As another school year comes to an end, we can look back and smile at all of our accomplishments, big and small. One accomplishment Jessie Wang ’19, Sofia Conte ’19, Ellie Barry ’19, and Zihan Sun ’19 should be incredibly proud of is their app. That’s right, they made their very own app! How cool is that?

To explain a bit about how this all came about, Jessie said, “The Montrose Programming club recently participated in the Technovation Competition which involves young girls with programming skills and development of entrepreneurship.” In fact, since 2010, more than 10,000 girls from 78 different countries have participated in this competition. It encourages young women to take the first steps to becoming entrepreneurs and leaders. Jessie added, “Our team, ‘Salve Tellus,’ which means ‘Hello World’ in Latin, needed to solve a problem in the world by building an app and starting a business.”

Inspired by Montrose’s International Week, the students decided to create a social-networking app to connect students around the world who are learning different languages. They named the app BBAC (Building Bridges Across Cultures). The app allowed people to interact in both private and group chats. Texting allowed for a more relaxed and casual way of practicing foreign languages.

This project was no walk in the park. There was some serious work that went into this process. The girls put together a 19-page business plan with an analysis of the market and financials. They also created an app demo and a pitch video. They even added security measures and pictionary! Finally, they presented their project at the competition to numerous professionals.

Sofia Conte ‘19 said, “The most important lesson that I learned was time management.” Jessie added, “I learned that nothing is impossible if you try your best to work on it, and it is important to ask for help because one person cannot do everything. In the beginning, everyone on our team thought this project was nearly impossible to do, but we did it.”

The professionalism these girls maintained and applied to their project was quite impressive. I think we can all learn from their inspiring ambition and unwavering perseverance!