When I was younger, there were a lot of theories about what I would do when I grew up. Rejecting dolls to play with my Handy Manny toolkit had my parents planning for my career as a builder and designer. My sudden obsession with math games, like 24, led me to start thinking about what glasses I would wear as a future mathematician, and my custom button business was the start of my entrepreneurial dreams. However, when I first looked into computer science, I was sure this was the career for me. After graduation, I plan to have a career in computer science that will allow me to explore both mathematics and business more deeply. Something I have learned about myself is that I enjoy collaborating with others. A goal of mine is to have a job where I get to work on a team and create solutions with other people. My college experience thus far has provided me with countless opportunities to work together with other students passionate about technology which has solidified my goal of working collaboratively in the future. Computer science contains countless areas to explore, endless opportunities to build, and infinite puzzles to solve. Computer science will continue to be instrumental in bettering the world we live in which is something that I hope is a part of my future. Through the various projects I have made for hackathons that revolved around social good, I have felt how rewarding it is to take something you are passionate about, like computer science, and apply it to make a positive impact. These projects include websites that spread awareness of women’s health issues, focus on mental health awareness, and help people learn ASL. Creating projects to help others has been a transformative and impactful experience. Within my future career, it is extremely important to me that I find a way to create a positive impact as well as hopefully progress the field of technology even if it is just slightly. Though I don’t know what specific job I plan to pursue within the field of computer science, I have a strong understanding of what is important to me, what I’m passionate about, and what goals I have for myself.

In the fall of my junior year, a friend from a summer Girls Who Code program reached out to tell me about Technica, an all-girls “hackathon,” a term unfamiliar to me at the time. After Technica, I couldn't believe I hadn’t tried a hackathon before. I was amazed by the opportunity to grow as a coder, networker, and designer that each hackathon provided. The following months were taken over with my new obsession, and I was doing a hackathon every couple of weekends and beginning to win more as my experience grew. As my passion and interest grew, I joined a team from TechTogether and helped run their New York hackathon. Running a hackathon was a great way to apply all of the knowledge and experience I had accumulated and allow others to engage their intellectual curiosity, just as I have. I also used this experience to found my school’s Computer Science Club with a focus on getting students interested in hackathons and other opportunities in computer science. After I began to improve my hackathon abilities, I was creating projects that went beyond the event itself. These projects include websites that spread awareness of women’s health issues, focus on mental health awareness, and help people learn ASL. However, there was one project that impacted me the most. My group’s inspiration came from an initiative started in NYC called SafeWalks NYC, which was created to help community members feel safer by escorting them to and from subway stations. SafeWalks had been trying to find people to help them develop an app for their vision to make their system more effective and accessible for users. Our team decided to help create an app that encompassed all of the things they envisioned. We designed the framework using Kotlin and designed the layout using Figma, based on what the organization had shared online. We not only won our category at the hackathon, but we were able to connect with SafeWalk’s team and share our ideas with them. Using something I am passionate about to solve an issue we all recognized was an energizing and enlightening experience. I always knew that computer science and technology could be used to make a positive impact in the world, but experiencing it myself and being a part of working to make a change increased my interest in pursuing a career in technology exponentially. I saw the impact I was able to make with such limited knowledge about coding and I can only imagine the impact I am going to be able to create once I further my technological knowledge during my time in college and beyond.