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M.NHIDZA
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Mazvita Nhidza

Engineering Sciences, Dartmouth College ’28Hanover, New Hampshire

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Hello, I'm an Engineering Sciences student at Dartmouth College, based in Hanover, New Hampshire.

An arcade game running on an FPGA, a suspension setup for a racing car, a pipeline that read 10,000 posts about the LA wildfires. Three different subjects, same job each time: get it working, then figure out why it works.

Work

  1. 01

    Nuggets

    SOFTWARE · C / UDP · 2025

    Built a multi-client dungeon game server in C over UDP. It implements the NUGGETS protocol: players join a shared grid, collect gold, and compete in real time across concurrent connections. No frameworks underneath it: the networking, memory management and protocol are all hand-written in C.

  2. 02

    Whack-A-Mole FPGA

    HARDWARE · VHDL / FPGA · 2026

    Built a fully playable arcade game in VHDL, running on an FPGA with live VGA display output. Designed finite state machines for game logic, sprite rendering modules for moles and hammers, joystick input handling, and a score system output to seven-segment displays. Completed as a team with Alisha Qureshi and Vishal Powell for ENGS 31.

    View the code ↗
  3. 03

    Dartmouth Formula Racing

    ENGINEERING · SOLIDWORKS · 2024

    Vehicle Dynamics Co-Lead and Aerodynamics member on Dartmouth's Formula SAE team. Responsible for suspension geometry analysis, load transfer modeling, and component design in SolidWorks. The team competes against 500+ college students internationally. Also involved in fabrication including TiG welding. Started in first year, currently co-leading the dynamics subteam.

  4. 04

    LA Fires: Climate Conversation Analysis

    RESEARCH · PYTHON / NLP · 2025

    Research intern at Dartmouth's QSS Lab under Prof. Herbert Chang. Built an NLP pipeline over 10,000+ social media posts about the Los Angeles wildfires, mapping how hashtag communities formed around climate discourse. Processing and feature extraction in Python and Pandas, network graphs in Matplotlib. The graphs below are the output: dense cores around #lafires and #climatechange, with satellite clusters showing where conversations stayed separate.

  5. 05

    SwimSafe

    DESIGN · ENGS 21 / TEAM · 2025

    A five-person ENGS 21 team project. Recreational swimmers with a history of cardiac events or epilepsy can lose consciousness in the water and drown. Life jackets work but are bulky. The discreet alternative, a CO2 belt, has to be pulled by hand, which makes it useless for exactly the person it is sold to. SwimSafe activates on its own. Benchmarked against an Onyx belt, it gave 257 N of added buoyancy against the belt's 102 N, inflated in 3.12 seconds against 4.47, and held a strong face-up orientation where the belt needed manual adjustment. The team weighted orientation as heavily as buoyancy in their spec, on the reasoning that flotation is not enough if the wearer's mouth and nose are not above water. Built with Keion Grieve, James Cunningham, Asghar Qanit and Tahjae Jackson.

  6. 06

    PawPal+

    APPLIED AI · PYTHON / RAG · 2026

    An applied AI scheduling system for pet care, built in Python with a Streamlit interface. Tasks carry a two-tier priority, and a greedy time-budget scheduler fits them into the day's available minutes, pinning fixed appointments and filling the gaps with flexible ones. Completing a task auto-spawns its next occurrence, and overlapping windows raise a conflict. Includes a RAG module and a full pytest suite with coverage.

    View the code ↗

About

I do software, hardware and data, and I keep ending up on projects that need all three. The ones I like best are where something has to actually run at the end, not just work on paper.

I teach Dartmouth's intro CS course to about 200 students, co-lead vehicle dynamics on the Formula Racing team, and turn up for SWE and WiCS. Before any of that I sat A-Levels in Zimbabwe and came top in the country for Computer Science, sixth in the world.

Experience

  1. Teaching Assistant, COSC 1

    Sept 2025 – Present

    Dartmouth College

    Supporting ~200 students in Dartmouth's intro CS course. Running weekly recitations, holding office hours, and grading in Python.

  2. Research Intern

    Jan – June 2025

    Dartmouth QSS Lab

    Built an NLP pipeline for misinformation classification under Prof. Herbert Chang. Processed 10,000+ posts using Python, Pandas, and Matplotlib.

  3. International Student Mentor

    May 2025 – Present

    Dartmouth College

    Supporting incoming international students through the transition to Dartmouth.

  4. Student Intern and Ambassador

    Sept 2023 – Sept 2024

    Educait

    Coordinated hackathons that introduced machine learning and AI to primary and high school students. Ran troubleshooting sessions to fix bugs in the platform, and designed the onboarding curriculum for new ambassadors.

  5. IT Summer Intern

    Apr – May 2022

    Rubiem Innovations

Education

  1. Dartmouth College

    Sept 2024 – June 2028

    BA Engineering Sciences

    Coursework: Software Design, Data Structures, Object-Oriented Programming, Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Mechanics, Electromagnetism.

  2. Arundel School, Zimbabwe

    2018 – 2023

    CIE A-Levels

    A*A*A in Computer Science, Physics, and Mathematics.

    • Top in Zimbabwe, AS Computer Science
    • 6th in the world, A-Level Computer Science

Skills

Programming
Java, C, Python
Hardware
VHDL / FPGA, SolidWorks, Raspberry Pi, TiG Welding, Soldering
Tools
Pandas, Matplotlib, Git
Languages
English (fluent), Shona (native), French (intermediate)

Beyond

  • Dartmouth Formula Racing, Vehicle Dynamics Co-Lead
  • Society of Women Engineers (SWE)
  • Women in Computer Science (WiCS)
  • Kappa Delta Sorority
  • Soyeya Dance Troupe
  • Mbira and Marimba

Contact

Come say hi. My inbox is open.

LinkedIn ↗GitHub ↗