Two YWCC Students Win Top Honors in Bank of America Codeathon
Vibha Venkataraman ’26 (Data Science) and Tina Thai ’26 (Computer Science), two students in NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC) and both Albert Dorman Honors College scholars, will have added their respective first and second place wins during this year’s Bank of America (BOA) Codeathon to an already impressive list of achievements when they graduate in May.
The Codeathon challenges BOA student interns to bring an idea for improving the company’s infrastructure to life before a panel of remote judges across the country. Each team is tasked with presenting their projects in 15 minutes. Venkataraman and Thai were among several NJIT students who participated in this year’s competition that included 50 teams nationwide.
Venkataraman, who did her internship in Dallas, Texas, as a data analyst working with customer letter verification, decided to set a precedent for assisting future new interns in acclimating to their environment. She, as team leader, and her team of four students from several other U.S. universities, spent seven weeks designing a chatbot for intern FAQs, along with a 3D map for navigating a large office.
Thai spent her New York City based internship as a software engineer focusing on data visualization for regulatory and supervisory reporting. Her first assignment was to develop a visual dashboard that displayed proprietary stock information, streamlining the process of generating reports. These reports are to be submitted to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) to ensure that stockholders, including BOA, remain compliant with federal regulations. Later, she and her six-member team designed a website capable of importing various types of code and automatically converting them into diagrams, helping coders better visualize their work as part of their competition submission.
Confidential and limited resources, which included extended times waiting for access to libraries, were a challenge for both women. However, according to Thai, it took only one accelerated week of work to complete their project once they had all their necessary resources.
They credit their involvement as e-board leaders in NJIT Women in Computing Society (WiCs) and its yearly GirlHacks hackathon with giving them the advantage of “knowing how it all works” through collaboration. Venkataraman also cites CS 288, an intensive course for programming in Linux, for providing the parallel experience needed to accomplish the work successfully with ease.
“I never expected to win first place, because all the groups had equally amazing and interesting ideas too,” she said.
A passion for solving real-world problems through creative thinking and ingenuity is what drives both women to continue pursuing computing as a career after graduation. Perhaps their first and second place wins may also score points when being considered for positions with Bank of America. Their futures are full of possibilities.
The next GirlHacks 24-hour hackathon is Saturday, Sept. 27 to Sunday, Sept. 28 and is open to students from any university.