It doesn’t really matter where you start

That’s me, I am a pretty regular girl I guess, but I want to change the narrative about what it means to be an engineer and share the story of how I got to where I am. I feel like I keep reading about research scientists who have only ever been research scientists and, guys that it NOT me!

Do you see that girl on the right side of the image ^, yeah, that’s me.

A lot of the computer science student’s I talk to took CS classes in high school and were really great at math, and knew engineers in the field. They could visit tech companies or reach out to people in their families network to understand what the field was like and get an idea of what and how to build it. I, on the other hand, started high school at Oakland School for the Arts, where I studied dance. I studied contemporary, Horton, ballet, jazz, and modern dance during the school hours. My instructor at the time did not believe that hip-hop dance was a real dance form so I studied my real passion hip-hop dance after school by joining hip-hop companies.While

Working Learner Slide Deck While other students took community college STEM coursework and did really cool research projects, I spent nights and weekends with the artsy folks, who loved hip-hop.

I learned pretty quickly that I did not want to be a professional dancer, I knew I was curious and I liked to solve problems but I also knew that I was academically behind my peers at Berkeley High given OSA did not give homework and did not supply textbooks. We would do our classwork off of Macbooks for half of the day and the other half we would spend in our art emphasis specialization.

So, I transferred to prepare myself for the University of California, I didn’t really care which UC but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get there if I was not academically prepared.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I was at least doing homework again, and I got a pretty good feel for the autonomy of navigating the college space. As a part of academic choice at Berkeley High, your counselor helps you navigate which classes you should take to enable you to matriculate into whichever field you want to go into. My senior year was great because I got to take a cool class on cinematography where we produced a film, dance emphasis and cheerleading were pretty fun as well.

Looking, back I still can not believe I was that girl! I was NOT thinking about research, if I could go back and tell that girl, “you, my dear will be an engineer on day, you willl build important things that will help change the world” I would have laughed and said, “Sure…”.

Gravity

Cinematography course in high school. Lets unpack how few students are able to take a course like this in high school.

I got into a few good colleges right out of high school, but I got some really great advice from my godfather:

go where your money will take you

Last week during my panel discussion with the middle school and a few college students I mentioned this lesson as my biggest takeaway. I decided to go to a community college not because I was not smart enough or not good enough for another school but because at the time it was what I could afford. I did not want to burden my mother with the cost of attendance and ask her to take out huge loans for me. I am very happy that I went to community college. I was able to explore different majors and meet amazing people and participate in fantastic research.

CHORI

The good the bad and the ugl https://docs.google.com/document/d/17j51zWGdsCIzopDZBXWTfnAJYGhAm653r-Z8xjGgqTM/edit?usp=sharing During my second year of community college, I participated in a summer research internship with children’s hospital and research center in Oakland. I was able to study metabolite analysis, it was my first experience into what it meant to be a researcher and be surrounded by incredibly smart people.

From this experience, I learned that the field of health care was not virtualized and it was frustrating. At this point, I was preparing to become a doctor because if you know me you know that I strive to be Dr. Gregory House.

I was pretty frustrated at this point and I wanted to step away from my studies so I decided, why not do an Americorp year! So I did.

Americorps

I was a kindergarten TA for 50 lovely students across two classes and I was able to teach 3 after-school extra-curricular activities.

My students taught me so about the next generation. They shared with me their struggles and their strengths. I started to understand the public school systems bureaucracy and why and how some students have a really hard time making it into the middle class, when “all school are equal…”

Maybe I am just a model

I even found the time to take up a side gig- teaching doesn’t pay well, but modeling totally does. If this software engineering gig doesn’t work out, I’m going back to Marla Dell, fasho! $180.50/hr to try on clothes was insane!

Buddhism

I was even encouraged to give back to youth interested in arts and I was the choreographer and lead instructor for the Oakland East Bay Chapter of the myo-lotus dance group. This was a really great year for me and I even made it to the cover of the World Tribune the monthly publication for the lay Buddhist organization that I have been a part of my whole life!

At this point, I was in the middle of transferring to UC Davis and I thought about who were the professionals who solved technological problems or developed technological solutions. I felt like the work that I did over the summer could have been done by a computer game and that it would have been more productive to let the game or model create organic chemistry equations and have more in-depth conversations about the pros and cons of those outcomes. My frustrations lead me to an understanding that computer scientists find technological solutions and I promptly changed my major.

