The Hillsborough Township Committee designated a portion of its July 9 meeting to honor a young woman for a milestone accomplishment.
At the meeting, Hillsborough Township Mayor Frank DelCore and the committee members recognized Shweta Kumar for having earned the highest achievement for a girl scout–the Gold Award.
Shweta is a junior at Hillsborough High School and a member of Hillsborough’s Girl Scout Troop 60786.
Shweta’s Gold Award project involved organizing a four-week program at the Hillsborough Public Library with 15 students in grades 5-8. The students were taught how to code in HTML and CSS. Each student also created their own web page. Shweta spent a total of 82 hours to complete the project with the assistance of six individuals.
Upon thanking the committee members for the recognition and honor for her efforts, Shweta provided more background about her Gold Award project and inspiration for it.
Shweta said that while she was in her computer science class at Hillsborough High School, she noticed that there were an abundance of students registered for the class, but few were interested in pursuing computer science as a career.
“Because of this, I felt inspired to make the unapproachableness of STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math], especially computer science, more approachable,” Shweta said. “I felt that the best students to target were those that were younger, and that’s why I conducted this program at the library.”
After the program, she said she took a survey and said that each student was interested to pursue and learn more about the subject in high school as well as college.
The Hillsborough High School student also thanked the Girl Scouts of America organization for giving her the opportunity to conduct the project as well as have an impact on her community.
“I would love to continue to keep making impacts on my community,” she said.
Shweta is a member of the National Honor Society and the Spanish Honor Society. She is also the president of the Computer Programming Club’s Web Page Design Sector, a member of the math team and physics team, participated in the Johnson and Johnson Technology Awareness Program and was selected for the Governor’s STEM Program.
Shweta has volunteered at the Hillsborough YMCA to help students with their homework and art and has also volunteered over 100 hours at the Liberty Science Center.