"One of the really nice things about the undergraduate CS program at Harvard is that, even with honors, it’s only 12 credits, so there’s a lot of freedom to explore—especially psychology, which is my secondary field, as well as philosophy or history. Part of the exploration has been seeing a lot of ties between what I've learned in CS and what I'm learning in other classes. For instance, this past fall I took CS 136, which is Computational Economics. There’s a lot of game theory involved, and now I'm taking a government class on international political economy. This semester I am also doing an independent study with Professor Ashley Whillans, and one of her grad students, at the Harvard Business School on a project about creativity and resource scarcity. So, the question we’re asking is: if, and if so under what conditions, does resource scarcity affect the creativity of solutions? The topic of my independent study is actually applying that to the startup industry. I think there's a lot of street wisdom in that industry, about funding in particular and whether it's good to get a lot of funding and therefore get your name out there and attract talent, or not relying on a lot of funding because you want that feeling of scarcity, like having your back up against the wall, to force you to be creative. I think a lot of the discourse on the topic has largely been from the industry—the investors or founders—and I think it'll be really cool to take a look at this industry through the organizational behavior point of view and run some analytics on some pretty good models of startup success and quantify start up creativity as a function of how much funding they receive, which is a question I'm really interested in.” — Janet Chen, A.B. '19, computer science