Nursing school is really competitive

Moving from community college to a four-year school was a big change. I did a lot of volunteer service in local hospitals before my transfer and given in indecisiveness in terms of majors and life plans, I was also still considering the medical field. I got into nursing school which was a huge accomplishment for me.

Art and Enrichment Courses on Campus

• What is the purpose of taking courses outside of your major during your undergraduate degree?
• On my new campus, I started taking art classes and sociology courses. I was extremely intimidated by the idea of jumping into computer science. I didn’t know anything about making stuff with the computer, I didn’t know any programming language. I was completely starting over and I was petrified. The thing about learning is it never stops, even when you are afraid that you might fail, or you might not understand something, you just take the first step. After the first step, you take the second step, and the next thing you know you have taken a step into the future you.

In my first visual art class, I decided to draw a picture of my Butsudan because my Buddhist practice has really helped me stay grounded during my many transitions. There are SO may times when I thought it was too hard, and that all the odds were stacked against me, but I would go to my altar and chant about it. I knew that I had the power to change my circumstances and I would overcome whatever obstacles I was facing at the current time. I also strive to be a global citizen and knowing that there were people all around the world who were also chanting and working towards happiness and world peace helped me continue.

I took the first step and I enrolled in my first computer science course. It was SO challenging for me. It was like I was in a room and everyone was speaking Mandarin and asking me to turn in assignments. I spent hours on youtube trying to find tutorials to help me catch up and make some sense of the information that was being presented to me. I luckily found Harvard’s CS50. The explanations in this class were so helpful and the shorts really saved me in this major.

Institute for the future

During this time I was introduced to Institutes for the Future and was invited to participate in one of their panels on the future of work and the working learner. I learned about the idea of bootcamps from this panel and it seemed like coding bootcamps might be a great option for me. I felt like what I was learning in the classroom was all theory and there was no application. If you have some relation to application development then you may be one of the students who can listen during a lecture and then go home and work on side projects applying your knowledge. I needed that application level of understanding and so this is how my journey through bootcamps began.

Dev Bootcamp

I earned a scholarship through yes we code to attend Dev Bootcamp. I wrote about that experience as I was working through it.

As a part of the yes we code program after the boot camp once per week we were able to travel around to different tech companies and work individually with software developers in the field. This was such a great experience for me because they took the time to dive really in depth with the material. Dev Bootcamp has a learn as you go model so there isn’t a real lecture and after you are assigned a new learning objective you sort of work backwards to understand how to apply that new concept. So for me, it was so useful to have someone to go over the material with and give me more context on how to apply the new information.

Lab Sessions

During the Lab session, I found an engineer who was so relatable and worked as a data engineer. He taught me so much about data and finance and how the two correlate. Thank you Zach so much for introducing me to data, I am pretty sure this was the first time we worked together and I have been in love with data ever since and I am so happy you are one of my mentors. Yes we code was such a great learning opportunity for me and I am so grateful to the staff and all of the wonderful engineers who took time out of their schedules to help a newbie like me enter the field.

Data Engineer

What is addepar?

Feel free to read about my experience @ Dev Bootcamp here

Virtual Reality + Habitat (Annenberg)

I also participated in and won my first hackathon on virtual reality and journalism held @ USC Annenberg School of Journalism.

Black Girls Code

Working with IFTF I met a few amazing people including Kimberly Bryant the founder of black girls code, which was SO inspiring and just jaw dropping. She is doing wonderful work to help expose black girls to technology through summer camps and workshops. She brings together black female technologists all over the world, #blackgirlscode are now even in Africa! It is amazing how when you are open to new opportunities you meet people in person you once were only able to read about.

Lucas Film

How many people have learned life lessons from Star Wars? I feel like most people have contemplated and altered their worldview after analyzing Yoda quotes. I also met Milton Chen during an event with IFTF, and once I saw that his badge said Lucas Film, I had to know if this was related to Star Wars. Once he confirmed that it was, he mentioned that I could tour the campus if I wanted. I was so overwhelmed by this opportunity and had a blast touring the Marin campus, it is so beautiful. There is a library on campus that to this day inspires me. I would one day like to build a library in my house which is inspired by that beautiful collection of books. It was TO DIE FOR…

I will also mention the actor and director, Nate Parker was having coffee in the cafeteria so I just casually went up to him to chat. Lucas did write and produce a film that Nate starred in, Red Tails about a group of African-American pilots.

