HCC STEM Campers receive encouragement from industry professional
Jul 20, 2017
“You can do it!” resonated throughout the large lecture hall as students, camp counselor, special guests and Apple executives sat captivated by speaker Priscilla Rodriguez.
During the Houston Community College (HCC) Summer STEM Camp, Rodriguez, a full-stack software engineer, offered words of encouragement through sharing her own stories of challenges and triumphs. Among her potential stumbling blocks, Rodriguez shared that she faced challenges from her high school counselors.
“Imagine your high school counselors, after you’ve been accepted to one of the top universities in the country like University of Southern California-Berkeley, telling you that you shouldn’t be going there, it’s too competitive for you, you won’t be able to handle it, and you should try another local university,” Rodriguez said. “A counselor that is supposed to encourage you, is telling you that you cannot do it. How do you feel? You have so much respect for their words, it doesn’t feel good.”
Now a graduate of the University of Southern California-Viterbi School of Engineering, Rodriguez went on to achieve her personal and professional goals and is a member of the National Center for Women and Information Technology.
Like Rodriguez, ninth-grade camper Thomas Cortez from Stephen F. Austin High School made the decision to follow his passion.
"My parents told me to follow something other than gaming, but since it’s what I like and where my passion is, I decided to actually mold what my parents said and my passion,” Cortez said. “They wanted me to become an engineer or software designer, so I’ll take computer science for four-years and for my last year, I will take game development."
HCC Summer STEM Camp is designed to introduce middle school and high school students to STEM careers. This year, the camp introduced girls to Swift Playgrounds, a programming language application for iPad that makes learning interactive and fun. During the summer camp students also built their own personalized gaming personal computers.
Apple executives visited the HCC STEM Summer Camp on the heels of the announcement that HCC is one of the first colleges in the nation to use Apple’s newly released Swift Curriculum. The curriculum is the basis of HCC’s iOS Coding and Design School (iCDS). The program will give students cutting-edge skills and training on developing iOS Apple apps and coding in the iOS Apple platform.
For information on Swift Curriculum, visit: hccs.edu/coders.