Abdiaziz Ahmed
My name is Abdiaziz Ahmed, and I am a full-time student at Seattle Central College, pursuing an Associate of Science in Computer Science. I came to the United States from Somalia at sixteen, alone. I did not arrive with much. What I carried was something I learned by watching my father, a blacksmith in my village: when your community needs something, you build it.
In Seattle, strangers became my neighbors. The Somali community took me in and showed me how to begin a life here. As soon as I could, I began giving that kindness back. One afternoon, volunteering at Somali Community Services of Seattle, I sat with an elderly woman who could not get past the login screen of a healthcare app. For two hours, we moved through it screen by screen, in Somali. She had survived war and crossed oceans. A screen had stopped her. The app was not broken. It was built by people who never imagined her.
That is the problem I want to solve. I taught myself to code, mostly from whatever was free, and built the Seattle Community Resource Navigator, a bilingual web application that has helped more than fifty immigrant and refugee families find housing, healthcare, and legal services. I want to spend my life building technology that reaches the people it was meant for.
When the work feels heavy, I walk by the water. It is where I find peace, and where I talk myself forward. For a long time, higher education felt impossibly far away, like a wall with no door in it. I am careful with hope; I have had to be. But when I heard about the Martin Achievement Scholarship in January at the NSC+UW STEM Research Fair, I let myself feel it. The wall had a door in it.
My father built what his community needed with his bare hands. I build with code. Different tools, a different language, a different continent, but the work is the same.
Goals
In the near term, I plan to finish my associate degree and transfer to the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, where I want to learn to build large-scale systems. My goal is to use that work to break down language barriers and make healthcare and public services accessible to communities like mine. Long term, I want to start a free coding bootcamp for community college students, giving them the real-world experience I did not have.
Tips
Start early, and give yourself time to sit with the hard questions about who you are and what you want to do. Ask people you trust to read your work and give feedback. Write honestly about where you come from, what shaped you, and where you are going. Trust your own voice. What you turn in is the first thing they will ever see you make.
