Trabuco Hills High Grad Madhu Suraj Codes To Make a Difference

ORANGE COUNTY, CA — Madhu Suraj marched into her boss’ office with big ideas and a thin resume.

A volunteer at the Tiyya Foundation at the time, the Lake Forest resident approached one of the Orange County nonprofit’s top administrators offering to use her tech skills to help streamline its operations.

The proposal was initially met with some hesitancy recalls Shukry Cattan, whose foundation supports refugees and their families.

It was nothing personal. Suraj had already demonstrated her smarts, enthusiasm, and passion for helping others. But the idea of someone with no professional experience engineering a technological transformation seemed like a stretch.

And, oh, she was a Trabuco Hills High School sophomore, too young to get her minors’ driver's license.

“I found that to be a large undertaking, especially for a 15-year-old volunteer,” Cattan would later write in a letter of recommendation for the teen tech wiz.

But Cattan admired Suraj’s moxie and put aside trepidations, going with his gut in deciding to give Suraj a shot at the project.

The move paid off.

Suraj went on to develop a feature-rich app that helps job searchers by connecting clients to employers based on their resumes, along with contact information, and sign-ups for volunteering, donations, free COVID-19 relief meals, along with the ability to send notifications.

“Madhu continued trailblazing the road to success and presented us constantly with wireframes of the app, demos, and more updates to keep us in the loop,” Cattan said.

Suraj has continued to produce impactful work.

She went on to work with a Columbia University researcher developing a machine learning research project that aims to make the web more accessible to the visually impaired.

She served as president of the THHS’s Girls who Code and the Wounded Warrior Project and founded Coding 4 Community, a nonprofit delivering free software to charity organizations on a global scale.

She also competed on the school’s track team.

She credits her parents, Suraj Vijayan and Beena Keshavan, with helping her balance a uniquely challenging juggling act.

“I really owe my success to their constant support both academically and outside of school, and for always encouraging me to pursue my passions from a young age,” Suraj told Patch.

“I work hard in order to make them proud of me as it is my biggest motivation.”

Suraj was named a 2021 National Merit Scholar and will receive a scholarship for her college undergraduate study. The USC-bound computer science -business administration joint major was among 2,500 selected from a pool of 16,000 finalists.

The award allowed her to also receive a USC Presidential Scholarship.

“This (National Merit) scholarship means a lot to me – apart from the honor being recognized for my work throughout high school,” Suraj told Patch.

“I'm extremely fortunate to be attending USC for a fraction of the price solely from these merit scholarships.”

Suraj plans to pursue her interest in artificial intelligence, the burgeoning field of advanced technology of which future implications are not yet fully known that has raised ethical concerns. Suraj is determined to use it as a force for good.

“I'm very passionate about utilizing my interest in CS for social impact, and that is something reflected in many of my endeavors,” she said.

“I'm specifically interested in the intersection between AI and healthcare, especially in the context of improving accessibility for the disabled community.

“Whether it is through making the Internet more accessible for the visually-impaired using natural language processing or developing intelligent hearing aids using machine learning algorithms, I want to be at the forefront of a movement using AI to revolutionize inclusivity.”