Oladoyin Oladapo ’14 was selected to receive an Enrichment Grant from the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship. This funding allowed her to get private training in HTML and JavaScript, which she will use in her entrepreneurial endeavors. Read Ola’s story below, and visit the PCSE website to learn more about our Enrichment Grants.
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PCSE: Why did you apply for an enrichment grant from the Patricelli Center?
OO: As a young entrepreneur with many ideas and startups brewing in my mind, I am now constantly seeing the need to hone my technical skills, specifically my computer science skills. This spring break, I spent my time learning from a private tutor through Code Academy, learning my first pair of programming languages.
In the fall of 2013, I started Alloi, a student-consulting network that helps young student entrepreneurs who have great ideas but lack financial and marketing skills. We partner with entrepreneurs to create a viable business model. Our goal is to give great ideas and innovations the business know-how required to turn them into successful products. Our current client is RevioSync, which was established in 2012 by eight undergraduates at Wesleyan.
Code Academy taught me the fundamentals of the programming languages that I need to create an interactive website for Alloi. My tutor, Brian Macharia ‘14 is a computer science major at Wesleyan and has professionally developed websites for companies and students internationally since he was 14.
PCSE: Tell us about your enrichment experience.
OO: Learning to code in this short time was rigorous and challenging. I woke up at 8 am every morning (during a break!) and worked from 9 to 5 learning code. I worked on HTML for the first three days. This language was relatively easy for me, but JavaScript was a lot more difficult. There were many times I wanted to quit and give up but by the end of the day, the concepts made more sense to me. At the end of the two weeks, I was able to build a website, on my own! It was a very basic interface but I was proud of myself nonetheless.
PCSE: Would you recommend this enrichment experience to other Wesleyan students?
OO: I would recommend this experience to any student interesting in coding. Not only is a good skill to have, it also enhances the way you think. If you are interested there are students in the Computer Science department or in IMS that would be willing to work with you. My tutor really pushed me to learn on my own and work individually first. He would not assist me until I tried my best. This mode of learning took twice as long as I expected, but I think the concepts stuck with me more because I was able to challenge myself and figure it out alone.