Learning the Language of the Future
Growing up, I attended an elite private school where I was ordered to wear button down white dress shirt and a long, hideous, plaid skirt and do insanely advanced academic things for kids our age. Things such as debate, singing, logic, dance, and coding classes. My school wasn’t named “Challenger” for just any reason. When I was in 3rd grade, at the age of 8, I sat behind a computer for four hours a week commanding a digital turtle to draw various shapes and designs through Terrapin Logo. Terrapin Logo was the first computer language designed for children. Through Logo, students harness the power of the computer by writing their own programs that push them to explore math, art, science, music, language, and so much more. While doing so, they are able to develop programming, critical thinking, and problem solving skills. This class was always my favorite of the day because I was able to make art with computers. At the time, I had no idea that I was even coding. I thought this adorable, little turtle was simply moving where I told him to and that was the extent of what was going on. At the age where children begin to get a sense of their own place in the world, I sat behind a keyboard coding. As the years progressed, I was able to create digital card games, have the computer play Beethoven, draw mandalas and snowflakes, and so much more. There was always an unspoken competition that was heated and intense between the boys and girls in my class. It was extremely important that the boys created better drawings or programs and finished before the girls in the class. The boys had to prove to the girls that they were smarter, faster, and better than us. I was not going to stand by and let them build that glass ceiling above my head at the meek age of 8. Terrapin Logo sparked the fire that still burns inside me today. It sparked my interest in the world of programming and engineering, my drive to keep up and challenge the males that would be questioning my place for the rest of my life.
Middle school was the next stepping stone in my coding career. At the age 11, I said goodbye to our pal the Logo turtle and started Pascal, an imperative and procedural programming language. Pascal was published in 1970 as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices by introducing users to the basic of coding languages in a more formal manner than Terrapin Logo. I was coding, I was really doing it. It was a transition from drawing pictures and puzzles with a turtle to writing scripts of code to perform intermediate mathematical calculations and store the answers in arrays. Going from Terrapin Logo to Pascal was like taking the training wheels off your bike for the first time. I was released, told to pedal, steer my bike, and not lose balance or crash. I did this for the next three years...and it was not easy. There were times when I was so frustrated that I had to take a lap around the basketball court. I could spend hours working on one program that could break with just one small mistake and to find that error would take even more time. Something as simple as a missing “;” would break the code and cause me to rip my hair out, but I never gave up. I always kept my head up and tried harder and new ways to code. There are thousands of ways to write code to get the same output. I was always trying to write the best and most efficient code I could. I wanted to be better than the guys in my class because to be better than them meant I proved them wrong. I needed to show them that I could do anything that they could.
After graduating Challenger, I truly believed my days of coding were over. One day after class, my calculus teacher asked me to stay behind. He told me that he saw a spark in me, a drive and thirst for knowledge, a competitive force, and a fierce attitude. The next words that came out of his mouth shocked me. He told me that he wanted me to enroll in his computer programming course the next semester, and I told him I would think about it. I remember showing up to Advanced Placement Computer Science my junior year of high school back in 2014. I so vividly recall walking into a room filled with testosterone pumping men. The reason I remember this so well is because I was the only girl. I was even asked by a kid sitting next to me if I was in the wrong room. My heart was pounding, my mouth was dry, I was an outsider with every eye in the room on me. They did not have to say what was on their minds, I already knew. I could have easily left and changed classes that day, but I didn't. I chose to feed that fire inside me that was sparked as a child. I had a burning passion to code and I knew I could not ignore it. I sat in my seat, took out a notebook and wrote the date. When I made that decision, I started down a path that would lead me to be where I am today. This class was a pinnacle point in my career as a female engineer. It was in this course that I wrote my first piece of code in Java, reading: “Hello world”. More widely used than Pascal, Java is a programming language that the “big league” coders used. A generic first project for any coding class. But it was exhilarating to be able to communicate with my computer and have it respond. Programming is a worldwide language and I just learned my first sentence. It was a feeling that is almost indescribable because the closest analogy is your first words as a child, but no one can remember that. It was a sort of prideful feeling to be part of this exclusive community of intelligent individuals with a shared love for programming.
I was propelled into a hunger for more. I wanted to code more and more challenging problems beyond AP Computer Science. In addition to my passion for the world of coding, I wanted to prove all those boys wrong. I wanted them to see that I could do it too, even though I had a vagina and “wasn’t as smart as them”. From this class, I continued my passion and was recruited by Sandia National Laboratories, the place where every undergraduate and graduate student wanted to be. Sandia was where interns were equipped with the newest and best resources and were learning from the most intelligent engineers in the business. It was here where I was once again put in a ring one on one with the glass ceiling above my head. Out of the five interns in my group, not only was I the only girl, I was the only intern still in high school. That was a terrifying moment. I spent that summer challenging myself every day. This internship drove me to apply to college with a declared major in the college of engineering.
