Girls Who Code is an organization that is near and dear to my heart, since I facilitated a GWC club when I was a classroom teacher. In fact, it was something I kept up during remote teaching since my students wanted to keep it up to have some semblance of community when we couldn’t be in the same space.

So, I was pretty excited when my company gave us an opportunity to volunteer with GWC to review the resumes of some of their members. I saw resumes from students who just graduated high school and were entering college to students who were just graduating college and were seeking their first full-time position.

We gave feedback on areas for growth, specificity, and clarity, but I also provided feedback on what was already done super well!

I was so impressed that the recent high school graduate not only had a resume, but a portfolio website as well! It’s a fantastic idea to start building your resume AND portfolio early and to maintain it often when new experiences and projects are still fresh in your mind.

Triton Hacks is a hackathon for San Diego high schoolers, with special attention to gaining participation from students in the underserved South Bay area. It’s organized by a student organization at UCSD called CS foreach. This was the second year for Triton Hacks, but the first year it was in person at UCSD!

I had such a great time volunteering my time to help students with a variety of projects spanning from block-based Alice programming to Unity game development.

Last year, I was a bit more involved and even hosted a workshop on Postman and REST APIs, but I am learning to set boundaries and not overcommit since I am both working full time and attending graduate school. I was able to enjoy the volunteer experience while not burning myself out, and there were plenty of amazing workshop opportunities for students, including one on Computer Vision!

I was excited to see some of my former CS students present and involved at Triton Hacks this year!

Triton Hacks is a high school hackathon organized by the UCSD student group CSforeach. One of the head organizers for this initiative is Jose Guaro, a graduate of the high school where I taught computer science. In fact, when I first started volunteering to help with Triton Hacks, I was still teaching and managing the school’s website and social media — this gave me the unique ability to advertise the hackathon and recruit our students!

By the time it was time for the hackathon, I had changed roles to work as a junior software engineer at Achieve Internet. I leveraged my position there to help sponsor the hackathon and to lead a workshop on REST APIs and Postman. It was a ton of fun, and completely virtual!

Being able to tutor/mentor and to present a technical workshop on APIs as a SWE in a high school hackathon where I’m seeing many of the students I formerly taught as a CS high school teacher is everything. I love that I’m still able to stay connected to CS education & empowering teenagers to learn about tech while improving my own technical skills in the industry!

Computer Science Education Week took place during the week of December 7th this year. Since we were still doing remote instruction, my Girls Who Code students and I planned and put on a series of virtual events and extended an invitation to all students in the district to attend!

These events included:

• SUHI Grad Panel (moderated by our Girls Who Code officers)
• Careers in Tech Panel (moderated by myself)
• Intro to Web Development with Webflow Workshop (Hosted by Sweetwater High graduate Veltson Bastien)
• Coding Scratch Animations with Xochi and her Robot Friend (Hosted by UCSD CREATE)
• Creating Patterns with Scratch and the Finch Robot (Hosted by Dr. Bambi Brewer)

In addition to these events, we published a website showcasing the work of our current AP Computer Science Principles and AP Computer Science A students.