Notes

The Arborist

The Arborist is a magazine I founded on my birthday my freshman year. It's an experimental web-based publication that publishes work by undergrads, whether it be long-form art history papers, or short small web experiments.

I spent a lot of time building the website for the Berkeley High Jacket in High School, so the Arborist is, in a way, a sequel to that project. It's also very inspired by the work of my friend Jerome on Summit Magazine, which he founded in college.

How Wet is This Winter?

This was one of the first articles I wrote for the Arborist: a small series of graphs displaying historical rain data at Stanford. I love the rain, and also ski, so it was fun to see how each year's total rainfall progressed.

I am currently working on a sequel to this article that's based on some satellite imagery I recently got access to. Stay tuned :)

Tracking Marriage Pact Submissions

Probably our most viral article. We tracked submissions to Marriage Pact, a Stanford-exclusive dating survey to see how they compared to previous years. We were interested in seeing how the existence of other dating apps (namely, Date Drop) would impact Marriage Pact's performance. The answer? Negatively.

We will definitely be doing it again this year.

Call us, Stanford!

This was a fun project: I made a phone number that can only be called from the free phones in dorm hallways. People could leave messages, which would be posted anonymously on our website (after some moderation). This got less traction than I would have liked, but some people called it!

m4f?

Our most recent article was a wild deep dive into Fizz, an anonymous social media app exclusively available to Stanford students. Some students post personal ads, looking for hookups. We wanted to know: how many of them were posted by the same person?

Without spoiling any more: It's a wild ride. I would recommend you read it.

Coming Soon

There are a number of articles I'm currently working on. These include:

  1. Where on campus have students received the most tickets on bikes?
  2. When are students doing their homework on our shared computer cluster?
  3. What do Stanford students consider to be "The Bay Area?"
  4. Tracking Stanford's laundry machines.
  5. Treehouses, a series where we look inside people's dorm rooms.

If you'd like to work with us on any of these, please do reach out :)

arb.st

In addition to the Arborist website, we also run a very small URL shortener on arb.st, used for permalinks within articles and posting on social media. It's built on Cloudflare, and uses a very simple csv-powered syntax.