How Did You Get Started?
posted by clara Dec 12, 2009 @ 1:23 AM • 1 comment
in computer science getting started introduction linguistics programming school storytime
Anecdotally, a lot of the men I know in science/tech/math have been interested in these fields since grade school; by the time they got to college, they’d already taken some advanced classes and were ready to major in these subjects. And while there are certainly plenty of women I know who were on math team in high school (or something similar), I also know a lot of women who realized they were interested in these fields later in life, after they’d already studied a non-technical field in college, and took a less traditional path to learning about it; some of them are self-taught in technical fields, and some of them are going back to school to learn more about their newfound interests.
My story is sort of in between. I’d always been somewhat interested in computers, but never really learned any programming. In my third year of college, when I was already well on my way to a linguistics degree, I decided that since I was interested in computational linguistics and natural language processing in particular (at the time I thought I’d go to grad school for linguistics), I’d benefit from taking an intro to computer science course. I decided I was up for the challenge of the honors level of the course; even though technically no programming experience was required, I assumed I was starting from behind. And indeed, the guys in the class (out of the 20-some-student class, I was one of two girls) projected an air of confidence and experience, and I felt like I was struggling to keep up with the assignments.
I was surprised, then, when at the end of the quarter, I had one of the highest grades in the class! (This made me wonder if some of the more experienced students had been overconfident and hadn’t worked as hard — I also think it helped that we were learning Scheme, which isn’t something many high school hobbyists pick up on their own :P) I’d also discovered that I loved programming, and started taking classes toward a computer science minor — which quickly turned into squishing a full computer science major into my last two years of college, and deciding I’d rather become a programmer than go to grad school. Since then, my web development skills have been mostly self-taught, though the programming I learned in college certainly gave me a head-start on that.
How did you first get interested in STEM? When and how did you start training in your field (if you’ve done that yet — or how do you plan to)? Share your story in the comments!
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at 7:10PM 12/22/09 Deborah_Wazir said:
What a great topic! What started me off on this path was my highschool boyfriend, who had a PC of his own and got me interested in taking a BASIC programming class my Senior year in highschool. I loved that class, and programming came easily to me.
When I thought about choosing a college major, I thought about being a CS major like my boyfriend. But being a competitive type, I wanted to know what was more advanced than programming – maybe designing computers? What would that job be called? Around the same time, I got a brochure from a college that described different engineering disciplines, so I learned that electrical engineers designed computers, so I decided to get my BSEE.
Since I was going into engineering, I was able to interview and get hired as a GM engineering co-op student so I could get work experience and pay much of my way through school. I started the day after highschool graduation. I was perplexed when I would tell my coworkers I was majoring in EE, and they would always say, “Wow, you must really like math!” I would always reply, “No, actually I really hate math” and it would be their turn to look puzzled. I was kind of worried about it but thought, if there was that much math involved, the degree would come from the Math Department, surely…
So I got to college and wow, there sure was a lot of math to EE! By the way, math was always my worst subject. In classes like Physics, we would start off the chapter & it would be so interesting & I would be so into it, but then they would say “OK, let’s describe all that mathmatically…” and I would become totally lost. I thought I must be an idiot, because it seemed so easy for everyone else. I was usually the only girl in my classes.
I felt like I didn’t belong there, but what kept me going was: my co-op job depended on remaining in engineering, and paying for college depended on my co-op job; I loved my co-op job assignments, and got excellent work reviews, so I figured it was more important to be a good worker than student anyway; I was convinced my whole future depended on getting my degree; I promised myself if I got through this degree I could enjoy the rest of my life; I was great at programming; and basically, I was too stubborn to quit.
I was too embarrassed to ever ask for help. I’m sure it took me a lot longer to do my homework assignments than the other students, since everything in EE seemed to depend on the areas I was weakest in. Once I met my husband, he and his friends worked with me from time to time to explain assignments to me and I started to catch up. Finally I graduated, started working as a Manufacturing Engineer, eventually becoming a Unix/Linux Systems Engineer, which I had more of an affinity for.
It was all worth it! Not all my decisions were optimal, but I’ve never been sorry I got a EE degree. Even though I’ve experienced layoffs in my career, I’ve always been able to find work when I needed it, I’ve met fantastic coworkers and had the chance to be continuously challenged on all kinds of levels.