I joined the KWK community at the Philly Web Dev camp in 2019 and immediately felt like I was part of something special. I clicked with the other scholars right away and looked up to our IAs so much. That week made me excited about building things and equally excited about the people I was building them with. I still remember debugging a stubborn CSS issue with someone I had just met and laughing about it for way too long.

The next summer, I got to be an IA myself. A few weeks before camp, it shifted online, and the way everyone adapted was honestly kind of amazing. It could have felt like a huge loss, but instead it was fun, collaborative, and still had all the energy that made me love KWK in the first place. That spring, I also facilitated a pilot version of camp that met weekly over a longer stretch. It was a smaller group and a slower pace, but it gave me more space to connect with the scholars and my co-facilitator.

That summer, I interned at Estée Lauder through KWK and worked on their global rollouts and delivery team for site launches and management. I got to work alongside one of my original IAs from Philly and even saw one of my first real changes go live on a product page! (I also love traveling, scuba diving, cooking, animals, and going on walks with my friends).

KWK was my first introduction to coding and it completely changed the direction of my life. After the KWK Estée Lauder internship, I started college at Northwestern that fall. Now I’m a senior, about to graduate with a Computer Science degree from the engineering school and a minor in Psychology.

In college, I’ve interned at UNICEF USA doing software engineering and web development, and spent the past two summers at Apple in Cupertino working in SWE and QA on the Weather app. Each role helped me grow in different ways, but all of it started because KWK gave me the tools and confidence to even begin.