News

VenusHacks 2023, UCI’s largest women-centric hackathon, took place from May 26-28 and concluded with resounding success. Organized in collaboration with Women in Computer Sciences and Hack at UCI, the hackathon brought together more than 200 participants from over 20 schools and 20 majors. With a mission to empower underrepresented groups and make computing more inclusive and diverse, VenusHacks 2023 provided a platform for students from all experience levels to engage in innovative projects.

Last year, in honor of Pride Month, the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) shared a variety of resources in “Supporting LGBTQ+ in Tech.” This year, we’re spotlighting one of those resources: a student organization called QT STEM, which serves as a safe space for queer and/or trans people who are studying a STEM field at UCI.

Jumanah Almajnouni’s resume lists the various programming languages she has learned throughout her years at UC Irvine in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS): JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, Java and C++. Yet she’ll be the first to say you can’t rely on a resume alone when trying to land your first job. “Saying that you learned a certain language is not sufficient,” says the software engineering major, who will graduate on June 20. “What have you built with it?”

A mother moves her young family from Korea to the United States. Years later, she finds herself struggling to stay involved in her children’s education. She’s not sure how to support their extracurricular learning, especially given that she doesn’t speak fluent English. She hopes to find an engaging educational resource.

When a mentor first suggested looking into UC Irvine for graduate school because of its strong program in software engineering, Nenad Medvidović still wasn’t sure what he wanted to study — and he had no idea where Irvine was. Originally from the former Yugoslavia (now Montenegro), Medvidović had only been in the United States for a few years. Fast forward to today, and Medvidović is an internationally recognized leader in software engineering. He serves as chair of the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science within the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC, where he has taught since 1999.. He joined USC after earning his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). Earlier this month, he was inducted into the ICS Hall of Fame in recognition of his contributions to the field of software development, including his landmark paper with Yuriy Brun, “An Architectural Style for Solving Computationally Intensive Problems on Large Networks.” Here, Medvidović talks about what brought him to the U.S., his original career goal and why he’s often up at 4:30 a.m., and what he loves best about working in academia.