Senior Shamarah Ramirez’s ambition is to help eliminate and prevent racial biases in technology. The Hack.Diversity fellowship she received this year is getting her one step closer to that goal.
The nine-month Hack.Diversity program, which aims to give support to individuals from marginalized communities who are interested in technology, includes career coaching, technical team projects to develop coding skills, and a full-time paid summer internship in the tech industry. Ramirez completed her internship this summer at Flywire, a global payments company headquartered in Boston.
Ramirez didn’t see herself studying or working in tech until she was in high school and her brother, who studied mechanical engineering, encouraged her to consider this field. So she took an information technology course at Quinsigamond Community College that required her to write a video game in Python. That experience made her fall in love with coding. After transferring to Worcester State as an Upward Bound student, she took an intro to programming course and started learning other coding languages, like Java. “I just found it fun to code different applications,” she said.
In her first year at Worcester State, she participated in a research project with Professor Karl Wurst that turned out to be a challenge. “I had no experience with the languages or any of the file types, so I was learning everything on the job, essentially,” she said. “I found that being the weakest on the team actually helped me improve a lot faster.”
Since then, she has only gotten more involved in both programming and supporting others who are interested in computer science. She and some friends founded the Women of Color in STEM club at Worcester State. She has joined the honor society for computer science, Upsilon Pi Epsilon; did a work study with the university’s Information Technology Services; and was awarded the Worcester State Foundation Award in Computer Science in April—a recognition that she says was a surprise. “I think a lot of computer science students experience impostor syndrome,” she said. “We’re all like, ‘I don’t know if I’m good at this.’ So, I was actually pleasantly surprised that I got it, especially considering there are so many hardworking computer science majors at Worcester State.”
Ramirez will graduate from Worcester State in December with a major in computer science with a concentration in software development. “I’m still unsure about exactly what I want to do,” she says, considering both IT and software development. Either way, she knows she has a bright career in tech ahead of her.
Achievers
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