Charlie Max Tharas

Hi. I hope you’re having a good day. This is my website, which has some information about me and my life. Check it out:

Education

TL;DR: I’m graduating with my bachelor’s degree in CS + Math from Williams in 2027.

Undergrad

Williams College, Williamstown, MA, 2023-2027 (Bachelor of Arts)

Anticipated double major in Computer Science and Mathematics, with a concentration in Cognitive Science. I’m currently participating in student computer science and research organizations, and conducting summer research on transportation patterns and microtransit solutions in the Berkshires. I’ll be TA-ing introductory computer science (CSCI 136) in my sophomore fall.

As a rising SWE, I’m also big into climbing: I teach bouldering PE classes, host climbing facility open hours, participate on the administrative board of the student climbing team, and compete regionally in bouldering. On the side, I also play the classical/contemporary guitar (shout out Leo Brouwer). Plus other stuff. Feel free to ask.

High School

Hunter College High School, New York, NY, 2017-2023 (6-year program)

Imagine a competitive liberal arts college, but as a high school. I did a lot of stuff, here’s some of it:

  • Was president of Computer Science Consortium, a competitive coding and general CS interest-based club.
  • Volunteered at the writing center.
  • Wrote articles for BITS, the computer science magazine.
  • Worked as a teaching intern for 9th-grade computer science classes and our school’s data science extracurricular.
  • Worked with Hunter Data Analytics for Change on hackathon problems and planning.
  • Took college classes at Hunter College, New York, NY, 2022-2023. (CSCI 23200 Relational Databases & PSYC 10000)

Check out awards and competitions on my LinkedIn.

Experiences

See also my resume, the list of projects I’ve been working on, and my teaching experience.

Work

  • Transportation researcher for Williams Center for Learning in Action over my freshman summer. Worked with a transit demand management coordinator from OHSU to study transit and mobility patterns in the Berkshires to brainstorm microtransit solutions for low density, poorly connected rural areas. Did full stack dev of a carpool web application to serve Williams students and Berkshires residents. Check back later for me showing that off.
  • Student developer for Williams Students Online starting in my freshman year. Worked on mostly the back end (in Go) to develop features for our student website, such as course schedule synchronization with user accounts, integration with Williams’s course rating service, new feature flags for the course catalog, and good old bug fixes.
  • Data engineering & bioinformatics intern for MSKCC MIND in the summer of 2022. I debugged and documented their Luna platform on Unix machines, built models to identify cell features on slide data, and worked on a .svs viewer and annotator that could integrate into their model training pipeline.
  • I also spend my summers working as a surf instructor at Rockaway Beach 🌊.

Volunteer

  • I was on the national executive board of Steel City Codes, a chapter-based nonprofit that provides computer science education to ~2000 students from underserved communities every year. Starting as a tutor in 2020, I became a chapter head in 2021, where I reached out to NYC school administrators to launch chapters at dozens of schools. In 2022 and 2023, I organized several hackathons (total 500+ participants, $15K+ cash-value fundraised), partnered with MRI Software to bring SCC workshops to their company HQ in Cleveland, launched new nationwide after-school and summer camp programs, and personally designed several new curriculum offerings.

Teaching

See teaching.

Projects

I love to analyze random data from my life (fitness, sleep, music history). I love to build machine learning models and play around with their applications (NLP chatbots, CV webcam models). I like to make games here and there (Unity, Java graphics). But most of all, I love simulation problems (“games you can’t play”: world generation, agent simulation, studies of emergent phenomena) that combine real-world thinking w/ code optimization.

See my GitHub and projects.