By Janet Li, a senior at MIT

What sets Clare apart from the vast majority of course 6ers at MIT—what normal people call “Electrical Engineering and Computer Science”—is what she wants to do with her degree. She’s not interested in changing the field of computers. Instead, she wants to apply her commendable programming skills and experience to her true passion—the fight for sexual freedom.

Clare hails from Arkansas and is hoping to go to California next. Before being introduced to computer science, she wanted to be a mechanical engineer. “I‘ve always just kind of liked playing with things,” she says. “I’m really naturally curious about stuff.”

But she was turned onto computers after joining the computer science program at her boarding high school. “It’s really interesting—I don’t know how anybody can use an iPhone or a computer or anything and not want to know how it works,” she says.

Clare’s most outwardly successful project to date was an Android app she developed with a team. Google had partnered with MIT to teach a class as part of the Android Developer Challenge. Their team’s app made the first round, and Clare spent the summer after her sophomore year helping make it better. Their app was the grand prize winner, and the team split their $300,000 earnings.

The app is Locale, a dynamic settings manager. Users can set custom settings for a host of various situations they might find themselves in—at work, traveling, at home, in the movie theater, etc. The phone will then detect when these situations are triggered and automatically adjust its settings accordingly.

That same summer, Clare was also working for Firefox. She has also worked for a start-up in Cambridge, a Department of Defense contracting company. Her prototype for an RFP was selected and is now a game that is being developed and produced in Hollywood.

While Clare is an expert programmer, it is actually her least favorite part of computer science.

“I’ve been doing computer science for so long that once I’m out of MIT, I want to do something with it,” she says.

While she claims not to have the patience for it, Clare’s most rewarding CS experience lay in teaching. This past summer, she taught for the Women’s Technology Program at MIT, a month-long camp with the goal of launching high school girls’ interests in engineering and computer science.

The previous summer, Clare taught for MIT MEET (Middle East Education through Technology). The participants of the program are half Israeli and half Palestinian. It aims to rise above political tensions and encourage students to bond through computer science. With regard to both of these experiences, Clare says, “It kind of restored some of my faith in the future of humanity.”

Clare is a Women and Gender Studies minor at MIT, which is her main passion. Her goal is to use her programming experience to release a progressive website bringing together education, products, and erotica. “I see sexual oppression as one of the last great boundaries to true equality in this country,” she says.

Supporting her dedication to sexual freedom, Clare singlehandedly spearheaded and produced a calendar called Bad Boys of Boston, which has been running for two years. MIT has had several different calendars showcasing female beauty on campus, but there wasn’t one for males until Clare came along. “That’s actually a pretty good summary of my motivation for what I want to do next in life,” she says. “Here’s something that doesn’t exist that I really want to exist? I’ll just go make it.”

Clare was also the editor-in-chief of MIT’s yearbook Technique last year. She loves design and is an avid artist when she isn’t busy with schoolwork and coding. She is a talented photographer, and has done some wedding photography. She customizes everything she owns and enjoys crafting and building things whenever she’s bored.

What’s next for Clare? “I know I want to go to San Francisco because the city calls to me, art-wise, computer science-wise,” she says. Whatever she ends up doing, Clare is sure to do so with great passion and style.