Paubox Kahikina STEM Scholarship 2023

Aloha, my name is Allena Villanueva and I am a 2022 Paubox Kahikina Scholarship recipient. I am Punahou School ’22 graduate and a rising sophomore at the University of Southern California studying to earn a degree in Computer Science and hopefully a minor in Linguistics. With this degree, I aspire to work to create a more equitable tech world.

This year, I had an absolute blast at USC expanding my knowledge on programming, math, and so much more. I joined many clubs such as the Hawaiʻi Club and Women in Computing. I look forward to serving on the leadership boards of both clubs this coming year. I had a blast exploring LA sports and loved to go to USC football games (fight on!), Dodger Games, and also went to my very first NFL game. I look forward to another amazing year as a Trojan.

USC Football Game 2022

In May 2022, I finished teaching Da Ponoverse as part of the Hoʻopulapula program which is a new program part of the Purple Maiʻa Foundation. After working for nine months with the most amazing and brilliant students learning Unity, Blender, C#, Students were able to showcase their bioluminescent deep sea creatures made in Blender and their volcanic scenes in Unity in AR and VR using Spatial.io. I am very proud of each of the student and very honored to have taught such an amazing class!

Student deep sea creatures captured in AR

This summer, I am working as an IS&T server side engineering intern at Apple in Santa Clara, California in the Partner Domain working on customer facing enterprise applications. In this role, I learned the entire API development lifecycle and how to build solutions for highly transactional applications. I am constantly learning different software applications like Postman and Jmeter. I love everything that I am able to learn and has made me even more passionate about computer science. Because working with the community to create a more equitable tech world has continually been important to me, I volunteer at different outreach activities around the community teaching Swift Playgrounds to students. Outside of work, I’ve loved exploring the different foodie restaurants near my apartment in Mountain View and weekend trips to San Francisco. I truly love what I’m working on, I’m learning more than I’ve ever learned before at a very quick but exciting pace, and I’m inspired every day.

Castro Street, my favorite place in Mountain View that has four blocks of restaurants and the cutest bookstore.

I look forward to another amazing and exciting year ahead at USC! Thank you to Mr. Hoala Greevy and Paubox for the continued support!