Jake Nicoll

Jake is a second year in the MS-CAPP Program at Harris. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Math and Physics. He then entered Harris in hopes of gaining data science skills and pursuing a career in policy research. In particular, he is interested in education policy, as well as in how early-childhood influences can shape education-related outcomes. He is excited about the creativity of MiiE Lab’s application of NLP techniques to the text of children’s books, and he hopes to participate in this frontier-pushing approach to quantifying representation in these texts. When Jake was growing up, a book that resonated with him was Timothy Twinge. The
book was about a boy who got overly anxious about ridiculous things, with the common refrain of “Timothy Twinge worried a lot about things that might happen and things that might not.” The story was a helpful reminder for Jake, who struggled with anxiety, to
keep problems in perspective.