Lisa joined the hacker community during her first semester in college. As a person with some competitive programming experience but without having built any projects yet, she was looking to go outside of her comfort zone. So, she packed her bag, booked a train to Maryland, and joined her first hackathon ever at UMBC. Lisa made her favorite hackathon project there. She arrived at the event having no teammates and only one project idea: a historical stock visualizer. Although it probably was an idea that had been tackled multiple times, freshman year Lisa was very confident pitching it to a bunch of strangers in order to form a team to build it.  They formed and ended up using Java and JavaFX to bring her idea to life.

After UMBC, she realized that hackathons allowed her to learn a lot over a short period of time. She found herself going to HackWITus and SheHacks in the 2018 season and falling in love with the experience all over again. 

In the spring of 2018, Lisa applied to become an organizer. She worked as an organizer for BostonHacks and TechTogether Boston and had the opportunity to cater to the hackathon experience to two different groups of hackers.

Lisa credits the hacker community with helping to give her a common ground between herself and other students. As an international student, hackathons provided an immediate connection with her peers. 

Having graduated from college in December 2019 after 2.5 years in school, a lot of her growth in college came from being an organizer. She learned a lot of soft skills that she wouldn't otherwise have learned in a traditional CS classroom, especially around how to be more confident in communicating with others. She also gained an incredible network of friends and supporters across the US that she can always rely on.