Sonia Camacho, Computer Science, MENG

Sonia Camacho

Do social media and engineering go together? They do for Sonia Camacho, a Master’s of Engineering student at Oregon State. She is passionate about using her social media presence to encourage more underrepresented students to explore tech. Before coming to college, Sonia didn’t know what to expect. She was nervous about the course load and wasn’t sure if she would feel like she belonged. To help process these feelings, she decided to start her own YouTube channel to showcase what it’s like being a WOC (women of color) in STEM. She now creates videos for Instagram and TikTok showing her daily activities as a computer science major and other events. From her videos, she has reached more students who are considering STEM.

Her motto is to work hard and play hard, which she lives by consciously. Balancing social media, academics, and a social life is not easy, but she has learned to find balance and still make time for her friends. So far, her best memory in graduate school has been mentoring four exceptional students in the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program. She loves to watch their social and academic growth.⠀

Sonia credits her mom and older sister for inspiring her to study engineering. Her mom majored in math, and her sister in mechanical engineering. When Sonia was in high school, her mom encouraged her to sign up for an intro to engineering class. She was skeptical, but it turned out that she loved the course and ended up taking all the engineering classes she could. Sonia loved applying her creative side to solve problems using engineering and computer science.⠀

Sonia is getting her master’s degree as part of the accelerated master’s platform at OSU. AMP allows students to begin their master’s degree in their senior year. With one extra year, Sonia will leave OSU with two degrees.⠀

So what’s next for Sonia? She recently completed an internship at Nike and will be starting there as a Global Technology Rotational Engineer with a long-term goal of going into technical program management or front-end development.