(September 13, 2023) - Fourth-year Computer Science student at Laurentian University Matthew Espinoza has been recognized on the Major League Hacking (MLH) Top 50 List 2023 for his “exceptional contributions to the technology ecosystem & STEM education”.
Born in British Columbia, Sudbury has been home to Matthew for the majority of his educational career. Having attended St. Benedict Catholic Secondary School, he chose to pursue his postsecondary education at Laurentian. Originally enrolled in the Behavioural Neuroscience program, Matthew saw Laurentian as a great avenue towards reaching his goal at the time; which was to attend NOSM University.
Not knowing there were careers in coding, Matthew would spend his weekdays focusing on his studies in Neuroscience and his weekends coding and working on his own side projects. Matthew expressed being much happier when he finally realized he could turn his passion into a career and took the initiative to switch his program from Behavioral Neuroscience to Computer Science in his 3rd year university. Gratefully, with “a little bit of a course overload in my first semester, I’ll be able to graduate on time; which is what the goal was.”
Through his transition into the Computer Science program, Matthew has found great support within the CS (Computer Science) Club. He added “the computer science culture has been really great and I'm part of all kinds of discord groups. Coding is just kind of difficult so you’re always going to come up with bugs and so everyone is really helpful. I always get a response within a couple minutes in case I have any problems.”
Currently completing a software engineer internship in New York City through the hackNY program, Matthew uses his foundational knowledge in software engineering acquired from Laurentian and applies it directly to his internship. “It's definitely helped the learning curve.” Having learnt the foundation at Laurentian; “the coding, applications, frameworks and theory based ideas especially around data structures and algorithms, it was easy to then implement and build cool stuff in the internship so it’s kind of a noticeable difference from that side of things.“
Matthew’s computer science courses have not only helped support him through work opportunities extending outside of Canada but within his own side projects as well. “I usually apply the knowledge acquired from my courses to small side projects that I build and that’s been really great to take what I know and then apply it directly. For example, I sold a company last year.”
Through the success of his side projects, multiple hackathon winnings, computer fellowship programs as well as internship opportunities, Matthew was named Top 50 Hackers in North America by Major League Hacking. Out of the 50, I was one of the few Canadians. It was super cool to kind of achieve that and it’s a great community.”
Matthew advises students to find “a good group of people when you’re doing these classes to collaborate on ideas” and follow their passions and to find a program that will lead to a career that derives from it.
Upon graduating from Laurentian and obtaining his degree, Matthew aspires to begin a career as a software engineer in the U.S. “During my time here in New York City, I've really been enjoying the culture and the tech community here, it's pretty strong.” He added that “being at Laurentian, getting the MLH and now doing hackNY, it just adds a lot to my credibility.”