Shonee Freed-Doerr Email & Phone Number

I take problems apart and build solutions from the pieces.I didn't start out as a software engineer. I'd been interested in computers from a young age, and even took a computer science course in high school. But when the time came to apply to college, it was the allure of the hard sciences that most spoke to me. I was accepted into UC Berkeley's prestigious College of Chemistry for the class of 2019.It was only after I arrived that I started to realize I'd chosen wrong. It took me months more to understand why.I like to build hands-on solutions with current and explicit utility, in a way the hard sciences aren't meant for. As a chemist I would have been pushing the boundaries of what was known, and what was possible. But I wouldn't have been turning those principles into actionable solutions to current problems in the real world. I wasn't meant to be a scientist⁠—I was meant to be an engineer.I transitioned into computer science and thrived. Software engineering is an incredible space, full of intricate problems and an ever-expanding toolkit for building solutions. It's a field where there are always more problems to solve. It's a field where complacency cannot survive, and where innovation and ingenuity are absolute necessities.I've grappled with problems as seemingly trivial as room assignments for students in a dorm, to ones as complex as machine learing for data analytics. Every single one is a new mountain to climb. Sometimes they seem daunting, but they can always be conquered.To climb a mountain, the climbers make a thousand successive steps. To solve a problem, a team makes a thousand tiny solutions, coming together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. That is what I do, and there's nothing else I'd rather be doing.

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  University Of California, Berkeley

  Computer Science