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Gulliver Prep senior Victoria Paesano is the Gulliver Silver Knight nominee in the General Scholarship category. Paesano has earned more than a thousand community service hours.
Many of those hours were earned creating her non-profit, CyberGirls.
“I started volunteering at Breakthrough Miami as a freshman,” she says. “In January 2022, I began a cybersecurity elective. Three girls signed up but dropped out when they realized the class would be full of boys.”
Paesano recognized the discomfort those girls faced.
“I’ve often been the only girl in my computer science classes,” she says.
So she organized CyberGirls and started doing hour-long seminars in middle schools across the county including Florida Christian, West Lab and Gulliver Prep.
“We start with a presentation on cybersecurity fundamentals,” she says. “Then future career paths. Then an interactive game component.”
She leads different levels of workshops, low, medium and high. In the highest level seminars, the students learn about HTML programming. Paesano has led 33 cybersecurity workshops, reaching about 500 girls. She hopes to lead at least five more before graduation.
“At the end of every workshop there are always a couple of girls who will come up and ask for more resources. That led me to create the website where the girls can learn more – www.cybergirls.us.”
Paesano began taking computer science in ninth grade.
“I fell in love with solving problems,” she says.
She continued with computer science classes and began attending technology conferences, including GirlCon. Now she’s working on finding sponsors for GirlCon on their National Sponsorship Team.
She also received a scholarship to attend the 2022 Women in Cybersecurity conference.
She plans to major in Computer Science in college. She has been accepted to MIT, Princeton, Columbia, UPenn, Northwestern, and Georgia Tech but has not committed to a school so far.
At Gulliver, she is a member of the orchestra and plays both violin and cello. She’s also a member of the National Music Honor Society, Tri-M.
She’s the captain of the Gulliver Varsity Girls’ Golf Team and has been a member of the team for at least five years.
As president of Zeta Omicron, the computer science honor society, she created a series of speaker events.
“We even had one person talk to us about his experience at Google,” she says. “He had started as an intern and was invited back for a permanent job.”
Paesano is a Health Information Project Peer Health Educator and teaches health to freshmen.
She’s also the Breakthrough Miami Club President.
“I’ve been part of the club since 2019. Over the years, I’ve had multiple roles,” she says. “I created and led curricula for the coding and cybersecurity classes. I also taught 7th grade math as a Teaching Fellow one summer.”
This is her first year as a member of the BB-R8DERS Robotics Team. She’s also a member of the Cum Laude Society, Mu Alpha Theta, Science National Honor Society, Rho Kappa (National Social Sciences Honor Society), National English Honor Society, and National French Honor Society.
She’s conducted computer science research under the supervision of a Carnegie Mellon PhD student.
“I studied the relationship between digital knowledge and password complexity in teenagers and middle-aged adults,” she says.
The bottom line is that teens create less complex and therefore less secure passwords than middle-aged adults.
She’s spent her summers as a Robotics Process Automation Developer Intern at DentalRobot, a healthcare start-up that supports dental organizations. Another internship was with a software developer that worked with Ruby on Rails 6.
“I also attended the Yale Young Global Scholars Literature, Philosophy and Culture program in July 2021,” she says.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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