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ERSP Application - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Another side effect of my hyperfocus is my extreme knack and attention to detail. As someone who does web development, I could have fun for hours, tweaking the layout and aesthetic of a UI to be just right, where others might be OK with an 80% polished design. While this attention to detail could sometimes lead to spending too much time on details that were not that important, I have found workarounds to such problems (such as breaking down tasks into goals every 2-3 days to keep pace), and, just as with my hyperfocus, taken advantage of its upsides to paying attention and pointing out small but important parts of a project to teammates that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.
- - - - This stigma of "not being smart enough" seems to have to do with how many of these students had no access to resources, classes, and extracurriculars that many of those in my community had from a young age to develop knowledge in CS. After seeing how well-executed the hackathon projects or initiatives done by the more privileged students of the area, perhaps they felt that they just simply couldn't compare in terms of talent or intelligence, when really it was that they just did not have the resources to practice and develop the skill over many years like many of those in my community.
        
        It was an epiphany when I realized that there were so much emphasis and organizations designed to facilitate students into STEM in my community that it became clear that many students going to these clubs or after school activities were doing it simply because their parents forced them or to increase chances at getting into a prestigious university. It seemed that supply of CS resources outpaced actual demand. In many underserved communities, it was exactly the opposite problem, where genuine passion for CS and STEM was outpacing the supply of resources.
        
        With this realization that there was so much untapped potential in genuine interest in CS in such communities, we changed objectives; our goal became to become the spark to as many students as possible to break into CS. We moved our venue to be closer to underserved communities; we guaranteed computers for anyone who could not bring their own; we provided workshops by knowledgeable individuals from the industry and students geared to teach complete beginners in technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript or Python and backend web development; we made sure to place a lot of emphasis that total beginners were welcome in both our marketing material and website; we set our target attendee demographics to be at least 50% students of underserved backgrounds.
        
        In the end, it was a great realization to me of how much potential underserved students had; it made me so happy to have helped guide the first steps of many underserved, passionate students in their adventures in CS, just as this event served as the first steps to fix this supply-demand gap of underserved communities and CS resources.