Meet student leaders who develop apps using Google technology

Posted by: Kübra Zengin, North America GDSC Regional Leader

Serving as a Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) leader at the university level provides graduating students with technical and leadership skills that will help them in their graduate careers. Four of her GDSC alumni leaders from universities in Canada and the United States have gone on to meaningful careers in the technology industry and share their experiences.

Daniel Silvani will graduate from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in pharmacology and will soon return to UBC for medical school. He served as a leader and founding team member of his Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC). Also in 2019, he started his own software company, Leftindust Systems, to experiment with creating small-scale electronic medical record software (EMR) for the open source community. This project is currently closed.

“We founded the startup to rethink the use of medical software,” he says.

As a summer student volunteer at a Vancouver-area heart clinic, Silvani indexed hundreds of medical records with specific blood sugar, HBA1C levels and factors associated with kidney disease to determine who is eligible to receive new heart medications. I was tasked with finding out if there was. However, the clinic’s medical records software did not have the ability to flag patients in the system, so the only way to get hundreds of files onto Silvani’s final list was to do so manually. And given its size that was impossible. List and time remaining in the working period. He thought the software should have been able to not only flag these patients, but also automatically filter out which patients met the criteria.

“This software will prevent 200 to 300 patients from receiving this life-saving drug,” Silvani said. “My father is a patient who is eligible to receive this type of drug. His heart attack put things into perspective. Like me, the software just couldn’t keep up. There are families who go through what my dad went through just because.”

Silvani decided to combine his medical knowledge and programming skills to develop electronic medical software (EMR) that could store patient data numerically rather than in paragraphs. This allows doctors to instantly analyze patient data on both an individual and group level. Physicians from across North America took notice, including those from UBC, Stanford, UCLA, and more.

“The North America Connect conference is a two-day, in-person event that brings together organizers and members of Google for developers community programs from across North America, including the Google Developer Group, Women Techmakers, Google Developer Experts, and Google Developer Student Clubs. I met with many GDEs and Googlers, including Kevin A. McGrail, who is now my personal mentor,” said Silvani, who continues to explore other ways to make a difference in the medical community. says.

“When the system fails, we do not see an end, but a new beginning. It is in that space that we shape our future.

Alex Cussell graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2020 and served as the GDSC lead during his senior year. She says this experience inspired her to pursue her passion of becoming a technology entrepreneur.

“Leading a group of students from such different backgrounds, tackling the world’s most pervasive problems, and loving every moment of it taught me that I was meant to be a technology entrepreneur,” she says. says. “When the world as we knew it came to a screeching halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were left on a mission to save the lives of people involved in traffic accidents. .

After graduating virtually, Cassel moved to Silicon Valley and earned a master’s degree in technology ventures from Carnegie Mellon University. She studied product management, venture capital, and startup law with a vision of building a meaningful company. After she got engaged and received multiple gift cards as gifts for her bridal shower, Ms. Cassel found herself confused about the amount on each card and struggled to keep her organized.

She created the Jisell app with a universal gift card e-wallet that allows users to digitize their gift cards. To date, she has uploaded over $5,000 worth of gift cards to the app, and is partnering with the largest gift card seller in the U.S. Her Jisell product, Emily Robertson, her manager, said at the GDSC Summit. was Cussell’s roommate.

“Without the Google Developer Student Club, I might not have known as much about how much I love problem-solving and technical leadership, or the great tools that Google has to offer,” Cussell says. “Thank you to everyone who contributed to the GDSC experience. You truly changed so many lives.”

Angela Buszeska is a double major in electrical engineering and computer science and a minor in mathematics at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and plans to graduate in 2025. This summer and last summer Buszeska participated in Google’s Computer Science Research Mentorship Program as she was an intern at Google. From September 2021 until January 2022, she will provide computing support to students from historically marginalized groups through her career mentorship, peer-to-peer networking, and building awareness about her path in the field. We support your pursuit of research. Busheska investigated her process of computing across her four different projects in the field of AI for her social good.

In 2020, during the pandemic, Buszeska founded EnRoute, a nonprofit that harnesses the power of everyday actions to fight climate change and break down the stigma that living sustainably is an expensive and challenging endeavor. was established. She also built a mobile her app using Android and Flutter that allows users to easily make daily transportation and shopping choices to reduce their carbon footprint. Since 2020, the app has guided thousands of users to reduce their CO2 emissions by more than 100,000 kg.

Enroot honors Buszeska’s aunt, who died when Buszeska was 17 years old. Buszeska grew up in Skopje, North Macedonia, one of the most polluted cities in the world.

“When I was 17 years old, my aunt, who was suffering from cardiovascular disease, completely damaged her blood vessels due to the high air pollution in Skopje, resulting in her premature death,” Buszeska said. “My sense of personal loss prompted me to begin investigating the source of the contamination.”

EnRoute is listed on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Social Influencers list and has been publicly recognized by Shawn Mendes, Prince William, One Young World, and the United Nations.

After her first year with GDSC, Saphira Chin, a senior at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, spent her junior year as GDSC lead at UPenn, led the club’s social media that spring, and began her second year at GDSC. He was responsible for marketing and strategy. As her GDSC lead, Saphira expanded her membership and partnerships across GDSC’s campuses, reaching over 2,000 students. In line with her passion for environmental, social, and governmental standards (ESG) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Saphira has drawn from a variety of fields of study including engineering, business, law, medicine, and music. Leadership built her team.

Chin’s passion for ESG, technology, and business drives her choice: “I want to incorporate ESG into technology to harness business acumen to connect people,” she says. says.

The Wharton School named her the first undergraduate fellow in the Turner ESG Initiative and founded the Penn Innovation Network, an ESG innovation club. Her summer internship focused on her ESG. Her summer 2021 internship focused on ESG at MSCI (formerly Morgan Stanley Capital International), and her summer 2022 internship was at Soros Fund Management, an ESG giant in finance. She is also an NCAA Division I student-athlete and an Olympic candidate in saber fencing.

“I attribute my growth in ESG, technology, and business to GDSC for helping me since my first year of college,” Ching says.

Interested in joining a GDSC near you? Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) is a university-based community group for students interested in Google developer technology. We welcome students from any undergraduate or graduate program who are interested in growing as developers. Learn more about.

Interested in becoming a GDSC Lead? The GDSC Lead is responsible for starting and growing a Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) chapter at the university. GDSC Leads work with students to organize events, workshops and projects. Learn more about.