Kalkidan Fekadu Eteffa, '18 – Computer Science

I was born in Addis Abba, Ethiopia to a mother who beat the odds in attaining both her bachelors and masters degree. From my childhood to today, she has been the strongest woman I’ve met. Luckily, both my parents ensured that my sisters and I grew up knowing that we could pursue any route we wanted. While my sisters chose to pursue careers in medicine and art, I chose the path of computer science. I often jumped around in difference sciences, first taken by the interactions between atoms and molecules in chemistry. But I later found that I enjoyed the interactions between people and computers more--especially machine learning. A program that improves itself as it gathers more and more data fascinates me. Unfortunately, Ethiopia doesn’t have much infrastructure for computer science and rarely uses data efficiently for development. I plan to study machine learning and possibly advance the use of data analytics throughout Ethiopia.