I can’t express enough how grateful I am for this scholarship. It will give me a head start paying for college and keep my student loans down. The internship after my freshman year is an opportunity to get invaluable real-life experience in the technology field and provides another way to explore computer science in an environment where I can learn and grow.

Ultimately, this experience shifted my view of myself from a CS major or developer working in isolation to a software engineer capable of meaningful contribution. Not only to my team and to services operating at scale, but to Amazon’s end customer experience. While I am early in my career, I don’t believe that I have to wait to reach some mythical benchmark of experience to share what I have learned thus far with my peers and those coming behind me. I am interested in giving back with regards to K-12 CS education, and to me Amazon is uniquely situated to support that kind of work.