Last weekend, I had the chance to be part of WECode (“women engineers code”), aimed at promoting female representation in technical fields and creating a community among women in technology. Although women are more and more encouraged to study computer science, in 2010 still only 18% of Computer and Information Sciences undergraduate degree recipients were female. The two-day conference was a marvelous event, with girls from 40 universities, distinguished keynote speakers, awesome sponsors, and lots of free “swag” ranging from Square smartphone credit card readers to Google lip balms. Although I learned about programming languages I have never heard of before, the conference taught me incredibly inspiring lessons that every college girl regardless of her major should consider before heading out into the scary real world. Here are the top three advices from successful women in technology.
Make sure your definition of success includes something you’re really passionate about.
The first day of the conference started out by Rebecca Parsons’ keynote talk. Rebecca is the CTO of ThoughtWorks, and in her talk, she detailed her more than 30-year-old journey through programming languages, universities, research labs, and offices. She encouraged us to “decide what constitutes success”. This advice may seem simple, but I believe that it is easily forgotten at academic settings such as Harvard where so many of us are caught up in the pressure to succeed according to the outside world’s norms. It is important to remember that you should follow your own versions of your goals and dreams, not a supposed one-size-fits-all success story from people so different from you.
Learn to value influence without authority.
The second keynote speaker was Kimber Lockhart, a young and energetic SVP leading the web and core engineering teams at Box. Soon after graduating from Stanford, she co-founded Increo, a service that allows users to share and review documents in secure space. Kimber talked about five myths of a career in product management and reassured us that software engineers have more freedom by working on what other people don’t understand. The most important lesson I learned from Kimber was to seek to change the world by actions, instead of power over others, in other words, “influence without authority”.
Go with your gut, but test it first.
Briana Whelan gave an energetic TED-style talk about the “confident interval” which in her definition is the “gap in experience and time that differentiates an uncertain hypothesis from a well-grounded conclusion”. Briana explained that as much as we would like to rely on our intuition for important decisions, sometimes that feeling in our gut comes after we have made an important decision. She gave the example of her college decision: she was deciding between Tufts and the University of Vermont, but after she made her deposit for Tufts and told all her family and friends, she knew something was wrong. Briana ended up at UVA. She thus came up with the idea of testing her important decisions by making a choice, telling her friends, but not quite committing in writing. This way she could test her feelings about a certain decisions. I thought that this was an incredibly practical and unique approach to the otherwise abstract advice of “trusting your heart”. You have to test your program first… so why not your gut? Makes a lot of sense.
Thanks for an awesome weekend to the Harvard Undergraduate Women in Computer Science and all the inspiring speaking and college women who attended!