Dorelys Martínez Suárez

I was born in Barranquilla but grew up in Puerto Colombia, Atlántico, my mother's hometown and the place I always come back to. From ages 6 to 9 I lived in Puerto Carreño, Vichada, and then six months in Tegucigalpa. Those years in the Amazonian Vichada and in Honduras gave me something no classroom can teach: that the world is wide, and problems that seem local rarely are.

I taught myself to code at 9, reading books and blogs. And yet, for years the last thing I wanted was to study systems engineering. The idea of spending my life behind a screen didn't appeal to me. At 16, I won a scholarship and moved to Medellín to study Aeronautical Engineering at UPB. I loved it. Then a chronic illness arrived, and in 2019, at 17, I came back to Puerto Colombia.

Changing paths was hard. Studying systems was my mother's idea — she always saw it before I did. She was right. What confirmed it for me wasn't a class or an academic project: it was building technology that had a real impact on real people.

I grew up helping my parents and grandfather with the social initiatives they ran in Puerto Carreño and Puerto Colombia. In 2016 I joined the MJS Foundation as a volunteer. I taught technology, programming, and game development to kids and young people aged 6 to 17, in Spanish and English. I stepped away to scale that impact, especially in my community, where my brother Alex works as a community leader.

In 2024, just before graduating, I won a scholarship to visit German universities. I had already been working with machine learning, but what I saw there changed my perspective: what we do here, with the resources we have, isn't so far from what they do there. That's what truly hooked me on AI, not as a technology of the future, but as a tool of the present for those who know how to use it.