Growing up, I was a strong feminist. I insisted on “People” or “Person” vs. “He” or “She.” I kept up with the boys in gym class. I never let anyone tell me I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. I’d dismiss them as “bigots” and strive to prove them wrong. I took every affront or doubt as a challenge.

But, I lacked practical support. I mean, I never felt unsupported. Raised in a school system that taught me to change our teaching aide’s last name to “Glassperson” from “Glassman,” I was primed to claim empowerment as my right, and to look at societal and historical dictates as the only true barrier or division between the sexes, ignoring even the possibility of any gender-based advantages or disadvantages. I was a professional reach-for-my-dream-er. And was taught women could be anything (except maybe housewives.) Of course, many of my classmates’ moms were still housewives, but “we weren’t going to fall into that same trap” and I was proud that mine was a working mom.

Despite all of the Ra-Ra!, I think that – what was certainly not lacking in attitude – was lacking a bit more in substance. I’d never heard of STEM or WISE until college or later. I took AP math and science courses in high school (yes, I spent a year on the math team…) but, in elementary school, where was the engineering club – or the science teacher who helped me learn about electronics, pumps, and engines? When I was 10 and tried to recreate the mechanics of a toy car big enough to sit on (my thought was to use hydro-pressure somehow to power it), I didn’t know who to ask for help.

So, I stayed mostly on the “arts & crafts” side of engineering – “hacking” together projects mostly for display or basic, duct-taped functionality. And, in school, I rode my love of geometry proofs, balancing chemistry equations, and friction coefficients…until I met a physics teacher who refused to teach me. 2am-nights or even all-nighters became a regular weekly, if not daily occurrence – as I tried desperately to dissect the textbook by myself – followed by his reprimanding me in class because he thought my frustration was an attitude problem. In the end, exhausted and in over my head, I decided I hated math and science. I just wasn’t good at it anymore. It had clearly gotten too hard for me. Right?

In college, I earned a BA degree because I was “not a scientist or engineer.” I tried enrolling in an intro-level computer science class…which started teaching mid-language. Everyone in the class seemed to have coded before; the profs and TAs assumed we were at least familiar. Umm… “Intro” anyone? I tried really hard to “swim.” Sat in the coding lab for hours on end – staring at a blank screen and desperately examining the course text (a bounded booklet of photocopied pages, with no intro and little structure.) Calmly, optimistically assuring myself that something would “click” soon – that I just had to get used to thinking differently. Why I didn’t try to get more help from TAs, fellow students, I don’t know… I’ve since heard from female friends who studied CS that if I had played the “cute female” card, I could have learned a lot from my classmates. But, I never thought of doing that. That wasn’t part of the we’re-all-equal-but-I’m-actually-better-and-going-to-kick-your-butt playbook.

So, in the end, I dropped out. And stuck to poli-sci and history and language, busying myself with performance dance troupes. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed myself for the most part: I loved performing and learning to move in different ways and steeping myself in foreign cultures. And, my actual courses were interesting enough. I mean, to be honest, I felt a bit unengaged. But, I chalked it up to being burnt out from high school.

And that has shaped my career up to this point. But, what I love about entrepreneurship – what I love now about being cofounder of a tech startup is: it’s never too late. No one was there to guide me when I tried to build my own car as a child. But, it’s never too late to find mentorship. And, I believe that doesn’t mean my career as an engineer is over before it even began.

Of course, I’m not trying to fill any of our hardware, firmware, or coding roles myself. Not yet. Not this startup, at least! But, working alongside my team – building out the business side of things, as we hack together technology, I re-encounter chemistry, mechanics, firmware, software. And, though it’s a steep curve, I’m speaking the language now. I’m getting that mentorship by proxy. And, I plan to take this forward.

Hack everything. It’s never too late.