Interacting with Ease
Carly Bigelow ’25 studies web efficiency — and work culture — during her computer-science focused ASEP externship.
BY KATE DUNLOP
This summer, Carly Bigelow took her strong foundation in coding and computer science concepts to Boston, where she completed an externship for the SPS Applied Science and Engineering Program at the Khoury College of Computer Science at Northeastern University. Under the guidance of mentors there, Bigelow explored the coding language of WebAssembly to improve efficiency on the web — a new topic for her, but one she found interesting.
Web efficiency, Bigelow explains, is the ease with which humans interact with their computer hardware and software — useability and load time are two measures, for example. The web typically interacts with low-level languages that are not generally readable for humans but are used because computer hardware interacts with it more efficiently than older, high-level languages that are more easily written and read by humans.
WebAssembly can act as a bridge for a high-level language like C++ to be brought onto the web through compilation, translating it to a low-level language with more precision than Javascript, and offering characteristics that can unlock new levels of efficiency for the web. To research those possibilities, Bigelow tested the high-level languages Rust and C++ when compiled through WebAssembly versus when compiled natively.
I still need to figure out where I might apply my experience for the best fit, but ASEP is an incredible, formative opportunity to gain experience that almost no one else my age has and to get a sense of where I might see myself in the coming years.”
“I had 10 programs that served different purposes, each having versions written in Rust and C++. I compared the same programs to each other to see how they compared when compiled (preparing the code) and when they were run (producing an output),” Bigelow says. “The runtimes I received told me about the high-level languages I was working with and how they interact with themselves and when run on WebAssembly.”
Bigelow conducted her research remotely for the most part and quickly learned how to work in that independent environment to meet deadlines. Once a week, she commuted into the city to meet with her mentors and to work with Ph.D. students who welcomed her into their conversations and lunch breaks, making her feel like a valued colleague. On site, she could see firsthand how invested the older students were in their research and in the learning process. She especially appreciated the way they looked to each other for advice and ideas and has decided to emulate that spirit of collaboration with her ASEP peers.
“My in-person days were definitely the best; the work was even more interesting when in an interactive environment,” she says.
To prepare for her summer experience, Bigelow had devoted the Spring Term to learning about the mechanics of WebAssembly and how the web has evolved, as well as looking at Rust and C++; on the job, she learned to code in Python well enough that she was able to automate the testing of each program and with one command could return the outputs of 40 unique programs and their run times.
By summer’s end, Bigelow had come to a few conclusions about her research and her own next steps — one of which is that anything is possible.
“I am very interested in computer science and will pursue it in some way, but I don’t know if it will be the research path,” she says. “I still need to figure out where I might apply my experience for the best fit, but ASEP is an incredible, formative opportunity to gain experience that almost no one else my age has and to get a sense of where I might see myself in the coming years.”