This Thursday, April 21st is World Creativity and Innovation Day, celebrating and empowering people to use new ideas, make new decisions, and make the world a better place. This day is especially meaningful for our team this year because, for the second year in a row, we’ve partnered with Iterable – the customer activation platform that helps brands deliver joyful experiences at a massive scale – for the Impact Scholarship, a career-accelerating opportunity for students enrolled in our Hack Reactor Software Engineering Bootcamps.
Iterable’s Impact Scholarship is designed to ensure that people from underrepresented communities and backgrounds are ready to enter the tech workforce, equipped with competitive technology skills, and well-versed in the impact and utility of emerging technology. Scholarship recipients are awarded full-tuition support. Upon graduation, these engineers will join Iterable’s engineering team for a three-month paid summer internship, where they’ll gain critical professional and technical experience as members of a fast-paced startup team.
Last year, Iterable offered the Impact Scholarship to three Hack Reactor students. One awarded student, Mark Valdez, received an offer to join the Iterable team as a software engineer at the end of his summer internship and is now a full-time “Iterator” (what Iterable calls their employees).
The 2022 Impact Cohort
Today, we’re excited to introduce the recipients of Iterable’s 2022 Impact Scholarship: James, Oh, Eunice Kim, and Wendy Zhang. Meet them below:
James Oh
Location: Berkeley, CA
Former Experience: Marketing and Media Studies
“Apart from a few Python and R courses I took in college, I didn’t have much experience coding and felt overwhelmed by how much there was to learn. Despite the intimidation, I taught myself how to code through courses on Udemy, tutorials on YouTube, and pestering my software engineering friends. I found myself loving the challenge and developed an app using the Yelp API to return a random restaurant based off of filters selected by the user. Sharing my app with friends and watching it solve a real life dilemma they frequently faced filled me with confidence. At that moment, I began to seriously consider software engineering as a career. I’m now actively pursuing my dreams at Hack Reactor, because my journey in coding taught me to embrace challenges and led me to realize how much I love to create. Winning the Iterable scholarship will make a difference for me, because it will give me the additional financial bandwidth to support my parents and the opportunity to accelerate my software engineering career!”
Eunice Kim
Location: Bay Area, CA
Former Experience: Human Resources and Employee Advocacy
“I was raised with the mentality that the needs of the family always came first and that individual needs and wants were secondary. As the daughter of an immigrant family in a foreign country, I felt that I too had to sacrifice my needs and wants to ensure that our family would survive. My parents are very traditional and are not familiar with software engineering as a career. They have also not been exposed to many women working in the technology industry and so they have had their doubts and disapproval about me quitting my job to pursue software engineering in the midst of the pandemic and economic uncertainties tied to COVID-19.
Taking this step to apply to Hack Reactor and to put myself in an unpredictable situation solely for my personal growth felt so daunting to me…Despite all those conflicting feelings, for the first time in my life I am pursuing something entirely for myself and for my own goals and happiness. As a recipient of the scholarship, I would carry the honor with me in my journey as a software engineer to one day pay it forward. I would be motivated to work harder to make the most out of this opportunity so that one day I would be able to invest in another’s dream just as Iterable and Hack Reactor invested in mine.”
Wendy Zhang
Location: Boston, MA
Former Experience: Public Health and Nutritional Sciences
“All my past education and experience were in the field of healthcare. Growing up in a family where everyone worked in healthcare and life science, this seemed like a reasonable path to follow. However, along the journey, the work I was doing eventually began to feel uninspiring and repetitive, leading me to question my career choice.
Being a full-time student at Hack Reactor has been one of the most difficult challenges I’ve taken on in my life. With such an intense pace of introducing new knowledge and immediately producing an output with it, I have been mentally and physically overwhelmed. However, looking back to when I typed my first-ever line of code, a time when identifying basic elements of JavaScript was difficult, to now being able to build a simple frontend website, I am amazed at how much I’ve learned and I am curious to see how much more I can do!”
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We’re so excited to welcome James, Eunice, and Wendy to the Impact program! Learn more about Iterable and the great work they’re doing here, and read about our Software Engineering Bootcamps here.
