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nna Shrestinian cannot be confined to one traditional niche on campus. Despite being a female in an intensely male-dominated field, she seamlessly fuses her passion for engineering with her extracurricular pursuits and sorority-based social life. She refuses to be constricted by the stereotypical attributes of her many interests and is motivated to both create a legacy of her own within the computer science world and inspire younger generations of women to become engineers themselves. Travel has been a great source of inspiration for Shrestinian’s work as a computer scientist. When Shrestinian went abroad to Berlin last summer, she discovered a lack of travel guides specifically for students. She and her friends found that as they traveled to new cities every weekend, they would struggle to figure out which restaurants, hostels, bars, and local hot spots were best to visit. As Shrestinian recalled, “Nothing [was] really geared towards our age group,” especially on sites such as Trip Advisor. Upon returning to the States, she started to create a Web Application called Wander, a site that blends the information of a travel guide with the interactivity of a social networking site. While for now she’s only completed the interface, she hopes this app will include categories ranging from “Eat,” “Sleep,” and “Experience,” to “Party” and “Escape.” Since this app is entirely aimed at students studying abroad, it would seek to provide reasonably
priced options—for example “Eat” would provide a variety of choices including “Cheap Eats,” “Street Food,” “Cafes,” and “Good Stuff.” Unlike popular travel sites, “Sleep” would not just include fivestar hotels, but safe hostels in prime locations where students could inexpensively lodge for the weekend. Shrestinian notes that having information about hostels would be especially useful, because the hostels’ websites often misrepresent themselves or exclude vital information. For example, “Some hostels are just for bachelor parties and you wouldn’t know that from the website,” she said, speaking from her own personal encounters. The “Experience” tab would include popular cultural attractions such as museums, galleries, and historical sites. While “Eat,” “Sleep,” and “Experience” are categories traditionally found on most travel sites, Shrestinian hopes to make her app more applicable to young travelers, which is reflected in the “Escape” section. This category would point users towards local events and recreational activities, such as parks, markets, and festivals. Initially she plans to create the app specifically for University of Michigan students traveling abroad. She envisions all users having an individual profile, so each member can follow other students while abroad. These profiles would link to Facebook, so students can connect with their friends to ‘like’ and share information and expand their network within the abroad community. “It would be
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