What does it mean to have an innovative mindset? We spoke with four alumni about their ability to evolve and take risks in their work lives. They also share how UPrep prepared them for their journeys.

Taha Ebrahami '97

Taha is the director of Tableau Public, Tableau Software’s free data visualization platform to explore, create, and publicly share data stories online. Her curiosity has led her through several career innovations, including being a journalist, obtaining an MFA in nonfiction writing, and working in marketing for finance companies in New York City. She moved back to Seattle in 2018 and, in addition to her job, is currently working with Sasquatch Books to write and illustrate a book mapping Seattle’s widest and oldest street trees (out in spring 2024).

Tell me about your pivot from working in finance to becoming the director of Tableau Public. 

I’m a writer and storyteller at heart, so my interests have always centered on communication. During my last job at a financial
company, I often had 15 minutes of anyone’s attention to help them understand a complex topic so they could make an informed decision. That’s when I recognized how powerful it is when you combine data with visual storytelling. I found out about Tableau Public and started using it to distill a lengthy report the company published. When I heard Tableau Software was looking for a new director for the platform (an old friend from UPrep alerted me about the job posting), I decided to apply.

What do you love about working at Tableau Public?

I’m a big believer in following your curiosity, so I love working on a product that empowers anyone to use data to explore their interests. I also love the data visualization community that has formed around this passion for good data storytelling. They’re analysts, students, teachers, artists, governments, and journalists from around the world.

How did investigating your own interests lead to the book you are currently writing?

During the early days of the pandemic, I started taking epic walks and decided to learn how to identify trees. Out of necessity, I began drawing these crude analog neighborhood maps that I could carry on my walks that included descriptions of how to identify certain trees. Then I found a street-tree data set the City of Seattle has published since 1950 and I started playing around with it in Tableau Public. One thing led to another, and these drawings became the inspiration for my book.

How did UPrep help build your innovation skill set?

UPrep was a great place for learning how to be curious and how to think. One of the key parts of innovation is being open to possibilities. If you lock yourself into one goal, you miss the exciting possibilities on the periphery. The ability to think creatively is also what led me to get interested in using data to communicate effectively—which led me to my current work at Tableau.

The teachers at UPrep sparked my curiosity and gave me permission to be creative. The small class size mattered a lot because that’s how I learned how to express myself and not be afraid to talk out loud. We were also treated like what we had to say mattered. I started a petition to ask the school to drop a class requirement called Life Skills and I was encouraged to present our case to the curriculum advisory committee. While I remember that experience in detail,
I strangely don’t remember if we won or not, which is indicative of the unintended, lasting impact. That kind of real-life learning experience wasn’t out of the ordinary at UPrep—and that’s how I started practicing being actively curious and recognizing unscripted opportunities.

 

Henry Ehrenberg '11

Henry is a co-founder of Snorkel AI, a technology startup that builds software to help data scientists and developers quickly create high-quality datasets and AI models. He earned a B.S. from Yale and a master of science from Stanford,
and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for six years.

Please explain the work of Snorkel AI in lay terms.

AI [artificial intelligence] makes our lives better in many ways, from self-driving cars to using Google Translate, but there are a lot of challenges when it comes to building AI systems. That’s where Snorkel AI comes in. To create a new AI system, you need to provide it with an enormous data set for it to learn from. Usually, this involves experts manually labeling thousands or millions of
individual data points with the right answer. For example, if I am building an AI system that can read X-ray images and find ones that likely have a broken bone in them to help prioritize radiologists’ time, radiologists first need to provide thousands or millions of X-ray images with broken bones manually marked. This is extremely time-consuming and not a great use of a radiologist’s valuable time.
At Snorkel AI, we build software that helps experts and engineers work together to create data sets in AI systems more quickly and less expensively, and to make those systems more understandable.

What’s Snorkel AI’s origin story?

