Linda Weng (she/her)

Vitam

Linda is a sophomore here at the University of Michigan studying Computer Science at the College of Engineering. After their grandmother suffered from a stroke and was diagnosed with aphasia, Linda and Maxwell felt the frustration in her, and created Vitam to help others. With aphasia reconnect with their loved ones. Linda is a Cohort VIII fellow and is now a peer mentor at optiMize.

To learn more about Vitam, visit their website.

I think what’s unique about optiMize are the mentors. While we were updating our product and making it even better and more suited for our customer user, I was pretty stuck and I didn’t know what to do. I found it really helpful to have those mentors who had that experience doing website development and adding these features which really helped me pick that lock. Even on our business side, we found a lot of mentors we could just talk ideas through, which was really helpful. We are always thinking about Vitam, we know every little detail about it, but when you are talking to someone who doesn’t know that much about your project, you can see the gaps, where you can improve, and gain new ideas. I really think mentorship is also a huge part of optiMize. 

I’m always so surprised when I look back and see how far we’ve come. On the product side, optiMize helped us rethink some features and some ideas that we gained from the community members. They helped us update Vitam to be more accessible and useful for our customers and users. But more on the business side, I feel like optiMize helped us think differently about how our organization and our company is going to run. Through optiMize, we have gotten to another idea where we incorporate Vitam into a bigger organization instead of just doing software, bringing in student volunteers who help people with aphasia use this technology and help them.