Aneekah – Tech Skills for Social Good

Aneekah, TechGirls 2018, USA

Aneekah is a rising college freshman at Princeton University and has just finished a gap year program through Princeton’s Novogratz Bridge Year Program, where she held an internship at a Yayasan SAMIN, a child rights protection NGO based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. During her internship, she supported their focus on preventing child trafficking and prostitution in Indonesia, by compiling research, attending conferences, and redesigning the website, which allowed her to use her tech skills for social good.

Her decision to partake in the gap year program was influenced by her experience at TechGirls:

“What stuck with me, after my TechGirls experience, was how one-sided my education had been. In high school, we hardly ever learned about world history or discussed current events around the world. That summer, through the many new friends I made, I recognized the importance of a global education. Global education shakes your core– it makes you question your knowledge, beliefs, and previous assumptions of life. ”

The importance of global education led her to take the gap year. After committing to Princeton in the spring of 2019, she applied and was accepted into the fully funded gap year program. Living in another country with a completely different set of cultural standards among a host family, that spoke a different language, gave her the opportunity to receive that global education in an unconventional way– learning as she lived through the experience. When she continues her education in the fall, she hopes to continue pursuing that global education while mixing it with her tech interests.