Hello! My Name Is Ashley Jean-Francois

My major is computer science but I haven’t yet decided what I wanted to do specifically under that field, or if I even want to keep going with it. As a child growing up, I was always in my head entertaining my thoughts silently since I was a very quiet child because I was picked on a lot. My imagination has always been very wild and vivid, I remember in fifth grade when I was scolded by my teacher for staring off into space while she was getting into her lessons. I had still gotten good grades and received honor roll certificates often, it’s just that I was too quiet and stayed in my head all the time. That is why I turned to reading!

I loved books a lot and would always nag at my parents to read me stories before I went to sleep, books always had the answers and inspiration that fueled my imagination and dreams. At age thirteen, I started writing stories of my own and discovered the wonders of the alternate universes I created into my mind and putting them on paper giving them life. I was infatuated with writing and reading that it gave me the idea of becoming an author.

Of course, that idea stayed an idea since the publishing industry is slowly diminishing thanks to social medias and various other online blog-sites. I chose computer science on a whim because of a summer program I completed over the summer, WiTNY. WiTNY was about women in computer science, since it is considered a male dominated job. It was only two weeks but I loved it, they taught design thinking in the morning and coding in the evening and by the end of it my group and I made a real functioning app! Its too bad it’ll never be out in app stores for other people to download but that was okay. I even learned that computer science is a very broad horizon, i used to think it was just sitting at your computer nonchalantly typing in a bunch of numbers. Now I know that its not just like that, its something that’s completely creative and fun and I would like to see where this takes me in the future.

I am passionate about a number of things but somethings that really stand out to me is music and writing. My aesthetic sensibility to these things really define me because I like to listen to pretty things, see pretty things and read about pretty things because there’s not much pretty things in this life. ‘Keep things pretty’ is a little motivational quote I made up for myself because even if nothing is going right and life seems to crash down around me I can always just wear my best outfit and keep it pretty on the surface even if the inside isn’t so pretty.

My avatar picture if of a blurred flower because in life there is so much ugliness we’re forced to bear witness too. However there are those simple fleeting beautiful moments that make life worth while, the beautiful colors that almost come together in a symphony of true colors and the lucid effect it has on someone. It almost makes one forget how truly fleeting life is because of that blurred beautiful moment. During class I thought of changing it to something different, an abstract picture that would have messages that represent me or who I am as a person. I made the decision not to change it because the interpretation I have is powerful enough to me to keep it the way it is.