Class of 2023: Sonia Chaudhary uses virtual reality to make dream career possible

Hi, I'm Sonia Chaudhary. I am a senior here at Virginia Tech studying Computer Science. I graduated last spring in 2022 with my Bachelor's, and I'm also doing the accelerated master's program here. And the Master's of Engineering is also in Computer Science, and I'll be graduating with that in spring of 2023. I really enjoy virtual reality and I just hadn't worked with it as much and I just wanted to learn more about it. But there weren't really that many resources that combined my degree in computer science with virtual reality. So I was thinking of where exactly I can sort of like merge the two. So just looking online, I saw the ARIES website. I saw all the projects they were working on which are really, really cool, amazing projects, virtual reality, like immersive experiences. So I was like might as well give it a try. I joined ARIES in fall of 2021. Virtual reality and computer science, they're growing fields and right now they're nowhere near where they could possibly go. The fact that these resources exist and I was able to try them, that's when I was like, Okay, this could potentially turn it into a career opportunity. So what I want to focus on is building environments within virtual reality that incorporate motion capture to enhance immersive experiences in the future. And I think all of that comes with continuous learning, getting better with computer science, getting better with virtual reality and motion capture and just continuous learning and improvement will hopefully pave the path to have a career that I really enjoyed working in. After graduation, I'm moving to New York. I'm going to be working with Amazon in cloud computing because of my CS degree. I have a little experience in cloud computing. And I thought to pursue that further and see how I could potentially grow in that field. And within Amazon, there's also like AR and VR side of things. So hopefully I can get into that field later on. If all this didn't exist here, I don't think I would have ever tried it out on my own because it just would've been super expensive, or very, very hard to do on my own. Whereas these resources helped me understand that just for asking for a little bit of help, if you just can reach out to the right people, you can do anything that you have your mind set to. If I had to describe my experience at Virginia Tech, I would describe it was just a phrase, life-changing. It definitely has been because of everything that has happened in the past four years. I've just continuously learned, continuously grown and it just yeah, it's just been super life-changing.