KP Fellowship Personal Statement 2

Nov 18 2022

Describe your most meaningful experience(s) and why they matter to you.

​Over the years, I've fallen in love with Computer Science. When I competed in the School's Out Hackathon 2019, three friends and I worked to turn the idea of automatically sorting books on a bookshelf into an app fittingly named HelpYourShelf. Here, I felt the incomparable joy of watching an idea become reality. We celebrated each time someone completed something on the app, even running around the workstation when it was well past midnight. In the end, we won 1st place in the Android Hack category, but the experience of collaborating with friends was far more valuable than the $25 drone we received as a prize.

​After attending numerous hackathons, I realized that my real-world development skills were lacking in favor of time-crunched spaghetti code. After starting a position at a start-up named PetCode as one of two mobile developers, I found that the project I'd have to work on was the first one for which I'd have to seriously consider best practices. I was overwhelmed by all the new concepts I had to learn. However, after poring over online articles and videos, my uncertainty turned into excitement as I started to figure out more and more concepts. Now, after building out most of the app's backend, I'm thrilled to say that it runs incredibly quickly and has garnered hundreds of downloads on the app store.

​These experiences of collaborating with a tight-knit team and early-stage company have excited me about founding a startup of my own.