I would like to thank you very much for awarding me the ACM-W scholarship to SIGCSE. I had an absolutely incredible time at SIGCSE, presenting both my Codester App Poster and my Properties of Twitter Network Communications among Teenagers Poster at the Student Research Competition.

The best part of this experience was getting to know a wide variety of different people who both respected my works and continued communication with me after the conference. I met Elissa who is an undergraduate student and has kept in touch with me. I also showed my Codester App to wonderful individuals like the people who work for CS First by Google and Code.org’s Hadi Partovi. It was wonderful to see them working on very similar projects as I am; working to inspire students from all over the nation to learn computer science. I was very excited listening to all of the talks and I was intrigued to see how many others were working towards similar goals as my own. This was absolutely fantastic and I appreciated getting to know these individuals and keeping in touch with them.

I also really enjoyed the student research competition. I especially enjoyed hearing the talks of the other individuals. One student also produced a data-mining project about nuclear reactors. I was intrigued to see how similar our methods were in developing projects of two completely different topics; mine was on teenagers’ use of Twitter and his was on nuclear data. This gave me new ideas on how to attack data-mining projects and introduced me to new methods that I will now apply to my own work to improve it.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity! I truly got a lot out of it.