My co-founders and I started Snorkel as a research project during graduate school at Stanford, and later turned it into a company. When we tried to apply exciting new AI tech to real-world problems at places like Stanford Hospital, we found ourselves constantly bugging experts to manually label data for us. Snorkel AI was born out of this frustrating and inefficient experience and wanting to speed up the process of building high-quality data sets for creating AI systems. I’m not a serial entrepreneur always on the hunt for a new business to start, but I was convinced that this work needed to be done so people can solve real-world problems with AI technology.

What’s your definition of innovation?

To me, the definition of “innovation” is super simple: doing something new. Something that’s more interesting to me is how you make innovation impactful. Every year, I reread “You and Your Research,” a talk by mathematician and engineer Richard Hamming about what it means to find and solve an important problem. To me, to make innovation impactful, you need to be empathetic—
really understanding challenges people are facing to solve the right problems in the right ways.

How did UPrep help build your innovation skill set?

Whether it was a teacher or friends, someone was always actively encouraging me to try something new and to explore ideas. The curriculum was also thoughtfully designed with a unique focus on how what you’re learning touches the real world. For example, linear regression (you know, y = mx + b) was something I learned in 7th grade but has weirdly played a very important role in my life. If I had just memorized it and hadn’t built an intuitive understanding, I wouldn’t have been interested enough to take a senior elective on how you can apply that to predicting who’s going to win a baseball game, and then follow that to college and grad school.

What experience at UPrep influenced you?

Working on The Puma Press newspaper, including a year as the photo editor and a year as the co-editor. I learned how to tell a clear story and get a point across in words and images. I went on to be the photo editor at the Yale Daily News during college, where we put out the newspaper five days a week. Working on both papers was a formative experience, because it connected me with the community and I learned how to effectively tell a story. Being able to
effectively communicate with people is a big part of what I do, and I began learning how to do that while working on The Puma Press.
 

Priyanka Jain '12

Priyanka is the co-founder and CEO of Evvy. The company’s mission is to close the gender health gap by discovering and leveraging overlooked biomarkers in the female body—starting with the vaginal microbiome. She received her B.S. from Stanford University and has lived in New York City for the past six years.

Why did you decide to start a company focused on understanding female health?

Before Evvy, I was the head of product at pymetrics, which builds algorithms to make the hiring process fairer and more efficient. There, I became aware of the challenges and opportunities of bringing algorithms into highly regulated industries, and the importance of intentionally designing ethical algorithms—
especially when you have biased training data.

This gap is especially pronounced in health care. Amid dealing with my own mysterious health care issues, I found out that women weren’t required to be in clinical research in the U.S. until 1993, and we’re diagnosed on average four years later than men across over 700 diseases. Our lack of understanding of the female body is a symptom of a massive data gap: almost all the data that we’ve used to define health and disease to date has been based on middle-aged, midsized, white men. In fact, the female body is constantly giving off a myriad of unique signals that could help us understand when we’re healthy and sick, but we’ve never paid attention to these signals since we didn’t study women.

Tell me more about Evvy.

Our first product—the Evvy Vaginal Health Test—is the first-ever at-home vaginal microbiome test to use metagenomic sequencing (a mix of DNA from multiple organisms and entities) to tell you what’s up down there, why it matters, and what you can do about it. Evvy is closing the gender health gap by discovering how female biomarkers can be better leveraged to diagnose, treat, and predict risk for complex health conditions in the female body. More than 30 percent of people with vaginas suffer from imbalances in the vaginal microbiome every year. The latest research has uncovered groundbreaking links between the vaginal microbiome and critical female health outcomes, such as infertility, STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections), preterm birth, gynecologic cancers, and more. Yet, many women and people with vaginas had never had access to that information about their own bodies. Since Evvy launched in July 2021, we have created one of the world’s largest data sets on the vaginal microbiome. We are working on a variety of research projects and clinical studies so we can leverage our platform to improve the understanding of this biomarker.

