Athena H.

Athena is currently a junior from San Diego. She loves computer science and hopes to major in it when she gets to college. She tries to learn as much as she can in and outside of school. During the fall of 2020, she participated in the SWENext camp at UC Berkeley, where she got to learn about different elements of engineering. Through an organization she founded with her friends, Athena has been able to reconnect with her roots by teaching in Spanish what she loves most, coding, to young students in Mexico. She learned most of the Java she knows over the summer of 2020 at the League of Amazing Programmers. Eventually, Athena got to build an informative COVID-19 app in Processing with a few teammates. Initially, she believed she wouldn’t enjoy collaborating, but later learned that coding is not just waiting for a terminal window to spit out data; it’s about being able to come up with innovative solutions which oftentimes works better in a group setting. She was able to reciprocate what she earned by becoming a TA for a few classes and interning under a few of the teachers. Athena's fluent in Python, Java, HTML, CSS, Django, JavaScript, and she's learning C++ through programming competitions and her school’s Honors Algorithms course. Last year, she found a love for web development—both front and back end—and enjoyed every aspect of it, whether she was coding her personal portfolio or a site to learn more about tree frogs. At school, she's a leader of the CyberPatriot club, and although it’s not only coding, she enjoys it because she gets to learn about Windows server structure and how to protect the security of a computer. She also avidly participates in the robotics club and machine learning club where she applies different algorithms to real-life applications. Athena's interested in the importance of mental health and she’s currently learning Swift for iOS app development through Stanford’s YouTube channel. Later on, she hopes what she learns there will help translate her app ideas related to mental health into reality.