(Web) Developing Her Future
“Growing up, I wanted to be a pediatrician,” says College of Engineering and Computing Sciences student Danielle Ongsohu. “But in high school, I did an afterschool program called Code Nation that introduced me to web development.”
After three years in the program, Ongsohu realized the extracurricular had awakened a passion within her for coding and web development. Now, she’s working toward her bachelor’s degree in computer science with a minor in graphic design—fully immersing herself in a field of study that she fell in love with by chance during her time at Code Nation.
Hoping that a computer science degree will give her a diverse web development education and experience in the field, Ongsohu says her classes are giving her the tools she’ll need to excel in her future career. In the spring of 2023, she participated in a software engineering group project centered on creating a game center. The project incorporated elements of coding and graphic design—skills critical to Ongsohu’s goal of becoming a front-end web developer, creating what a user will see and interact with when visiting a website.
“It was interesting to see the combination of my interests come to life and to learn how to work through the challenges of piecing the project together,” she says. “Our group made a lot of edits and spent many nights focusing on all of the problems that we needed to solve.”
When she’s not in class, Ongsohu can be found working at one of her three part-time jobs, including being a student ambassador for New York Tech, or participating in her sorority on the Long Island campus, Kappa Phi Gamma, Pi Charter. Founded in Texas in 1998, Kappa Phi Gamma is the United States’ first South Asian interest-based sorority.
“We expanded the warmth of our sisterhood to include any and all motivated women who are willing to make a difference in their community and to uphold the eight principles that the sisterhood is based upon,” says Ongsohu of the sorority, which has shifted to being open to all women. “This coming fall (2023), I will be president of our chapter, Pi Charter.”
Becoming president of her sorority is not the only exciting thing in store for Ongsohu during the upcoming academic year, as she is also expecting to graduate in spring 2024. She hopes to secure a computer science-based internship that could transition into a full-time job.
Having taken “rigorous computer science courses” that included creating projects with time constraints and constructive criticism from professors, Ongsohu says her time at the university has given her the confidence to enter the workforce and enabled her to grow as a student and, important for her career goals, as a coder.
Ongsohu offers this advice to computer science students: “Utilize all the resources that are available to you and persevere because it will get hard. Remember that you deserve all that you want, but you have to work for it.”
