Gulliver Prep senior Amanda Vera is president of the Computer Science Club. One of her top achievements in the Computer Science Club is the creation of Operation Recycle Refurbish.
“We take old computers and refurbish them,” she says. “We give them to students at other schools. Right now, we are hoping to work with Palmetto Middle School and give them to kids there.”
Palmetto Middle was chosen because some of the students in the robotics program there don’t have the supplies they need to do the things they wanted to do.
“We also gave some to a school that was in a robotics competition,” she says. “The Young Men’s Prep. Gulliver’s Robotics Team asked us if we could refurbish some computers for them.”
The donated computers can be old as long as they still work.
“If we give them to a robotics team, we would try to find the best ones we had,” she says. “We would choose the computers for the situation.”
If possible, they try to work with the computer parts already on hand but sometimes they have to fundraise for new parts. They did a fundraiser earlier this year, but those funds were donated to Puerto Rico instead.
“We raised about $1,106 and the Miami Dolphins matched that,” she says. “It was a game night fundraiser. We had about 100 people attend.”
She took her first computer science class as a freshman but because of her academic schedule, couldn’t take another class until this year. However, the computer science teacher agreed she could stay in the computer science club.
In college, she wants to study financial engineering.
“It’s the intersection between statistics, computer science and finance,” she says.
Princeton has a program that she hopes to attend. She’s been accepted to Princeton through the early action program. Some of the other schools on her list don’t offer financial engineering in which case she’d major in statistics and work in computer science courses.
In addition to being president of the Computer Science Club, she’s vice president of Mu Alpha Theta, the math honor society. Last year she was president. She does participate in math competitions through the math honor society.
She recently created an app for the Congressional App Challenge.
“Every computer science student participates,” she says. “Two of the three winners from our district were from Gulliver, including the overall district winner and there were two honorable mentions from Gulliver.”
She’s co-president of the National Art Honor Society.
“We are painting murals,” she says. “We go to events and field trips and learn about art together.
We do community service.”
Club members plan to work with another school club that’s raising money for children’s cancer patients.
“We’re helping them with decorations,” she says. “We made the Mardi Gras masks for the Walk for Alzheimer’s,” she says.
She takes Advanced Placement Studio Art. Her portfolio concentration is unromantic displays of love done in photo realism.
“The last one I did was somebody feeding a sick person soup,” she says. “I did one on putting cream on my grandmother’s face before she goes to bed.”
Her work will be in the Beaux Arts Festival in February.
“Five kids from our class submitted and all got accepted,” she says.
Last year she won a Gold Key in the Scholastic Art and Writing Competition.
“I was considering a minor in art,” she says. “I might not be able to because of how time consuming both engineering and art are, but I would definitely find a way to stay in art outside the classroom.”
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