Graduation

Ok, so I met all of these cool people, and I participated in a few cool events up until this point, I even graduated from boot camp, but I still felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. In software development, things are constantly changing, like everyday! Even when you know how to do things, there are loads of things that you don’t know how to do. When I would sit down to start to build something, I would freeze up, or spend HOURS, trying to debug. This is what my development reality was like. I felt overwhelmed and confused.

Those Feels Again

It wasn’t completely isolating because there were other bootcamp graduates. We would talk about out struggles understanding certain topics or trying to get past a technical interview when you haven’t taken a data structures and algorithms class. It can be hard fresh out of boot camp, but people make it to the other side, LOTS of people.

Teamwork

Teamwork

The Ivy League Black Founder from New York

Introducing Amina

Fresh out of boot camp a start-up founder Amina emailed me asking to help with the development aspect of her start-up. I was so excited to take on a new project! I completely believed in her mission and am so proud of the work they are doing and continue to do.

LinkedIn Hackathon

I was also invited to participate in the LinkedIn hackathon for the first time as an intern in the valley. I learned about natural language processing for the first time and met some really great people. This was also the first time I met a code2040 fellow and learned about the program!

My first group project

Pocketboard (Project)

Thinking back a little to my first group project and my first technical team project, I remember my team from PocketBoard. PocketBoard was my final project that I worked on at Dev Bootcamp, and there were so many learning moments within that project. We had a student from UCD, a student from UCB, and two international students. One finance student and one business student. We all came together to build an asset management tool for novice users. Victor the financial analyst of the group was very familiar with the product, it was his idea but no one else in the group knew anything about finance, not really. We started developing a portfolio generator that would use back-tested data from the S&P 500 and scrape data from social media and use sentiment analysis on this data to determine trends in the company and help predict increases or decreases in the stock price. Even thinking about this idea today, it is SO ambitious for a week long project, but we were all excited about it and we built something like it. We built a Tinderized stock selected for the novice user.

I am so proud of this project for so many reasons and I think it was my introduction into financial technology and one of the reasons why I am so interested in financial technology now.

As I was busy trying to figure out my next move, with more and more familial pressure to graduate, I found out about a cool new scholarship, Adobe partnered with General Assembly to pay for the Web Development Immersive program. This was so exciting for me because:

scholarships can take you ANYWHERE!

I applied and received the scholarship and I completed another boot camp. I learned a different stack and became more familiar with Javascript, Dev Bootcamp was primarily a ruby shop. I also focused a LOT more on project management.

Scrum Master

Thank you to Collabnet for sending all of the Yes We Code scholars to training to become a SCRUM Master. I learned so much about agile development from that course.

What Now? Now that I am a code2040 fellow, and completing my summer internships I am thinking about what problems I want to solve and how I want to use my new skills to make a big difference.

Speaking to Students

UC Davis partnered with IFTF to hold a symposium with educators and faculty about the future of education and how the University can be a place which works with the changing start-up culture. Hopefully, more Universities will get on board and think about the type of education it’s students are getting and make sure that students really feel like they are getting 21st-century skills when they invest a large amount of money it costs to attend a four-year university these days. In the image on the left, I came back to my school to speak as a panelist during this symposium and I got a chance to tell a lot of graduate students and research faculty about my personal views on education.

I will always remember that day, talking coming full circle. I appreciate the many opportunities that UC Davis has offered me and I plan on completing my education and going on to graduate school now that I feel like I have the tools necessary for application development and not simply theory.

Here UC Davis engineers spent a day @ synaptics.

Smartcar

That day I met the founder of smartcar an API which controls a Tesla from a smart watch or tablet. The coolest thing I have seen in a while. The moon roof and temperature controls were controlled from his smart watch! Omg Sahas Katta is so cool!

I look like an engineer

To any up and coming engineers specifically if you were like me an you are untraditional in EVERY way. You too can become an engineer and you don’t have to change anything about yourself. We need engineers who look and act like you. You can be pretty and pretty good at MATH. Don’t let people place you in some box and tell you that you can’t have it all. Says who?!!

What is the difference between an engineer and a non-engineer? The engineer never stopped trying to be one, then one day they were.

What’s the point you ask?

NEVER GIVE UP! EVER.

Build for the next generation

“if you can graduate, graduate” - alivia #StudentVoices

#Purpose