“To approach this quantitatively I turned to the concept of lexical hierarchies,” Rhoades School Student Olympia Sternson says.
Lexical hierarchies is not exactly the phrase you'd expect to hear from a 14-year-old.
But for Olympia, it's language she's been working for nearly a year in a research project that's now taking her all the way to Washington, D.C.
“I really went out of my comfort zone with programming, to extract over 10,000 tweets from X, formerly known as Twitter,” Olympia says.
She wanted to understand how the words we use shape people's feelings and whether that changes depending on the context.
“In political context general language is more preferred and in non-political context specific language is more preferred,” Olympia explains.
She started the project a year ago, and she's one of just 30 students nationwide selected for the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge.
“She learned all the math that was required to analyze the statistics in a very sophisticated way, even for a college student it would have been impressive,” her Science teacher Roxxane Hunker says.
Behind her project was a teacher willing to review her work, even with a deadline just hours away and a classroom where students push one another to keep going.
“She's [Roxxane] always willing to help out in any way she can, and just really like she understands what it's like to do the project and she's always helpful,” Olympia says.
“I think that the students have tremendous ability to think outside the box and dig deep and perhaps pursue a topic in ways that others can’t,” Hunker adds.
Now, Olympia is in Washington, D.C., presenting the work she spent months building.
“I think we really give the students inspiration to pursue things at a depth and a level of sophistication... we permit them to actually think in ways that are extraordinary.”
For Olympia, it's a chance to take her research even further and proof of what can happen when young people are given the support to follow their curiosity.
