Ana D.

Biography

Ana graduated from John G. Diefenbaker High School in Calgary, AB. During her time there, Ana developed a Discord reminder bot that understands natural language requests; Ana was also featured on NVIDA’s The AI Podcast speaking about her work. Ana also spent several months learning the Smalltalk programming language for the 2022 JRMPC programming competition and won the grand prize. She also joined a VEX Robotics Competition team and helped them achieve their first competition win as a programmer by acquiring sponsorships and encouraging design documentation, and helping the team advance to the World Championships in Texas.

Ana chose to study at UCalgary because she feels that she can make a difference to both the university and the city. As a native Calgarian, she felt that living on campus would give her a good balance between being near home and being immersed in university life. She also appreciates Calgary’s affordability and beauty.

Ana is enrolled in the Bachelor of Science program, majoring in Computer Science. She chose this program because coding has been her passion from an early age. She felt it was the most flexible and relevant program out of its alternatives.

While Ana doesn’t have a specific career ambition in mind yet, she would ideally like to work on software that can improve people’s lives, such as educational games, accessible technology, and other fun/useful applications.

Ana believes that the Prestige Award’s benefit is not just financial. She is excited about the large networking opportunity that winning this award allows. She sees the network and credibility it gives her as valuable as the money.

Ana is excited about the range of research interests in her field; she is most excited to learn about and apply AI to create applications from start to finish.

Ana wants to remind everyone that the Schulich Leader Scholarship requires a nomination from their high school, so interested students should talk to their guidance counselor.