We’re delighted to share some fun pictures and valuable take-aways from another summer tech tour: alumnae of the DawgBytes summer coding camp toured the offices, talked career paths, and made ice cream sundaes with some amazing women engineers at Zillow.
The back story: Hélène Martin, former CS teacher at Garfield (go Bulldogs!) and CS Instructor at the UW (go Huskies!) leads a coding summer camp for girls as part of the UW’s “Dawbytes” computer science and engineering K-12 outreach program. A dozen recent grads, aged 14-20, participated in this reunion, and talking with Kristin Acker, Carol Lin, Maddie Harris, Sarah Maurer and Lakshmi Dixit was the proverbial cherry on top of this inspiring sundae. (Thanks to all of these amazing women, and Alexa Fiander for making it happen!)
Kristin, Carol, Maddie, Sarah, Lakshmi and Hélène
- Ask your teachers tough questions!
- Get hands-on experience through internships and projects; pursue your passions and do activities outside of school
- Go to networking events and seek mentors
- Start a GitHub account and post up your projects
Though every panelist had her own insight on why she pursued this career path, a few themes emerged (beyond the opportunity to wear comfortable clothing):
- exciting rate of change
- people work hard because they want to, not just because they have to
- don’t believe the hype: it’s not all heads-down coding but very team-based
- high degrees of responsibility and flexibility
Looking forward to seeing these young women in tech and entrepreneurship VERY soon!