Humans of HackBeanpot: Ifteda Ahmed

In middle school and high school, I was the type of person who was involved in everything. If there was a club, I was probably a member; if there was a leadership position, I probably held it at some point in time — and I loved it! But then I kind of lost that in my first two years of college. I wasn’t nearly as involved outside of work and classes, and I didn’t have that same ‘happy busy’ energy that I had in high school. Looking back now, it was kind of a darker, sadder point in my life. But towards the end of my second year, when I started learning more about HackBeanpot and applied to be a part of Core, I started being exposed to a new community, started finding my niche in college, and got a taste of who I was back in high school. I started doing work that didn’t feel like work because I was genuinely passionate about it — like Build for Black Lives, which has given me back a taste of that “old Ifteda.” Working on this team has been one of the most fulfilling parts of my college career. I’ve learned a lot more from being on HackBeanpot Core than I might have even learned in a classroom. Even though I had worked in a team environment before, doing it in college was a little new to me and a great thing to learn. I’ve also learned so many indispensable tools on the technical front. I really learned how to sit down and hack (😄) something together. Build for Black Lives is a great example of that because I am not a front-end developer by any means and I had been telling myself that I would learn React for a long time, but I had never sat down to just do it. So when I volunteered to do one of the pages for buildforblacklives.com, for that one night I just sat down and built out the page having no experience with React. This entire experience has brought me back to what drew me to computer science in the first place: the fact that its applications can really make a difference in society.