Michigan Council of Women in Technology Foundation
Michigan Council of Women in Technology Foundation
Arial Magyar shares her story on how MCWT’s high school GET-IT program fostered her interest in design, coding, and programming, as well as how her skillset in technology has.
As part of Grand Valley’s engineering program, I worked for a year as a co-op at Gentex Corporation in Zeeland, Mich. This global electronics company is an automotive supplier of electrochromic, automatic-dimming rearview mirrors, and also works with the aerospace and fire protection industries. As part of my co-op, I worked in the embedded software test department to simulate how the mirror’s electronics would behave in the vehicle and wrote test scrips to verify its operation.
It is thanks to MCWT’s high school GET-IT program which fostered my interest in programming that I was able to have many of the skills needed to be successful in this role.
Over a year before graduation I was offered a full-time position at Gentex, and it was the earliest my boss had ever made a student such an offer. I am excited to now be working as a full-time embedded software test engineer and look forward to growing even more with this company.
Another part of the engineering program was a two-semester capstone senior project. This project started in January where I was placed on a team of five to design an embedded IoT (Internet of Things) content management system and LED sign for DornerWorks, electronics contracting firm in Grand Rapids, Mich. My role in this project was to create an Android mobile application.
I was able to harness the web development skills I gained through my involvement in MCWT’s GET-IT program to design and code the app. DornerWorks was extremely pleased with the final product and plans to show it to potential customers within the next six weeks.
MCWT helped kickstart my career by sparking an interest in web development through GET-IT and the annual web design contest. It landed me my first job as an IT intern at Mercedes-Benz Financial Services, which led to my second job as a student web developer at Grand Valley, which led to today, where I can finally call myself an engineer.
Thank you again for your generosity and support of women like me in the field of technology.
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