During the 2020-2021 school year, the Stir Scholarship committee awarded scholarships to three young women who will be pursuing college degrees in computer software. We awarded these scholarships in addition to renewing the scholarships for our inaugural 2020 scholarship recipients. These women come from diverse backgrounds and life experiences. We asked them to tell us about themselves and will be highlighting them in the coming weeks. We hope that reading their stories will inspire other young women to pursue software degrees and apply for the Stir Scholarship.
The first scholarship recipient we’re highlighting is Ephrata Getachew. Ephrata will be graduating from Pickerington High School North and plans to major in Computer Science. Here are some things Ephrata told Stir Scholarship President Cassandra Faris about herself:
Cassandra: How did you hear about this scholarship?
Ephrata: My cybersecurity teacher told me about the scholarship.
Cassandra: What motivated you to study technology?
Ephrata: I’m interested in technology because it makes our life easier and more effective. When I was in grade 9, I took a computer science class. I stayed after school to use the school’s computer with other classmates.
Cassandra: Why do you enjoy programming?
Ephrata: I love programming because as long as you have the skills and resources you can build anything from scratch. It also makes you challenge yourself to solve a given problem.
Cassandra: What are your favorite extracurriculars?
Ephrata: I enjoy soccer and volunteer service.
Cassandra: What do you like to do for fun?
Ephrata: For fun, I like to travel and swim.
Each scholarship applicant wrote an essay about how they plan to change the world with technology. Ephrata’s essay focused on how she’d like to use technology to improve human health.
“Computers and communication technologies are opening up vast stores of knowledge. As remarkable as these achievements are, certainly just as many more great challenges and opportunities remain to be realized. Advance Health Informatics: the acquisition, management, and use of information in health can greatly enhance the quality and efficiency of medical care to respond to widespread emergencies like Covid19, which are crucial and timely to materialize. Many people are experiencing grief due to the COVID pandemic because the world wasn't ready for it. I want to make sure a large amount of death by a pandemic doesn't happen again. I have a plan to build a computer program that can recognize patterns in a data set to predict future pandemics.”
In her essay, Ephrata also shared some of her own personal story. Her experience will serve her well as she pursues her degree and career in technology. We can’t wait to see what she can do on a software development team as she works on technology to improve our health.
