Why are you here?
I thought girls didn’t like computer science.
Can you code?
It didn’t really occur to me that
there were more boys in my class until I realized that
some of the girls that I really wanted to become friends with just stopped coming to class.
Recently, at a hackathon that I was at,
a piece of hardware that was tasked with machine learning didn’t recognize female voices,
because the entire team was male.
So if everyone’s thinking the same way, we’re going to have a lot of problems,
because there’s no way we’re going to adapt to changes.
The unique thing that I could bring to it wasn’t my extraordinary computer science or coding skills.
It was the fact that I come from a different background,
and I think that’s really what diversity boils down to.
One of the Microsoft employees who taught the class was a female,
so that really helped a lot.
And most of it was just setting my mind on this goal
that I wanted to pursue computer science to impact the world
in any way that I can.
Code is really original, and for me it’s kind of like a piece of art.
That was the defining moment for me,
getting to actually create something in computer science
with code that I can then use.
That impostor syndrome has gradually faded away.
And I’ve gone from a place of being terrified and thinking I wasn’t qualified,
but I hope to god they believe I am,
to actually feeling like no, I am qualified.
Stop apologizing for being different.
Stop apologizing for what you perceived to be any lack of skill or experience,
and just do it.