SOCORRO, N.M. April 13, 2011 – New Mexico Tech sophomore Ashlyn Shatos was selected as one of 20 finalists out of 260 applicants for the prestigious and competitive Cascadia Innovation Fellowship.

		Ashlyn Shatos, a first-year sophomore from the Seattle area, was selected as a finalist for one of 10 summer internships through the Cascadia Innovation Fellowship.

Ten Seattle-area companies hire summer interns from engineering and computer science students at universities in Canada and the United States to interview for fellowship positions.

A 2010 graduate of Bothell High School in Bothell, Wash., Shatos brought enough college credits with her to Tech to already be classified a sophomore. Now studying electrical engineering at Tech, Shatos was excited just to have a chance to compete for one of the fellowships.

“I was really excited to hear that I was a finalist,” she said. “I didn’t think my chances were that great because I’m not a computer science major and I don’t have that much experience.”

As a senior in high school, she enrolled in a programming class, where she learned C-Sharp. For her senior project, she built and programmed a robot. That year-long challenge included an oral presentation and a demonstration of her robot’s capabilities. For the Fellowship exam, Shatos had to write a program to convert strings to integers; then, she had to write a program to assign an unknown integer to spot on a trinary tree. She  performed well enough on the preliminary computer programming exercises to impress the Fellowship judges.

“I guess I did well enough on the programming test that they invited me to be a finalist,” she said. “Since I started programming, it has just come naturally.”

Shatos and the other the finalists were flown to Seattle for interviews with the participating companies on March 25-26. She hasn’t heard if she landed one of the fellowships, but she was pleased that she was a finalist.

The Fellowship connects world-class computer science and engineering students with some of Seattle’s top technology startups. The paid summer internships and $5,000 scholarships are a small part of the rich experience the Fellowship will create for the participants. The Seattle technology community will support the fellows and provide them with networking, education, and insights that will benefit them as they finish school and well beyond into their career.

– NMT –

By Thomas Guengerich/New Mexico Tech