McDuffie Software Engineering Scholarship

Growing up, the question that I was most often asked was, “How do you understand that?”. It was my peers who were asking this question about my coding class, which I was one of the few girls in. To be completely honest, the question gave me confidence in my abilities but also made me feel lonely. This feeling was due to the lack of a female community in my coding class. I didn’t have anyone to share my joy from figuring out an error in a code. I felt isolated, from the overwhelming amount of male students in my class that stuck to themselves the majority of the time. Toward the end of my junior year, I won an award for my affiliate at the National Center for Women and Information Technology(NCWIT). As all the awards were being handed out, I noticed that the majority of the awardees were in Girls Who Code. After that, my teacher and I set up a plan to launch a Girls Who Code Club for my high school. The club was officially launched in August of the new school year, and we had about fifteen girls join, from different graduating classes. It felt so gratifying to have a club full of other females with the same passion I have for coding. We loved our monthly meetings where we would create new programs to show our creativity, as well as fix errors within a code. As a group, we quickly realized that we continued to code in high school because it was instilled in us in our elementary schools. So we decided to visit elementary and middle schools within our school district to introduce computer programming to young minds. Additionally, we wanted to ingrain taking computer science classes and joining the Girls Who Code in high school for young girls. Teaching younger minds was very gratifying, and instilled faith in me that females going through the Computer Science program in my high school would have a community to be a part of. Just like coding was introduced to students by my friends and I, it was introduced to me by my Dad. My Dad is a software engineer and my number one inspiration, which is why I have decided to follow in his footsteps. He is our sole-income producer for our household, still manages to take care of the house, and takes an interest in my sisters and I. Most importantly, he instilled his passion for programming in me at the age of seven. He got me started with block-based coding and even bought me books to learn different algorithms that I could use in my code. It was, and still is, a way for me to express my creativity. Expressing my creativity through code is one of my favorite things to do to this day. This is why I have decided to pursue a degree in Computer Science. I plan to focus on mobile app development because it reminds me of the eight-year-old who loved to make games out of block-based code. I love to express my creativity and develop ideas that can make life less stress-free, and more fun. With the help of this scholarship, I will be a role model for young computer scientists, just as my Dad was for me.