My struggles and my journey in learning the language of computers taught me many life lessons and values that I will carry with me forever. It taught me that no one can tell me what I can or cannot do; I am the only one that can decide that. Just because you are not a man does not mean you are not just as smart, skilled, talented, and driven. This was a huge problem when I entered college and decided I wanted to be an engineer. Yet again...surprise. I was the only girl. No one wanted to be my lab partner, no one took me seriously, no one answered my questions. No one believed I should have been there or deserved to. So what did I do? I earned my spot. I fought for it by working twice as hard. Hopes that I would be respected and seen as a competitive equal were depleted. The boys never changed, and I would soon face the fact that this is the world we live in. A world where women earn 78 cents for every dollar a male earns for the same job. With a wage gap so large, how could men not think they are superior? Why wouldn’t small boys believe the same thing as their dads, brothers, and uncles? With a wage gap so large, how could I shatter the glass ceiling? Coding changed my experience and mindset as a woman engineer. Ultimately, my experiences with programming prepared me with many transferable skills. It altered the way I problem solve and think. It reassured my place in my major. Coding is one of the world’s most widely used languages and it gave me a voice to speak up.
Middle school was the next stepping stone in my coding career. At the age 11, I said goodbye to our pal the Logo turtle and started Pascal, an imperative and procedural programming language. Pascal was published in 1970 as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices by introducing users to the basic of coding languages in a more formal manner than Terrapin Logo. I was coding, I was really doing it. It was a transition from drawing pictures and puzzles with a turtle to writing scripts of code to perform intermediate mathematical calculations and store the answers in arrays. Going from Terrapin Logo to Pascal was like taking the training wheels off your bike for the first time. I was released, told to pedal, steer my bike, and not lose balance or crash. I did this for the next three years...and it was not easy. There were times when I was so frustrated that I had to take a lap around the basketball court. I could spend hours working on one program that could break with just one small mistake and to find that error would take even more time. Something as simple as a missing “;” would break the code and cause me to rip my hair out, but I never gave up. I always kept my head up and tried harder and new ways to code. There are thousands of ways to write code to get the same output. I was always trying to write the best and most efficient code I could. I wanted to be better than the guys in my class because to be better than them meant I proved them wrong. I needed to show them that I could do anything that they could.
After graduating Challenger, I truly believed my days of coding were over. One day after class, my calculus teacher asked me to stay behind. He told me that he saw a spark in me, a drive and thirst for knowledge, a competitive force, and a fierce attitude. The next words that came out of his mouth shocked me. He told me that he wanted me to enroll in his computer programming course the next semester, and I told him I would think about it. I remember showing up to Advanced Placement Computer Science my junior year of high school back in 2014. I so vividly recall walking into a room filled with testosterone pumping men. The reason I remember this so well is because I was the only girl. I was even asked by a kid sitting next to me if I was in the wrong room. My heart was pounding, my mouth was dry, I was an outsider with every eye in the room on me. They did not have to say what was on their minds, I already knew. I could have easily left and changed classes that day, but I didn't. I chose to feed that fire inside me that was sparked as a child. I had a burning passion to code and I knew I could not ignore it. I sat in my seat, took out a notebook and wrote the date. When I made that decision, I started down a path that would lead me to be where I am today. This class was a pinnacle point in my career as a female engineer. It was in this course that I wrote my first piece of code in Java, reading: “Hello world”. More widely used than Pascal, Java is a programming language that the “big league” coders used. A generic first project for any coding class. But it was exhilarating to be able to communicate with my computer and have it respond. Programming is a worldwide language and I just learned my first sentence. It was a feeling that is almost indescribable because the closest analogy is your first words as a child, but no one can remember that. It was a sort of prideful feeling to be part of this exclusive community of intelligent individuals with a shared love for programming.
I was propelled into a hunger for more. I wanted to code more and more challenging problems beyond AP Computer Science. In addition to my passion for the world of coding, I wanted to prove all those boys wrong. I wanted them to see that I could do it too, even though I had a vagina and “wasn’t as smart as them”. From this class, I continued my passion and was recruited by Sandia National Laboratories, the place where every undergraduate and graduate student wanted to be. Sandia was where interns were equipped with the newest and best resources and were learning from the most intelligent engineers in the business. It was here where I was once again put in a ring one on one with the glass ceiling above my head. Out of the five interns in my group, not only was I the only girl, I was the only intern still in high school. That was a terrifying moment. I spent that summer challenging myself every day. This internship drove me to apply to college with a declared major in the college of engineering.
My struggles and my journey in learning the language of computers taught me many life lessons and values that I will carry with me forever. It taught me that no one can tell me what I can or cannot do; I am the only one that can decide that. Just because you are not a man does not mean you are not just as smart, skilled, talented, and driven. This was a huge problem when I entered college and decided I wanted to be an engineer. Yet again...surprise. I was the only girl. No one wanted to be my lab partner, no one took me seriously, no one answered my questions. No one believed I should have been there or deserved to. So what did I do? I earned my spot. I fought for it by working twice as hard. Hopes that I would be respected and seen as a competitive equal were depleted. The boys never changed, and I would soon face the fact that this is the world we live in. A world where women earn 78 cents for every dollar a male earns for the same job. With a wage gap so large, how could men not think they are superior? Why wouldn’t small boys believe the same thing as their dads, brothers, and uncles? With a wage gap so large, how could I shatter the glass ceiling? Coding changed my experience and mindset as a woman engineer. Ultimately, my experiences with programming prepared me with many transferable skills. It altered the way I problem solve and think. It reassured my place in my major. Coding is one of the world’s most widely used languages and it gave me a voice to speak up.