Elyas Al-Amri

Appointed as Community Development Advisor (CDA) in male housing at HBKU, taking on a leadership role in fostering a supportive and engaging residential community. This position involves introducing new students and organizing events, ensuring a positive living environment.

My responsibilities encompass organizing community building events and activities that bring residents together, providing support to students, making them navigate their academic and personal challenges, and facilitating conflict resolution while promoting inclusivity within our diverse residential community. This role has strengthened my leadership skills and deepened my commitment to creating positive, supportive environments where everyone can thrive.

Joined the Center for Teaching and Learning at Texas A&M Qatar as a Peer Tutor, helping fellow students excel in mathematics, programming, engineering, electrical, physics, and statistics courses. I really enjoyed teaching; I would actively choose to tutor double the number of subjects that of other tutors, and I believe it helped me reinforce my own understanding of these subjects as well.

Throughout this position, I tutored students in calculus, linear algebra, electric circuit theory, Python language, and C language, helping them grasp complex concepts through simplified explanations. I developed supplementary learning materials and practice problems tailored to different learning levels and styles. This position also honed my ability to communicate technical ideas effectively.

My journey actually started because of a very known game: Minecraft. In fact, I can almost count back all the things I like about Computer Engineering to this game. My focus shifted to programing as I was trying to learn how to extend the game capability. After two months, I gained OOP-level of knowledge about programing but then moved to other matters.

I went on a phases exploring stuff like Photoshop, 3D graphics design like Maya and 3D Studio Max, game development with Unity and Unreal (mostly Unity afterwards), music composition with FL Studio and Ableton Live which also made me a piano hobbyist. Though I liked all those fields, I saw myself excel in programing the most, as I was more math oriented.

And though I selected programing as my main career, I realized overall one thing:

One challenge that epitomized my determination during this period was a Codewars kata called “Tiptoe through circles”: A deceptively simple problem that took me 52 days to solve. Every day, I would work hard on this challenge, trying different perspectives to find the correct approach, devising equations, visualizing different scenarios, and testing edge cases. And as the problem was in C++, I had to utilize other languages I knew to prototype and visualize my ideas before implementing them in C++, so I ended up combining code from C++, C#, and Unity, and after 1000 lines of code, and another 1000 for tests, I submitted a solution that passed all test cases first try.

I hold this to this day my greatest testament to perseverance and problem-solving, and I consider this the moment I moved from being a mediocre programmer to a good one.