Faith Felts

How did you first hear about Rize?

Faith is a 19-year-old senior studying interdisciplinary studies with minors in computer programming and cybersecurity through Rize courses. Her father, an engineer at Intel, suggested she try programming after noticing her problem-solving aptitude; through Khan Academy tutorials she started to explore programming and immediately found it intuitive and fun. After enrolling in college early, she gravitated to the technical offerings at her institution, which were Computer Programming and Cybersecurity through Rize, which fits into her greater Interdisciplinary Studies major.

How did you apply your Rize skills outside of the classroom?

Faith landed an internship at a small tech company through an unexpected networking opportunity that turned into a real career launchpad. Starting as an unpaid intern with basic programming knowledge, she impressed the CEO enough to be hired as the company's UI developer by summer's end. Now she's been promoted to a multifaceted role handling UI development, quality analysis, and client communications for the 14-person company that builds custom web applications for legal systems and businesses.

Since then, she’s applied three key skills from Rize courses directly to her work:

Foundation and best practices: "Being able to learn how to construct good, solid HTML CSS code, nested CSS, tables, best practices... made me go to my company and say, our foundation sucks." She rewrote the company's coding standards based on what she learned in her Rize courses.

Backend understanding for better collaboration: Although front-end is her focus, learning data structures, APIs, and backend concepts made her "a translator between the client and the back-end programmers. I have to be able to understand what I'm saying when I talk to them."

Documentation practices: Inspired by Rize's clear project documentation, she created comprehensive style guides and coding documentation for her company. "We took on a huge project, it was a mess. We took on a second huge project... and it was going so much better, because we're using that documentation that I was able to write."

How did this experience impact your career trajectory?

The experience brought "a big relief and very empowering" realization that everything she was learning actually applied to the real world. Faith explained how this validation transformed her perspective on her education: "It made my education feel like a valuable investment of my time and money, and that it was actually bettering me to be a better employee." Seeing her programming coursework translate so directly to her web development job gave her confidence to explore cybersecurity with the same assurance. "I now feel very confident in the things that I'm learning in my cybersecurity classes, because I see how directly my other classes translated to my web development job." The internship didn't just prepare her for one role—it gave her a broader understanding of the value of her degree. "I have the confidence, and I know what I'm learning is applicable to the field. I know I have a quality education."

What's next for you?

Faith is pursuing a cybersecurity internship at Honeywell for summer 2025 to explore a new technical area, with a newfound sense of confidence from already having experience under her belt.

She'll graduate in fall 2026 at age 20 and is deciding whether to continue in web development, pivot to cybersecurity, or combine both fields. She already has the option of a full-time role at her current company but wants to explore other opportunities before committing to her career path.