College Major Recommender wins Rep. Mike Garcia’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 25th District
Rep. Mike Garcia has named Jeremiah Chun, an 11th Grader at West Ranch High, as the winner of the 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 25th District.
When asked what inspired the creation of College Major Recommender, the student said, ”What inspired me to create this app was the overwhelming number of students, especially those in high school, not knowing what they are going to do for the future. Personally, my brother graduated from high school last year, and during that time he had a difficult time choosing his major. This also applies to me, as I have yet to hone in on a specific field to study so far even when I am in my junior year. It also impacts the people I interact with everyday, with one example being a club called Code For Kids. This is where I teach kids about the art of coding through the coding language Python, and seeing these kids grow under the foundation of computer science is very helpful for their future. This made me think about other kids who don’t do any extracurriculars, and I want all types of kids no matter their background to at least explore areas of study that they have never heard of before. As for my friends, when I ask them, they also have no idea what they want to study in the future. This probably applies for many more people in the entire world, as I have heard many stories of people not knowing their potential until college itself. Because of these repeated occurrences, I decided to make an app dedicated to trying to solve this issue. Even though it may not immediately solve a person’s dilemma in this situation, it can give them a foundational start to maybe consider other fields that they have never thought of before.”
The Congressional App Challenge smashed previous participation records in 2022. All told, 9,011 students registered for this year’s competition – creating 2,707 fully-functioning apps for 335 Members of Congress across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the District of Columbia. This year’s competition set the record for most student registrations, most apps submitted, most apps per district submitted, and most districts receiving over 20 apps. The wildly successful competition continues to impress upon House Members the importance of computer science education and the need to develop a pipeline of diverse, domestic STEM talent.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and each winning team is invited to showcase their winning app to Congress during our annual #HouseOfCode festival. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from Omidyar Network, AWS, Rise, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2023 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2023, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.