Ot­to Car­ringotn

The Laven­tille com­mu­ni­ty is most­ly stig­ma­tised by crime and vi­o­lence but out of this com­mu­ni­ty, nes­tled on the hills of the cap­i­tal city, a lot of pos­i­tive has emerged.

Aque­ena Alexan­der is a 19-year-old who has emerged as one of the pos­i­tives with a par­tial schol­ar­ship to St John’s Uni­ver­si­ty in New York to study Com­put­er Sci­ence for four years.

Aque­ena, a Form Six stu­dent of St Joseph’s Con­vent, Port-of-Spain, has al­ways been an ex­em­plar in all as­pects of school­ing.

“I am go­ing to study Com­put­er Sci­ence with a fo­cus on Cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty. It was my Form Four and Five Stu­dent Based As­sess­ment (SBA) and at that time I re­al­ly fell in love with com­put­ers and pro­gram­ming plus the how much I learnt from writ­ing com­put­er lan­guage code and I was al­so in­flu­enced by watch­ing my favourite TV se­ries CSI-Cy­ber,” Aque­ena said.

The schol­ar al­ready plans to take the knowl­edge she re­ceives help T&T.

She said, “I think in Trinidad and To­ba­go we need to ad­vance a lot of tech­ni­cal as­pects I see it with­in schools at the ba­sic lev­el. A lot of teach­ers don’t know how to use the ba­sic in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy sys­tems and then fur­ther­more, we im­ply that same knowl­edge to busi­ness­es and all these com­pa­nies. When you look at the glob­al scale of how ad­vanced the world is and how far tech­nol­o­gy is go­ing to com­pare that to the sys­tem we have here we have to im­prove that”.

Aque­ena con­tends that the on­ly way to im­prove that is to have per­sons as her­self go­ing to learn the skills to re­turn to T&T to as­sist in our na­tion’s ad­vance­ment.

Af­ter re­ceiv­ing the schol­ar­ship af­ter com­plet­ing her SAT’s, Aque­ena was faced with a fi­nan­cial chal­lenge, as she was un­able to pay her tu­ition for her first year in the amount of US$30,000.

“So, Ansa Mcal Group has com­mit­ted US$5,000 dol­lars which is the first pay­ment due this month, with­out that pay­ment, I would not have been able to start this up­com­ing se­mes­ter in Sep­tem­ber,” she said.

“They would have seen my plight on so­cial me­dia chan­nels and then my moth­er is an em­ploy­ee of the Ansa McAl Group so they con­tact­ed her about how they want­ed to as­sist me to pur­sue my ed­u­ca­tion.”

De­spite the neg­a­tiv­i­ty sur­round­ing her com­mu­ni­ty, Aque­ena said she is proud to be from Laven­tille.

“I think through­out my life I just con­tin­ued to be pos­i­tive. I did not let these ex­ter­nal neg­a­tives in­flu­ence change how I view my­self and how I view my com­mu­ni­ty be­cause peo­ple al­ways think that these ar­eas are just made up of bad and neg­a­tive peo­ple,” she ex­plained.

“I grew up there and I saw how up­lift­ing and pos­i­tive these com­mu­ni­ties can be. While oth­er peo­ple look down at some­body who came from Laven­tille, I was proud to come from Laven­tille and that was some­thing that nev­er af­fect­ed me neg­a­tive­ly be­cause I knew the truth. I knew what these com­mu­ni­ties re­al­ly have to of­fer me be­sides the neg­a­tive me­dia high­lights.”

Aque­ena hopes af­ter her four-year study in New York at St John’s Uni­ver­si­ty, she can gain some in­ter­na­tion­al ex­pe­ri­ence and re­turn to T&T.

“Af­ter my four years at St John’s Uni­ver­si­ty, I will like to com­plete my Mas­ter’s de­gree and af­ter that per­haps work for a large com­pa­ny such as Google and these com­pa­nies, and I will ac­tu­al­ly like to start a lo­cal tech­ni­cal in­sti­tute for chil­dren that the up­com­ing gen­er­a­tion who are grasp­ing tech­nol­o­gy can get foun­da­tion skills to make them com­pet­i­tive on the glob­al stage,” Aque­ena said.

Any­one will­ing to as­sist Aque­ena Alexan­der can make their con­tri­bu­tions to her go­fundme page at www.go­fundme.com