Hello.
My name is Kathy Pham, and I am here
to tell you about my story, "Falling
in Love with Computer Science."
It all started in high school.
I didn't know what programming was.
I had no idea what computer science was,
but I had a great geometry teacher
who decided to bring programming to our school that year.
Thanks, Mrs. Strife.
She came up to me and basically asked
if I wanted to take a programming
class my senior year.
And I figured, oh a computer class-- easy thing to do.
I will just cruise on by, have one easy class
for my senior year before graduation.
It wasn't super easy, but it turned out
I completely loved programming.
I loved building a program to write up
a receipt where I entered information
like apples and oranges and tax rate,
and it printed out a receipt that is completely customized
to what I want it to be.
And from that moment, I knew there
was something about this programming thing
that I really enjoyed.
So when I went to college next year at Georgia Tech,
I had to pick a major.
I had no idea what I should do and figured,
you know what, I'll just pick computer science
and I can always change it later.
Turns out I really, really enjoyed my first year.
The class is in Scheme, similar to Pascal.
No one had heard of Scheme either,
and it was just this language with lots of parentheses.
I loved it, nonetheless.
I loved the way it made me think logically,
and I just loved writing functions
that can do what I told it to.
So then I continued to really fall in love with the College
of Computing at Georgia Tech.
I loved staying up studying late at night.
I became a student ambassador for Google
and brought pizza to all of our study sessions.
I loved my professors, advisors, the classes and really just
had a great time.
But it wasn't always easy.
I had a really hard time my freshman year.
I put up a PuTTy screen here because I remember
a moment when during class the teaching assistant taught
us to go home and log into one of the College of Computing
servers.
I didn't really know what a server was, didn't
know what a terminal was.
I just had no idea what he was talking about
and just remember thinking, oh, man, this isn't for me.
And I had a great TA that had me install PuTTy
and showed me how to SSH into a terminal,
and it was great after that.
But that really drove me to be a teaching assistant, as well,
so I could help other freshman students
who came to the College of Computing a little confused
like I was.
So that was also a lot of fun.
After that during my time at Georgia Tech,
I explored lots of different things.
I knew I was interested in health care to the point
where I actually was taking pre-med classes-- thought I
might want to go to med school.
And I thought, well, you know I should explore everything
and had a research assistantship at a microarray bioinformatics
lab at Georgia Tech.
And I fell in love with the idea of using
data and bioinformatics to do something good for the world.
So that led to an internship at Google.
I interviewed for a summer internship
as an associate product manager at Google.
One of my interviewers had asked,
tell me just something that isn't really on your resume
that you just really care about.
So I started talking about my love
for health care, that I had done some work
in this microarray lab, really liked bioinformatics.
I didn't think it had anything to do with Google
because Google did search and maps and email.
And turns out they were looking for someone for Google Health
that summer.
So I spent the summer with some of these interns
here and really absolutely loved learning more
about computer science and data and just learning
how it all can tie together in health care.
So I loved computer science so much
that I decided to stay for a master's program.
I flew over to Paris, France.
And I had a great excuse to tell my mom I was doing something
with my life but really go live and enjoy my time in France
while getting a computer science degree.
The university was actually in this beautiful city
called Metz, a little outside of Paris.
And I had my computer science program
jointly with Supelec, a French university.
I learned conversational French, learned to absolutely
love and embrace the French culture and food,
met some wonderful friends, and also
had an internship at INRIA, a French research institute.
So I had a wonderful time there.
Near the end of my time as a graduate student,
I had an opportunity to participate
in the Microsoft Imagine Cup.
That's basically the World Cup.
But instead of for soccer, it's for nerds.
And it's held in a different city every year.
I found a partner to enter with me into this competition,
and we actually ended up with the first place
in the Microsoft Imagine Cup and had a wonderful time building
a tool to address one of the United Nations Millennium
Development Goals.
So after I graduated, I had to figure out something
to do with my life in the real world.
I got a wonderful opportunity to go live along
the Space Coast of Florida and work at Harris Healthcare
Solutions, finding ways to use software
to find solutions for some of the hospital problems
that we have today.
And what that also meant was that I saw many rocket
launches, I learned to surf, and I
got to live along the Space Coast of Melbourne
and just really enjoy wonderful, beachy lifestyle.
But I missed the big city.
So I had an opportunity then to become a business consultant
for IBM, building and testing data warehouses
for hospital clients around the country in many cool cities.
One of my fondest memories while I did this
was when I ran my first ever half marathon.
I trained for my first ever half marathon
with my team that was in Nashville with me at the time
while I was living in Orlando.
So I had a lot of fun times flying around with IBM.
However, it wasn't always fun times.
There were times when I was delayed,
late nights on Thursdays.
This is a photo of when I was snowed in in Roanoke, Virginia
one time.
And I really just missed my family
after flying around for so long.
So I found a new role.
At that time, Google was hiring for a data analyst role.
So I came back to Google.
So I'm currently a data analyst for our staffing and hiring
and all the people data.
But before I actually could start at Google,
my mom was diagnosed with leukemia.
And I never thought that everything
I had learned with computer science, with health care,
with program management, with consulting, with learning
to just fly around on last minute's notice
would really prepare me for one the important roles I'd ever
have in my life.
And that was be a patient advocate for my mom
during her battle with leukemia.
She was diagnosed last year in August 2013,
and I'm happy to say that she had
her last round of chemo on October 6-- one year
and two months after diagnosis.
Hurray!
So that gives me time to go back to Google
and continue my love affair with computer science,
focusing on data.
I also do things like Girls Who Code on the side and support
our K through 12 initiatives, in addition
to working with our business intelligence community
here at Google.
So what's really started out as a chance
encounter in high school has turned into many academic,
personal, and professional adventures of computer science
I don't know what the future holds,
but I'm excited to continue this adventure.
And I hope that your passions and love for whatever field
you decide to join-- and maybe it is one related
to science, technology, engineering, or math--
will take you on many great adventures as well.
Thank you.