How did UPrep help you build the skills necessary for innovation?

The small classroom dynamic and discussion-based classes were critical in exposing me to different ways of thinking and multiple perspectives. Through class discussions, it was clear that there isn’t just one way to approach the world, and issues don’t have only one solution. I remember a 9th grade English project where we took a strong stance on an issue and presented our argument to the class. None of us knew that two weeks later you had to do the exact same thing again—but for the opposite side of the argument. By being explicitly taught to see problems as multidimensional, I learned to pay close attention to how everything can shift and evolve.

What experiences at UPrep have shaped your career?

In journalism and Mock Trial Club, I began developing my communication skills—one of the most important skills for my job as a CEO. Through journalism, I learned how to communicate concisely, always being told to make articles 100 words shorter, and then another 100 words shorter. Through Mock Trial, I learned the importance of making crisp arguments and thinking on my feet.
 

Idalia Kaplan '16

Idalia is a fashion designer, stylist, artist, and sketch writer. She’s a 2020 graduate of the Fashion Design program at the Pratt Institute—where she played on the basketball team—in New York City. Before she moved to Los Angeles this August, she worked as a production assistant for the costume and
wardrobe departments for TV shows.

You graduated from Pratt as the pandemic began. How did the timing of the pandemic require you to innovate.

It was sad and disappointing. The design show we waited for all four years did not happen. I designed and made over 20 pieces by hand and had no platform to share my work. The creative industry in NYC shut down, too. Since I’d been cutting friends’ hair since high school, I went to barber school and worked at a barbershop. When I told a woman while cutting her hair that I wanted to work in costume or wardrobe on a TV show, she said, "Oh, I know someone; let me connect you."

That’s how I began working on shows and became a driving production assistant for The Blacklist, which meant I drove shoppers to stores in Manhattan. Let’s say the shopper buys 15 red sweatshirts: I drive the tops back to the show and tag them into the catalog; the actor tries them on; and then I return the 14 unchosen sweatshirts to the store. If I continue working in wardrobe/costume for film and TV, Los Angeles will offer me the same opportunities. I moved here with a friend, and we want to start creating our own content, including writing and performing comedy sketches. My brother, Zachary ’13, and his friends have a production company here, and I want to work on creative projects with him, too.

How do you deal with the inherent failure that comes with creativity?

It’s the worst feeling when you put hours of work into something, and then it doesn’t fit the model. I try to see it as a learning experience and reconstruct it or create something new from the mistake. I’ve thought a lot about choosing how to react. You can be down on yourself, or you can do something that wasn’t your original intention and grow, potentially creating something better. I always tell people I’d much rather laugh than be angry. It’s important to feel all emotions, but for my creative purposes, I’d rather laugh, and I try to integrate that philosophy into every aspect of my life.

How did UPrep help prepare you for your life and career?

The adults created a supportive, encouraging environment. I became comfortable being an individual at UPrep and straddling many worlds. I loved being in the art room; I played soccer, basketball, and softball; and I danced or sang at every Music Day. This sounds cliché, but I could have a conversation with a teammate, then talk with someone in theatre, and then hang out with people in the art room. I learned you can have totally different experiences from someone, but you can always find something in common and you can always have a good conversation. Making friends in different spaces is always beneficial, and a necessary skill for making connections in the creative field.

What's your favorite UPrep memory?

I was co-leader of the GSA (Gender Sexuality Alliance) during my senior year; it was so cool to be a part of! We put on a big LGBTQ+ event and invited GSAs from other schools to attend. It was my first time organizing an event, and I loved it. I remember we invited queer individuals from a range of professions to speak to students. It was very rewarding and led to me coordinating orientation at Pratt.

I also recall being in a pumpkin pie eating contest as a junior during an assembly. When the other contestants shoved their faces into the pie, I pulled a fork and knife out of my pocket and slowly began eating. At that moment, I realized that I love making people laugh and it’s good not to take things too seriously.