Blair Huang ’25

Blair Huang ’25 stood at the top of a hill in Murlo, Tuscany, Italy, watching as archaeologists methodically searched for remnants of an ancient Etruscan society. They toiled among the remains of a community where, over 2,500 years earlier, artisans fired pottery and crafted textiles.  

She wasn’t there to dig—instead, she leveraged the computing and data science skills she had learned during her undergraduate studies at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) to organize what they found, painting a picture of the past using the technology of the present.  

“Computer science isn’t just sitting in front of a computer,” said Huang, who is now a graduate computer science student at Manning CICS. “It can be really applicational, and it can apply to a domain that you very much care about.” 

As her overseas experience might suggest, Huang’s had an unconventional path to computer science. While she initially intended to study history as an undergraduate, her curiosity led her to add computer science as a major, carrying a historian’s instinct for context and pattern into how she approaches it.  

“Even in history, numbers can tell a story,” she said.  

Discovering Computer Science 

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects didn’t come easily for Huang in high school.  

“I was so convinced that [it was] just not my thing,” Huang said. “I kind of shunned the entirety of STEM and anything adjacent.” 

Instead, she focused on studying history—her “first true love”—when she first enrolled at UMass Amherst in 2022. Despite studying her passion, Huang said she felt like she could take on more.  

She shopped around on SPIRE and enrolled in COMPSCI 119: Introduction to Programming, taught by Teaching Faculty Cole Reilly, one of her “biggest inspirations.”  

“It opened a whole new world to me,” Huang said about Reilly, who would conduct live programming tasks during the class for students. “I was like ‘Wow, I wasn’t aware you could do stuff like this.’” 

Huang said that while the humanities and STEM seem to be on two different sides of the academic spectrum, both areas of study place emphasis on building on previous discoveries to gain a novel understanding of modern issues. 

“In order to understand ... the present, you have to continuously revisit the past, reevaluate what you know of it, and then connect it to what you’re living through,” she said. “With computer science ... technology keeps evolving. What we knew in 2022 is not the same as what we know in 2026. So you’re forced to ... keep refreshing your knowledge.” 

Tech in Tuscany 

Eventually, Huang was introduced by Reilly to an outlet that combined her love of history with computer science.  

In the summer of 2024, Huang traveled to Italy for an internship as a researcher/developer at The Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project, a 60-year-old dig site focused on unearthing remnants from the Etruscan civilization, dating back to roughly 700 BCE.  

From an underground garage near the dig site, Huang used programming tools to create visuals that tracked where pottery shards, bones, and other relics were found. To make those visuals accurate, much of her time was spent poring over old physical trench books and field notes, investigating discrepancies between what archaeologists wrote on the page and what appeared in the digital records. 

She also indexed newly discovered items and helped digitize older records, making decades of archaeological data more accessible to researchers studying how the ancient society was structured. 

“Things that come out of the earth are not worth it if you don’t keep it in context," she said. “In order to give it any meaning, you have to keep track of it.” 

Staying at ‘The Forefront of the Present’ 

Huang once believed STEM wasn’t for her, until Reilly’s class opened her eyes. By her senior year, she was serving as an Undergraduate Course Assistant (UCA), helping guide other students through the course.  

She wanted to connect with peers and give back to courses that gave her so much. But the experience also reminded her of her roots as an aspiring historian. 

“[Being a] UCA forces you to understand the foundational stuff and see it from multiple perspectives, which is similar to what history’s doing,” Huang said.  

Today, Huang works as a machine learning science intern at Expedia, where she focuses on reading novel ML research and seeing how the company can leverage new techniques for its own purposes.  

“It goes back to what I was saying ... you’re forced to stay at the forefront of the present,” she said.  

Huang understands that some students who struggled with STEM subjects in high school may feel intimidated by studying computer science. Manning CICS, she said, provided her with the tools and support system she needed to be successful.  

“Things aren't always going to feel intuitive at first," she said. "But over time, you build that intuition.”