NJIT Senior Finds Hispanic Role Models in Software Internships

From NJIT to Apple to Google and back, senior computer science and mathematics major Ricky Palaguachi always expands his peer network around those who share Hispanic heritage.

On campus, he's the webmaster for the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), which welcomes students from any major. He is also a McNair student, receiving scholarships and support as an underrepresented STEM major aspiring to graduate study. As a software engineering intern, he associated with diversity groups called Amigos @Apple and Hispanic Googlers Network. Now, returning to campus, he's excited about the promise of the recently announced Hispanic and Latinx Leadership Council.

"I like any opportunity to help. I see it as community service. Anyone with a background like me is a plus," said Palaguachi, whose parents are from Ecuador. "It's a cultural thing where we're here for each other, always. That's been ingrained in me my entire life. Any opportunity that arises at NJIT, at Apple or Google or wherever, I've always checked that box."

Whatever NJIT can do to attract more, that I can see being a real goal.

Palaguachi's earliest memories of community involvement are from his childhood Spanish-speaking church, but he began understanding his role in the world when he reached college age. At one extreme, he witnessed subtle bigotry at various part-time jobs off campus. At the other, once he became a Highlander, "We're all nerds here. … At SHPE, being a predominantly Hispanic organization, I had a lot of friends that were already members and encouraged me to go. Once I became the webmaster, I maintained shpe.njit.edu, but I also had the opportunity to lead a coding workshop."

His time at Apple, from January 2020 through May of this year, had two parts. For the first year, he worked retail in The Mall at Short Hills — "I worked my [butt] off to be a good employee. I'm a huge fan of Apple so it was pretty easy," he said — plus he had a Hispanic store manager who hosted social events. He also saw the company form groups for other minorities, such as a Black Lives Matter group and an LGBTQIA+ organization. Then, realizing that he could indeed fit in, he applied for and received a software development role early this year. In that role he built a full-stack web application to automate internal bug-triage workflows for software engineers, which became available to anyone inside the corporation. He used the React library in JavaScript for the front-end and the Flask framework in Python for the server.

"A lot of good fortune," Palaguachi said, led him to Google for his summer 2021 internship, which he is optimistic about repeating next summer. "I had applied to Google pretty much every year that I could, starting from my freshman year," before a recruiter finally reached out. He did well in solving two algorithm questions for the interviews and kept the good news secret while he worked at Apple.

Google placed him on its company-wide Python maintenance team. He worked on an open-source project called Pytype, which allows what's called static typing in Python for safer development and better code health at Google.

"The entire purpose of this is to make development in Python safer at Google, or for any Python developer," Palaguachi explained. "I took ownership of the design. I took ownership of the implementation. We had to make sure that we didn't break anything. As of today, my feature has been fully rolled out. If you wanted to, you could use it today. … Upon release we caught hundreds of immediate type errors in Google code. Now we prevent a new kind of type error going forward."

As at Apple, he found that Google offered a gamut of diversity activities and organizations, although the access was reduced because of the COVID pandemic. He did get to experience Hispanic and Latinx guest speakers such as Dominican-American singer Prince Royce, of whom Palaguachi is a fan.

Still, although he's seen people of every possible background at NJIT and in the workforce, "It is apparent that there just aren't many Hispanics with computer science, period. Whatever NJIT can do to attract more, that I can see being a real goal. … One important thing is to catch them young, catch them early. With Hispanic culture, it's kind of common to see people find interests outside of sitting at a computer screen all day."

Palaguachi had to figure it out for himself, lacking any mentors or money — "My dad was a truck driver. My mom takes care of the elderly. My brother manages a warehouse. There's nothing really that directed me to STEM or engineering."

Upon finally discovering computer games like Minecraft, "I would have to tinker around with the computer to get it to work properly to play with friends online. "I learned you could modify the game using something called Java, and so I had to learn what that was. My high school taught programming in Java, and that's where the journey began."

Now with more experience and wisdom, Palaguachi said it would be a pleasure to work with the Hispanic and Latinx Leadership Council before graduating in December 2022, although he's considering staying here for a master's in data science.

"If we look back a few years ago, I was just a Hispanic kid who thought he was kind of good at math. I was just your average Hispanic boy. I played soccer, I did well in school, I ate rice and beans. I come from a typical, humble Hispanic background. I'm still just your average Latino who goes to NJIT and likes to code."