Student Profiles

Jewel Loree
Junior
Interdisciplinary Studies

Bridging Humans and Machines

When Jewel Loree, a junior in Interdisciplinary Studies was three years old, she was the only kid she knew who was learning how to count on the MS-DOS operating system. “Everyone in my family worked with computers,” she says. “My dad was a computer programmer, my mom did data analysis, my stepdad was a computer programmer. We had so many computers in our house.” Which is why when she enrolled at ASU, she didn’t want to simply follow in her parents’ footsteps. Instead, she declared a major in psychology and developed an interest in cognitive science. Halfway through her sophomore year, she decided to “stop running away from computers,” and switched to Interdisciplinary Studies, declaring concentrations in both psychology and informatics and pursuing an informatics certificate. After taking classes such as Information and Data Management and Memory and Cognition, she found one of many ways the two disciplines connect.

In Information and Data Management, she learned how databases rely on associative thinking to link and sort information, while in her Memory and Cognition course, she learned how people’s thinking is primarily associative. “That’s when I was like: my major makes sense! If we can teach computers to think more like people, we can have more user-friendly programs and machines. And if we can teach people to think more like machines, they can become more efficient.” Now, Loree proudly carries a white Eee PC series laptop and hopes to eventually earn a graduate degree in bioinformatics.