Melinda views herself as a pioneer of all things that involve technology. She is ambitious, independent, and intelligent with a 3.6 GPA and a full time job, she tries her best to always upkeep high standards in everything she does.
Working in the field she is pursuing has always been extremely important to her. She likes to get hands on as much as possible. Melinda started fixing computers in her Sophomore year of High School when she took a computer repair class. She received a high A and subsequently was offered a job working for the occupational school of my district as a student tech where she was promoted to the lead technician, in charge of 5 servers, a network of 400 end user machines and had some budget and Purchase Order responsibilities. She then moved on to work for the district itself as an assistant tech in which we had a domain of 4,000+ computers.
Melinda also enjoys exploring the world of digital photography and started her own portrait company!
The job that she currently upholds at a film studio as an IT tech. In addition to managing servers, media, many external hard drives, and writing a few in-house C++ programs, she helps out with most any technology that comes in and out of the facility. She is constantly seeing and coming up with new technologies for camera systems. Personally helping out on a few camera rigs and many formats of media ingestion. Melinda managed all the cameras in the building and the file structure that she developed. She initiated the reuse of the audio studio in which she is building from the ground up. Audio is but one of her many technological passions because it involves such a mixture of everything from music to electrical engineering.
Melinda increases her computer knowledge through the school club CCDC (Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition). Learning a few penetration testing techniques for Linux. Melinda reports that learning Linux commands has definitely helped her in her career in the field. Her current place of work has three Linux run servers.
Additionally, Melinda manage media for SQE (Students for Quality Education) in which she shot and edited videos demonstrating some student’s views towards the program and budget cuts that are happening at our school and state level.
Melinda always takes initiative and leadership on a large scope of projects, leading to considers herself an entrepreneur of many diverse technological aspects.
Melissa Fenerci
Melissa is very involved with extra curricular activities to benefit her college. She is focused on the importance of being a good scholar and building leadership skills.
Her leadership activities include:
Public Relations Secretary for Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society for two academic years, working on honors in action project along with her Honor Society. The project is called Democratization of Information: Power, Peril and Promise. There are 10 different issues that she researched and wrote about within this project including how technology influenced the spread of information and how the dissemination of information influences the individual and the community. Through this project, she is learning to do research, exploring different ways information is streamlined and discovering the use and benefit of technology as well as working on our four hallmarks, which are: service, leadership, scholarship and fellowship.
Melissa was the Secretary of Publicity for the Saddleback College Associated Student Government (ASG) in the 2009-2010, been a part of many committees including: Diversity Student Council, Marketing Committee, Standard II Accreditation for Student Services, Green Committee, Awareness Week Committee and Homecoming Committee. Melissa started the Public Relations Committee to promote ASG events, to streamline related issues. She planned the Women’s History Month Celebration at Saddleback College.
Currently, she is the Associated Student Government president of Saddleback College, representing close to 30,000 students and is a member of the Student Senate of California Community Colleges, representing the 2.9 million California Community College students.
Patricia Chen
Patricia is currently a UCI Student Housing Student Application Developer. Her past part‐time jobs include: Violin teacher, String Quartet First Violin Member Clubs(High School)‐ Key Club, I‐Art (art club), Science Olympiad Associations‐ San Diego Civic Youth Orchestra, Mt. Carmel High Orchestra Scholarships‐ Fleet Cooper Ratliff Scholarship (for Violin)
Patricia is learning how to program in .NET languages and to use all the features in Visual Studio and learning how to use SQL. After her training, she wants to learn how to apply these skills towards programming used in the real world outside of the classroom. In the future, she would like to work with cloud computing and apply for a job at Apple or Google.
During her freshman year, Patricia have dedicated most of her time towards adjusting, keeping up my grades, and recently, learning how to work in a computer science related job. Through her efforts, she became the first female to work in the UCI Student Housing IT department.
After receiving the AWT Student Award, Patricia aspires to serve as an AWT student ambassador, promoting computer science to the females in the field, relating her experiences in computer science, including her positive working experience in programming. Patricia expressed that to her dismay, many of her fellow honors ICS classmates have dropped out of the class, with a mix of both females and males. Many of these students have shared that although they are interested in programming, they feel as if it is too much of a struggle for them, or that it takes up too much of their time. As an AWT student ambassador, she hopes to alleviate these types of sentiments and persuade students to continue with computer science, even if they struggle with it at first.
