Ashley C.

Ashley is a senior at Alameda High School. Her passion for technology sparked in 3rd grade when she would run home after school to play Club Penguin. However, her virtual world wasn't perfect as she often became frustrated with the aesthetics of the game. After watching many Youtube videos, she began crafting her dream characters with her new pal, the paint bucket. Her love for art evolved into an appreciation for software when she learned how code created her favorite virtual world and animations. From there, she took her first steps of learning computer science in 10th grade with the help of Astra STEAM, Kode With Klossy, and Girls Who Code. To further her passion, she self-taught herself Java and basic algorithms through EdX and Coursera classes, and worked directly with mentors from Pixar, Uber, and Facebook to help her develop passion projects. Today, Ashley is the founder and executive director of She STEMs (http://shestemscamp.org), a national organization teaching middle school girls about hardware computing through summer camps, events, and workshops. Within a year students have received a total of 3,600+ hours of computer science education and received over $13,000 in funding. Last summer, Ashley conducted research at San José State University on a hardware-based PYNQ project using Python to develop a parsing tool and spoke at EF's international Influence of Technology Summit in Berlin to over 2,000 attendees while speaking about She STEMs and introducing her idol, Disney legend Glen Keane. In late 2018, she presented one of her applications, She-Quality, a VR application built to step in the day in the life of a women, to Karlie Kloss and Gloria Steinem, and Believe, an Android application to prevent sexual assault, to Bill Nye. For the past year, Ashley has been a director for GirlCon which has impacted 200 girls in the Chicagoland area, earning support from Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg, Common Application's President Jenny Rickard, and Senator Duckworth. Outside of this, she's highly involved in her community as the co-founder of her school's FTC robotics team, the and Chabot Space and Science Center. Through her leadership experiences, she's been honored as a Facebook F8 Scholar, been featured in Emily Chang’s best-selling novel Brotopia, interviewed Randi Zuckerberg, and developed countless friendships and memories. After graduating college, she hopes to become a Disney Imagineer and fuse her two passions of art and computing into engineering and storytelling, and she dreams of developing a real Baymax to create more accessibility. In her free time, Ashley enjoys playing soccer, going on boba runs, and collecting stickers at hackathons. If you're interested in learning more about her, visit her at https://ashleyc.netlify.com.