(Age 16) Junior at Lauderhill 6-12 STEM-MED magnet school
Victoria Dameus has become a role model, a coach, an entrepreneur, and a leader. Arriving from Haiti in 2013, Victoria was faced with the challenges of many new immigrants, who would have thought that her inability to speak a word of English was going to be her key motivator for her early academic and leadership success?
Victoria managed to develop her leadership role as an active member of the National Honor Society’s Lauderhill 6-12 chapter (current Secretary), a student member of the North Broward County Chapter of The Links. A lead anchor and writer of the school’s television production studio, Yearbook Copy Editor, and a founding member of the Oracle Coding group. It was her active involvement in the coding group that propelled Victoria forward. As if learning English as a second language was not enough to keep her occupied, Victoria found the time to learn HTML, HTML5, CSS, CSS+, Bootstrap, Python, SQL, and JavaScript. This opened a new world for her. Identifying problems and developing computer science solutions came naturally for Victoria, her work has gained the attention of the South Florida community and she has already made a footprint of her unique user experience web style. As a web coder and designer, she applied her programming knowledge to recreate a website for Doris Canady, this was her first exposure to web development for the community. CSS and JavaScript were new languages for Victoria and she was quite fluent- creating buttons and layouts improved page management resulting in an upgraded and gorgeous page. This was the first out of a class project and many others have followed, such as five web pages created using WordPress.
Victoria’s determination to lead by example has provided Victoria with 1st place recognition for Human Capital Management Jr. End of the Year competition and the Yaeger Redesign Project. Her community involvement led her to present at the 9th annual WordCamp Miami where as part of a panel discussion she shared her insights on web tools and publishing in the 21st century. She parlayed these experiences into a summer job atConceptual Communications, a marketing, branding, public relations and social media company in Ft. Lauderdale. She was also nominated for a Leaders recognizing Leaders award. She is currently working with industry professional in making the web a friendlier place. Her efforts to improve herself has impacted all those that work with her-both personally and professionally.