Senior Victor Iris Del Prado founded his own company before attending Harding. Senior software development major Victor Iris Del Prado started his own company in 2012 at 14 years old. Based out of his bedroom and high school computer lab in Villahermosa, Mexico, Iris Del Prado designed and maintained websites for local clients. In 2016, Iris Del Prado arrived as a freshman at Harding, where he also gained a U.S. clientele. Iris Del Prado started his software development company after bargaining with his teachers for an excuse from a school activity in return for a website. After that initial project, Iris Del Prado said he accepted small projects from classmates, acquaintances and teachers. He taught himself basic software development to fulfill project requirements. "He had to go out and learn the tools to program," Dr. Scott Ragsdale, associate professor of computer science, said. "Now, if you're not a motivated person, you will not do that because that's hard. That is very hard at his age, and there are a lot of skills." Ragsdale said, in his 35 years working at Harding, he did not know of any other computer science students who ran their own businesses in addition to school work. "I think certainly having some business experience and real world experience, you kind of understand that somebody's got to pay for the software to be developed, and they've got certain goals," Dr. Frank McCown, associate professor of computer science, said. "We tell our 122 seniors students that in classes when we say, 'Here's the scenario, and here's what you're going to do when you leave here.' But [Victor has] actually experienced that, so he knows, 'Oh yeah, you've actually got to fulfill these requirements that the customer is giving you or you don't get paid.'" Iris Del Prado planned to return to Mexico after graduating from Harding to focus on the growth of his company. Iris Del Prado said there was an opportunity to expand the software development job field in Mexico as future entrepreneurs inherited companies. "One time we got a client, and we made a website for them," Iris Del Prado said. "But, the process was really interesting because we had to make them think that we were this massive corporation with offices and those kinds of developers at an office. But, in fact, it was just me in my pjs in my dorm,just coding there. When we had meetings using FaceTime, I just had to make sure that the top part of me looked like I was in an office." story by Audrey Jackson
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