of wisdom to share, but were also very welcoming, humorous, and a lot of fun to work with.
Starchup

This was my first ever working experience. I always like to tell the the story that I was made fun of for not being able to drive! When I started working at Starchup I was 15. I spent about 10 weeks working with this 6-person company the summer after my Freshman year. There was a lot that was new to me, but I was fortunate in that I was assigned real work; I spent the majority of the summer designing an end-to-end testing suite for the company's main product. Doing real work was really a formative experience because it allowed me to really value my work for the first time. The company's product was essentailly Uber for dry cleaning, unfortuntely the company has gone under, but I am very thankful to the people there for welcoming me into the work force for the very first time.
Carbonless Community

I currently work as the CTO for a 3-person company called Carbonless Community. I was approached by a parent in my high school community to help promote clean energy usage. Alongside a few other high school programmers we assembled a professional-grade website advocating for green energy practices. We also wrote reverse energy auction software for low-price energy procurement. Finally we present ComeEd sales metrics in a cohesive manner (which is harder than you might expect! ComEd really doesn't want you to know how much everyone is paying for their energy!).

Campbell Phalen

Computer Scientist | Software Engineer