For his final project in Arabic Calligraphy, Ziyad Gawish penned one of his favorite verses from the Quran.

“It translates to, ‘God doesn’t burden you with more than you can handle,’ and I feel like that’s been my motto,” Gawish said. “Whenever I do something difficult, I always just think about that: I’m built for it.”

It was a bit of competitive fire that drove Gawish, a first-generation college student, to apply to Stanford in the first place. A high school friend in Long Island, New York, told him it was hard to get in – so Gawish accepted the premise as a challenge.

When he learned he’d been admitted, Gawish had to then convince his parents it was worth moving across the country to enroll; they had immigrated to New York from Egypt and had never heard of Stanford. During Admit Weekend, his father came around.

“Seeing all the palm trees, driving toward the Oval, we were like, ‘Where are we right now?’” Gawish recalls. “We didn’t know that colleges looked like this.”

“Walking around, meeting people, seeing that there was a lot of support for me through the FLI office, through the Muslim Student Union, through the Arab Student Association, he knew that I could find a home here.”

Gawish started his undergraduate career focused on bioengineering, but things changed when he took the introductory programming course CS 106A. He fell in love with the power and the versatility of the major, the ability to have an idea and to bring it to life – “A to Z.”

Before long, Gawish was coding for some of the biggest companies in the world.

During a leave of absence in fall 2021, he interned at Tesla, where he wrote software for the battery manufacturing team. In summer 2022, he worked with the team that manages upgrades for Google Cloud.

For his senior software project, Gawish and his teammates worked with Mercedes-Benz, exploring ways to incorporate augmented reality into vehicles. With travel costs covered by the computer science department, he flew to Germany to present the project to the company’s future technologies team.

Gawish also tackled a busy schedule of extracurriculars.

An avid soccer player, he joined men’s club soccer his freshman year. After the pandemic closure, he helped rebuild the team and became co-captain and president his senior year. He also served as co-president of the Arab Students Association.

Gawish will return to Stanford in the fall to complete a master’s degree in electrical engineering. Wherever his career takes him after that, he wants to contribute to his family and to people across the Arab region.

“My goal always is to work towards being able to give those people a voice, being able to give back to those communities.”