My Story

Hi there!

My name is Dana and I am a state-certified educator turned software engineer. I have two master's degrees in education (TESOL and Educational Leadership and Administration) and over 10 years of experience with curriculum design, K-12 classroom teaching and developing and delivering quality training for adult learners. I taught 2 years abroad in Seoul, South Korea and for the past 8 years in New York City at a public international school. My passion in life is in making a positive impact in everything I do and everyone I interact with. With my skill sets, I specialize in designing and building exceptional experiences, in the classroom as well as online.

My journey into engineering began when I saw the immense impact ed-tech brought about to all stakeholders of the school ecosystem. For students, there was a noticeable increase in accessibility when we introduced Google classroom, engagement when we used to formatively assess with Kahoot and differentiated instruction with the AI powered technology behind Reading Plus. For teachers and school administrators, we used the Google Suite for knowledge management purposes and Menti-Meter, Nearpod, Peardeck to increase adult engagement. Counselors utilized Calendly to make appointments to meet with students. Jumprope enabled parents, teachers, school support staff and students to keep track of grades and behavior in real-time.

The difference between a tech-empowered organization versus one without access to these tools was black and white for me - it was not just a temporary shift, but a complete revolution. The ability technology has, when used appropriately, to increase equity, include the voices of under-represented populations and empower ALL users was parallel to none.

From that moment forward, I knew I had to be a part of this revolution, so I decided to continue my work as a teacher and teacher leader full time (as I still wanted to be present for my school community) while committing all of my outside time to learning how to code, design and build online tools. I saw fulfilling my dreams of becoming a software engineer myself as a more efficient way to serve my students and to bring value to society as a whole. The tech world needs more people like me - a first generation immigrant, woman of color, bi-cultural, multilingual and from a non-traditional career path into tech- to represent the diversity and the humans it serves.

Currently, I am looking to work in a full-time software engineer role. I have an extensive background in education and educational leadership as well as free-lancing web-development experience. I am proficient in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and gaining more experience everyday with the MERN stack.

Thank you for taking your time to learn a little more about who I am! Feel free to reach out by sending me a message via the form below.

I hope you have a wonderful day!