My experience being a Girls Who Code mentor
A few years ago, I moved to the United States, till then I lived most of my life in India, a country abundant in engineering and technology talent with ~2.6 million STEM graduates every year, only a third of whom are women. If this sounds skewed, you only have to go back 10 years (where it was even more skewed) for one to feel happy about the change. As you would imagine, I was one of the 3 women in my engineering class of over 60 students, which was symptomatic of a huge diversity imbalance. Clearly, this was a problem begging to be solved, but as one does, I too conveniently forgot about this and moved on my with my career and life. So, last summer, when I heard about the my company’s (EA) partnership with GWC, an organization with a mission to encourage and drive women participation in the tech industry, and that they were looking for mentors, I signed up immediately.
Girls Who Code (GWC) is a not for profit organization (started by Reshma Saujani) which aims to support and increase the number of women in the tech industry by equipping young women (mostly junior and senior year students) with the necessary skills.
The seven-week mentorship program encourages mentors to share their personal experiences and hopefully encourage the girls to choose a career in tech. As a mentor, you can also help them with their college applications, build their professional profiles and advise them on college programs. The program also includes a couple of field trips ( e.g. Sims studio) as well as motivational talks from Ken Moss, Laura Miele among other leaders.
What I discovered during this program was amazing– a program that was primarily meant for the benefit of these young women, also had such an equally positive impact on everyone involved, including the mentors as well as EA. I wanted to share this experience with everyone so that you get a glimpse of what this program is about and possibly in the future contribute (in your own way) to the success of it.
Each of the 20 students who signed up for GWC in our campus, was paired up with a female employee who was their mentor for the duration of the program. My mentee, an inquisitive, fun-loving senior year student, has a passion for traveling and is interested in taking up a psychology major in college. She didn’t have any prior experience coding in school and hence when she saw the poster for GWC at her school, she was initially hesitant, thinking that her lack of programming skills would make her ineligible. However, after watching a couple of YouTube videos where girls with similar backgrounds participated and enjoyed the course, her inhibitions changed to excitement and she applied.
Over the 7 weeks here, through multiple courses, she learned various topics such as CSS, HTML, python, robotics, UX design, etc. When she admitted that she didn’t see herself coding forever, I tried to explain my role at EA as a TPM, and how a blend of technical knowledge, understanding business needs and the fundamentals of programming, helps you better collaborate on projects to create successful products. I also explained that at a company like EA, it’s a perfect blend of art, design, music, engineering, and technology that helps in creating some of the most amazing games in the world.
I think GWC helped each one of the girls learn and appreciate how programming can help create such wonderful products and help transform your idea into reality. As a testament to the success of the program, my mentee, a girl who had never written a single line of code before, by the end, was explaining JSON and REST APIs to me over lunch and how she used her new skill sets to build a website for finding volunteering opportunities while traveling!
My experience with GWC would be incomplete if I would have missed their graduation ceremony where the girls were supposed to present their final week group project in front of their family and a large group from EA (including all the mentors, support group and our leadership). Three teams-built games, fully-functional working games, across different genres, in just one week. EA truly inspired them! Apart from what they had learned during the course, they spent several extra hours learning Unreal, Unity, animation, and design by watching online tutorials. During their presentation, they talked about how they learned to pair program, debug and share code, and work in teams to build their projects. All of them rehearsed their presentations well, learned how to effectively demo their projects, and understood the value of teamwork!
What I learned from these girls was the enthusiasm and fearlessness to always push yourself and try new things. Their willingness to learn, to push it all the way to the end, without fear of failure, is something that we all start losing somewhere down the line. This experience has definitely reminded me and hopefully rekindled some of this positive energy. Spending time with my mentee also reminded me of the importance of finding your own mentor in life for advancing your career.
EA is very vested in GWC, which is building a future pipeline of strong female engineers and increasing the possibility of creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce. One of the questions that my mentee asked me during our first meeting, completely took me by surprise and I instantly realized why this program is important not just for these girls, but also for the community at large. She asked a very simple but thought-provoking question — “how are we measuring if our players are happy or depressed?” She asked this in a very matter of fact fashion, with an expectation that this would be something that I, of course, would have thought about. It’s this social awareness that these younger minds bring with them and if nurtured well, will in due course, help in creating better products.
In closing, if you know someone who could benefit from GWC (or similar programs), I highly recommend informing them about this program and encourage them to sign up. Whether or not they decide to go into a STEM career, being a part of Girls Who Code gives them the confidence to know that they could be successful in whatever path they decide to pursue. You can find more details on the GWC application process here. Lastly, my experience as a mentor in this program has given me a fresh perspective, enthused with positive energy and in a small way personally made me happy about my little contribution to promoting diversity.
