My name is Mahamat Oumar, and I am a sophomore majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics at Winston Salem State University (WSSU) located in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

What is more awesome than asking Google maps your current location, telling Apple Siri to call dad, or watching a friend on Facebook or Instagram live enjoying a beautiful day on their vacation? Technology inspired me at a very young age. I woke up one morning and asked myself, “How can one at least contribute to build a better world?” I began seeking an answer to my question through the science and computation domain. The works that mathematicians and computer scientists have done really amazed me, so I decided to combine mathematics and computer science to make a change, and do something that the future world will also benefit from as I made my mine to pursue a career in computer science and mathematics.

My very first project was creating my own weblog. As an unexperienced high schooler, I followed some tutorials on “Learning HTML for beginners” book to make my first weblog (2015). After my freshman year in college, I did my first Java project. That was a text editor called “Oumar Text Editor”. The text editor has some nice features such as changing foreground and background color, changing font size, and setting password to encrypt and decrypt texts. Then I followed the previous project with a second one. This time it was a platform game called “Oumar Java platform game”. The game was written in Java as far as computer language, and used sprite sheets for the player and other animation. After learning python syntax, I made another text editor using the python GUI Tkinter and a 2D game using Pygame.

There is a special day called “CS/IT day” at Winston Salem State University that is held once a year. It’s a day where computer science majors present their programs and get recompensed for their hard works. As a computer science major student, I presented a parking ticket simulator program with two other classmates as a team, and we came in the first place. This victory gave me courage to pursue my vision and passion for computer science.

I am currently at Elizabeth City State University doing an internship on a Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) program. The SGCI is a four-week Coding Institute, and it is focused on gateway development. The workshop covers the core skills needed to be productive in design and maintenance of science gateways. The program is presented as short tutorials alternated with practical exercises, and all instruction is done via live coding. The workshop also covers python, R programming, Git and Shell scripts, professional statements and poster design, and computers configuration.

As I enjoy programming and designing more than networking and configuration, I always dreamed of being a software engineer. Being a mathematics major, I also want to perform data analysis and data mining as a second option.