I completed my Ph.D. in computer science in May 2018 and am currently working at Microsoft as a data and applied scientist. Internships have had a huge impact on my journey in STEM. People may not know what possibilities they have until they get the opportunity, or someone may get stuck in a dead-end job if they can’t try it out first in an internship. It was especially important for me as a person with a visual impairment to discover where I should focus my career.
Software Development
My journey as a computer scientist began around the time I entered high school. I had been interested in computers from a young age, but it was around this time that I began to learn to program a computer.
My STEM journey began in high school, when I first started to think about what I would do after graduation. During my junior year, I learned about a summer program that introduced computing fields to high school students who were deaf or hard-of-hearing, and offered college credit for participation in summer classes. I signed up and traveled to Washington State to participate.
I already had an interest in computer technology and through this experience I was able to work with computers and meet deaf professionals in computing fields.
Research
My lifelong journey in STEM got off to a challenging start. I was born with a severe form of cerebral palsy that affects most of my body. Throughout my life, I have had to overcome many obstacles, physical as well as social.
Information Technology
Technology & Independence
My life has never been easy, but I am grateful every day for the opportunities I have received and experiences I have had. I have C4 complete quadriplegia, but that hasn’t stopped me from pursuing a great career in science and technology, marrying a great woman, and continuing to serve my community in every way I can.
Engineering Technology
I was born deaf, but fortunately received education in a public school district that had a program to accommodate deaf students. In my classes I had sign language interpreters and note-taking services. These accommodations played a major part in my academic success in high school, helping me graduate with highest honors. After high school, I enrolled at Williams College, a small liberal arts college in rural Massachusetts.
My name is Zane Hintzman, and I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015 with my B.S. in Computer Science. This summer, I participated in an internship with Disney Research in Pittsburgh. For my project, I worked on an interface for streaming data from a motion capture system and a radio frequency identification reader simultaneously. The goal of the project was to create a tool that could track people moving in a specified two dimensional region.
