Practicum Project Essay
In the Spring 2023 academic semester, I had the incredible opportunity to work as a software engineer in Hack4Impact-UMD, a student organization focused on empowering students to create social good through its partnerships with local non-profit organizations. I worked with a team of twelve other students consisting of engineers, designers, technical leads, and product managers of varying class standings to work on the completion of a website for a non-profit student organization Combating Overdoses in Rural Areas (CORA). As can be inferred, the non-profit works toward educating people in the community and beyond the issue of drug overdoses nationwide. Moreover, they share prevention tactics, train individuals with how to administer naloxone in the event of an overdose incident, and news on policy and legislative enactments pertaining to drug overdoses. We met both in-person and online, with meetings held every week, and communicated offline using Slack. I contributed to the project while balancing my coursework, as our project timeline went from the start of the Spring 2023 semester to the end — about 16 weeks.
I applied to join Hack4Impact-UMD before my freshman year began at the University of Maryland. After my first semester as a member in the organization, I had the opportunity to join a project team and make real contributions to my community, like with my work at CORA. My listed site supervisor, Nelson Padua-Perez, was the advisor of Hack4Impact-UMD. I’ve been enrolled in classes taught by him, so I did know him prior to beginning my work. I loved my experience as a software engineer working with my incredible team on our product to CORA. And, my advice for identifying a practicum site advisor would be to speak up. The University has a wide range of practicum-worthy opportunities, and its imperative one takes it upon themselves to seize the opportunity and be proactive.
I performed several tasks within my team. Again, the website we were developing was near completion: development began in Fall 2021. The tasks that were left weren’t as difficult in comparison with what the tasks would’ve been for an engineer the semester prior. One of my goals was to make the website responsive on mobile devices. At the time, the website wasn’t easily accessible on phones and tablets — it was only functional on products of larger screen sizes. And, considering that many individuals have phones, it was imperative that I carry out my task successfully. I worked with React and CSS to achieve my goal, and I was successful. Moreover, there were a few bug fixes that had to be addressed. For example, clicking on a certain hyperlink wouldn’t open a new window to the intended page — I fixed that on a few pages.
The field of computer science is vast, and there are many subfields like software engineering. If there’s one thing I learned from this experience, it is that collaboration is nearly essential in the field. The projects one may embark on more other than not require great critical thinking skills and the ability to solve problems efficiently. In my experience, I gained experience with solving complex problems and exactly why my computer performed the way it did with my code. I found this experience extremely valuable to me, both personally and professionally. It brings me great joy when I have the opportunity to impact lives, like through the work I did within the high school’s environmental club (found on the homepage of my portfolio) and now this! And so much so that I plan on continuing my involvement in volunteer opportunities after graduation: activities that allow me to connect and impact my community. Whether that be remaining connected to Hack4Impact-UMD, the national Hack4Impact organization, or doing my own thing remains a mystery, but this experience allowed me to once again confirm with myself that I love doing impactful work.