As a high school senior, Jennica Ramones accomplished something most adults dream of: She took her hobby and turned it into cash.
Using her self-taught graphic and Web design know-how, the recent Waipahu High School graduate crafted a website that earned her a $1,000 scholarship from education website development company eSchoolView, based in Columbus, Ohio.
Winners were announced in April, with the eight recipients from across the nation receiving a combined total of $15,000.
Her reaction to finding out she had won?
"Let’s just say I was really happy, like jumping around the living room type of happy," she said.
For her submission, Ramones, 18, decided to make a website for her college preparatory class. Using the website builder Weebly and tweaking its templates using her coding knowledge, she designed an informative, Marauder pride-filled page that includes photos of the school’s football team, marching band and the annual Arthur Awards competition, a class spirit contest.
And to think: Ramones, who graduated with a 3.91 GPA, never took a computer science class.
Her interest in graphic design started shortly before her freshman year of high school.
"It was just something I came across on the Internet," she said. "I was on a website and there were these people drawing, and I thought, like, ‘I can do better than that.’ So I started drawing and I got into it."
It became a hobby for Ramones, something to do for fun along with playing video games and watching TV (her favorite shows include "The Walking Dead" and "Game of Thrones").
From there she also got into coding, which she feels is now her strength. That’s why she decided to major in computer science and minor in graphic design when she begins attending Colorado Mesa University this fall.
"Since I’m doing computer science, I think that I can do a lot of things with that degree, so I’m not sure yet," Ramones said. "If it turns out that computer science is for me, I think I want to do programming and coding, all that computer stuff."
Ramones’ scholarship win proves she’s on the right track. Her submission showed an attractive balance of light and dark, with heavy use of Waipahu High’s school colors of blue and yellow — demonstrating her attentiveness to her client (in this case, her college prep teacher).
"When I look at a website, I do not just see a website, I see art; I see the negative spaces and the clashing or complementing colors," Ramones wrote in an essay that accompanied her entry.
It took Ramones a week to design the site. She worked on it up to three hours a day before pulling an all-nighter to finish by the Feb. 1 deadline.
To see Ramones’ winning entry, visit eschoolview.com/scholarships.
