Throughout middle and high school, my best friend pushed me to join robotics clubs and engineering classes. My first taste of coding was similar to most other people’s: hour of code. But I think the most impactful part of my experience was that within these classrooms it was almost completely boys. This started in middle school robotics club. Although we mostly worked with Linkbots, we usually did some extra coding exercises on the side. I thought the club was fun and all, but mostly as an extracurricular activity because I did not always get the code right on the first try and my peers were always faster. It did not help that it constantly felt like the girls had some sort of special treatment or were at least treated differently. It was definitely my introduction to engineering class freshman year of high school that solidified this. Our teacher would have us, “the girls” (I put this in quotation marks because this is what our teacher would actually call us), participate in separate activities. One of these was a competition that only “the girls” took part in. It felt like an echo of the separation that took place in middle school robotics.
In retrospect I appreciate the elements of supporting women in engineering and even pushing us to explore all of the activities that were meant for us. But I think it all contributed to me feeling alienated and different from the rest of the students. Now, I think I want to find communities that I will fit into whether it be a society of women engineers or a random club like hackathon club.
But back to the story. By the time college applications rolled around, I had to decide what I wanted to do, which has not been an easy journey for me. At the time, I was watching a lot of Criminal Minds and thought I was interested in psychology. I had taken the introduction to psychology class at my local community college and taken and passed the AP psychology test my junior year. I decided to apply early decision to UPenn, majoring in forensic psychology. If you know me, obviously I did not get in. But this also prompted me to essentially apply as a psychology major to every other school I eventually applied to, with the exception of the University of the Pacific, which was the school I initially committed to. After committing to UCSB as soon as I got off of the waitlist, I was still a psychology major. When I went to orientation, I had the intention of going to medical school and I realized it would be harder to get the classes I needed if I was a psychology major. The night of orientation, I immediately switched my major to chemistry. The idea was that I could switch to something less biology if I did not want to go to medical school. Long story short, biology seemed to be the best major when I decided on optometry school. And here I am now, a post-bacc student in CS after realizing optometry was probably not for me.
After writing this initially, I want to add some thoughts. I am about halfway through my first actual CS class. It is online through a community college so there are definitely limitations, but it is starting to get hard. Is it manageable? Yes, I will get through it. But I think this is just a taste of what’s to come. On a similar note, getting this website to work has been such a pain. But again, I will get through this and succeed. Dare I say that despite all of the frustration, it is also fun trying to get this all to work.