We are near the end of my capstone project! We have our MVP ready, and I get to enjoy cleaning up our code and testing our Citizen Science mobile app. My teammates are amazing and now I get to do some more styling and I have time to work on our style guide. So I’ve spent the last week standardizing our buttons and interactive elements based on the Material Design guide. With my remaining budgeted time for this project, I’ll look into Material Theming and be supportive to my teammates in finishing the MVP for the website.
I’m less than 2 weeks away from graduating. My younger self would not have believed that I ended up with a CS degree. However, my younger self would be delighted that I’m choosing my own path. I would now tell my younger self that it’s okay to be lost along the way and those lost moments ended up being motivations. I’m grateful that I got to work in healthcare administration, nonprofit boards, public health advisory, health equity strategic planning, and volunteer management. The past decade of experiences and connections led me on international trips in improving health through nutrition. I got to visit villages in Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines with healthcare providers and community health champions. It took me three trips to Nepal to understand what it means to empower people halfway around the world. It starts with spending time with the people on the ground and listening to their stories. Through those stories, I get to glean about their interests and aspirations. I remember feeling empowered by the female community volunteers who asked if I can teach them how to use a laptop because of the presentation that we showed at a meeting about the importance of nutrition in pregnancy. She showed me her bag filled with flipcharts, pamphlets, and her own training materials. She told me that she traveled to the city and got all the written materials to teach her village. Sometimes, she had to walk a long distance to teach people. Back then, I wasn’t even good with design and tech tools for education. But I knew I wanted to do something about it because my family has always valued education.
Since 2010, I accepted various volunteering opportunities with the international nonprofit to figure out digital solutions to improve health through nutrition for Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Guatemala. Along the way, I come to realize that I enjoy coding and I’m fascinated by design. I’ve become more curious about how we can use technology for good, especially tools for community health volunteers and nonprofits to deliver quality and accessible health education. It’s also more than technology, it’s about the people and their communities. So a CS degree is another beginning for me. Now with time and resources on hand, I’m looking into recruiting more talents to join the Global Nutrition Empowerment tech team.
Thank you. Dhan’yavāda. Salamat. Terima Kashih. Gracias.
M: Z
