Ashley Raigosa is currently a junior at Oakmont and an active member of Oakmont’s computer club since her freshman year. 

“While I absolutely love the problem solving aspect of coding, my favorite part is definitely being able to work with teams around the world and even with my father, who is also a developer,” Raigosa said.

Ashley has gained most of her knowledge from joining Oakmont’s school club, along with the help of her father. This allowed her to discover a newfound interest in what she wants to continue doing throughout her lifetime. Not only has she made huge strides in the school club, but has also taken her talent to the outside world. 

“The first fully functioning app I developed was with an international team, including two other students in India,” Raigosa said. “Our team developed an iOS app we decided to name Spero, which means ‘I hope.’ I personally worked on creating a database so our model could understand English, developing a machine learning model (AI) to identify depression, and designed the app which could connect to a user’s Twitter, check their timeline of tweets, and redirect them to resources if necessary.”

Throughout her short time in the programming world, Ashley has competed in worldwide competitions, working with other students all over the globe creating apps that will better other people’s lives and has had great success. Her apps are not only fully functional, but are also catching the eyes of the public. 

“We placed first out of over 1000 project registrations from over 247 schools and 12 countries in IAIF and also won first prize in the Girl’s Computing League’s AI summit,” Raigosa said. “After our success in these competitions, we published our work to the International Journal of Scientific Research in Computer Science, Engineering and Information Technology.”

Over this short period of time, Ashley has become very dedicated to her hobby of programming and coding and plans to take it with her into her future with hopes of majoring in computer science. This path will allow her to keep creating helpful tools for the good of society. 

“Learning to code is like learning a language,” Raigosa said. “Although it may look intimidating at first, surrounding yourself by fellow programmers and not being afraid to make mistakes will allow for you to learn any programming language effectively.”