“It was becoming a hot topic, like, how are we going to get girls and underrepresented minorities into STEM? And that was a problem I thought would be fun to tackle. So that’s what I did.”

I'm a freshman at UC Berkeley majoring in Cyber Security and Policy. I found at the intersection of those subjects is a very interesting, rapidly developing field with topics like data privacy and legislation that affect users. And it's just a fascinating field for me. 

I spent some years in high school running a robotics program for middle school girls. It was becoming a hot topic, like, how are we going to get girls and underrepresented minorities into STEM? And that was a problem I thought would be fun to tackle. So that's what I did. My proudest moment was at our very first competition that I took my students to and they won first place. And I was just thrilled. I've never cried of happiness in my life, but I did that day. 

From a macro view, nobody's going to say girls today shouldn't learn STEM. But when it comes to the micro level, it’s challenging to convince young girls that they can excel in a subject that seems totally foreign to them. For them, topics like robotics or coding are scary. When you take that unfamiliarity away and you make it something easily palatable for them, they excel at it. But showing them that it's not a daunting subject and then convincing them of the potential they have is probably the biggest challenge.

For almost all of my students I saw character development. I saw girls go from being hesitant to make any contribution or interact with their team to eventually directing their teammates and contributing quality products by the end of our season. It was really incredible to see how socially, they could open up and become confident with their peers within an unfamiliar subject.

When you see barriers to entry in any profession, a lot of those are unnecessary. They really don't have to exist. Especially with the internet, my generation — in comparison with my parents' generation — is just so much more well resourced, that we have to start now. And there's a larger context around the way education in this country and beyond is so hindered because of these certain inequalities. But if you can chip away a little bit of that, at least for me, that’s very appealing.