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age:20 Chiamaka Nnawulez i knows what she wants to do and has her choice of fields to go into. Chiamaka is a third-year computer science student at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State U niversity. She got her start in the P roject L ead the Way program at Nansemond R iver High School, from where she graduated in 2018. She applied for the program in her eighth grade year. “I introduced us to all the different disciplines — civil engineering, architecture, computer science,” she said. Her teacher and mentor, Dawn R ountree, sparked her interest in modeling and simulation engineering, which led her to her current career path to get a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Chiamaka chose North Carolina A&T U niversity because she wanted to go to an HBCU , and she’d heard the school had a good computer science program and had good internship opportunities, even for freshmen and sophomores. It didn’t take her long to take advantage of that. In the beginning of her sophomore year, she applied for an internship with Microsoft Corporation, where she ultimately worked on a project involving facial recog-
nition, the cloud and artificial intelligence, aiming to improve the user experience across several different applications. “I think it really helped with my personal growth,” she said. “My manager and my team constantly reminded me I was here to learn and to grow.” Her achievements haven’t stopped there. In October 20, she and a team of peers won second place in a 24- hour Walt Disney hack-a-thon competition, where they created a virtual reality application to experience different theme park attractions. Chiamaka also conducts cybersecurity research in the computer science department at her school. She wants to go into a career path that allows her to combine modeling and simulation and virtual reality. “My main focus is to have a career where I can work with software engineering as well as virtual reality applications,” she said. “I’m kind of open-minded whether I want to go into the entertainment field or medicine field. I’m still not sure exactly where I want to be, but I feel like I’m on the right track.” — T r ac y A gne
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What is your current bingewatch? “Naruto,” an anime show What is your favorite thing to bake? I make a really good honeybun cake.
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Chiamaka Nnawulezi
