Claire Zhang

Some things about me:

• Born and raised in Seattle, WA
• Public libraries were my third spaces growing up
• Went to Columbia because I wanted to study engineering in New York
• Worked on emergency medicine, testing foods for plastic chemicals, AI strategy, and venture capital
• Currently seeking an apprenticeship and learning about tacit knowledge
• LinkedIn, Twitter

I believe:

• Our human nature is to be good and kind
• The best teams are like jazz bands
  • Compact, dynamic, aware, team over self, shared love of the art
• Writing is thinking
  • Making tacit knowledge explicit is soft power in a workplace — things like meeting notes and weekly summaries are a privilege to send, not a chore
• "Hell yeah or no"
  • Even doing nothing is better than doing something uninteresting
  • Find and maintain momentum
• Bring back analog
  • Digital artifacts are losing the attention war — physical objects have presence
  • A picture is worth 1,000 words but the clay pot you made in kindergarten is worth 1,000 pictures

Writing:

2026

• "The results are bound up with the pace"

2025

• Learning to receive wisdom
• Why you should study engineering at Columbia
• A weekly no computer day
• Short prose
• Learnings from working on AI strategy in Madrid

2024

• Annual ins and outs
• PlasticList: testing foods for plastic chemicals
• AI at Qualtrics
• About this website
• Walkthrough of a human-centered design project
• Learnings from volunteering as an EMT

2023

• Fairytales
• For lightning
• Three love letters
• Jazz violin
• Learnings from interning at an AI agetech startup

2020

• Quantifying urban nature designs with AI