Making impacts without limit: paying it forward
When I first decided that I want to pursue an undergraduate degree in the field of Information Technology, I was 18 years old and had almost finished my first year in college. I never really looked into the possibility of majoring in tech because I always thought of it as a man’s world, until I registered for my first Computer Science class in college.
My name is Matahari, I’m currently pursuing a bachelors degree in Integrated Digital Media (Information Technology) with minors in Computer Science and Mathematics at New York University. I first got into the world of technology by accident, I was looking for classes that I could take as an elective and chose to register for an introduction to CS class for the sake of “trying something new”. I wasn’t really surprised when I walked into the class and found that was one of only five girls in the class out of 30 people (a ratio of 1:6), but I was surprised when I saw that the professor was a woman. She is the one who got me interested in this field and who got me to realize that this is not only for men, women can do it too. I decided to pay it forward by signing up to be a mentor in Generation Girl’s summer club.
I was a mentor to 9 girls during the 5th week of the summer club, and I taught Computer Science 101. During the week, the girls learned the basics of programming with Python and also had other activities like workshop + a visit to the Go-Jek headquarters!
Day one, we started by introducing ourselves. I was expecting the rookies to be way younger than me but it turns out that 5 out of the 9 have already graduated out of high school and was getting ready to go to college. We then learned about the basics of basics: pseudocode, algorithm, variables, literals, logical & assignment operators, input, conditionals, and concatenation. I wasn’t used to teaching more than one person at a time, so I was quite nervous (and it showed! Haha). Thankfully, the girls were kind and I was comfortable in an instant. On day two, we started to get into the nitty-gritty and talked about loops and the slice operator. I had a couple of games/activities in between the lessons so the girls could practice what they’ve learned so far. There was also a public speaking workshop facilitated by Adinda Sukardi at the end of the class.
Day three, we went to Go-Jek (and I was super excited!). We began the day with a presentation about Go-Jek, followed by a tour of the four (correct me if I’m wrong) story office though we only toured the top two floors. After the tour and lunch, we had an activity about agile. The rookies learned how to work together to build a product for a client and in each iteration, they had to improve/update that product. The mentors were tasked to be the client and was assigned to a specific group (and my group won, yay!). The next day we came back to Menara Astra and resumed our class talking about function, modules, lists, and also their final project for day 5. We also practiced by tracing lines of code and review by playing kahoot. During lunch, we all got to meet Clarine Karyadi (a very cool woman, I might say) and she shared her experience working as a digital banker to us.
The final day was their final presentation day. Because the rookies were all so smart and finished their final project quickly, I shared my experience studying STEM in the U.S. and also my college admissions process. The rookies were asked to do two final projects: making a mad lib that asks the user to input the words and a guessing game between the user and the program using the random module. We had a good laugh when the rookies started to present their mad lib project because the words that people threw out were so weird and unrelated to the story so when the whole story printed out, it was really funny! Although it was a sad moment because the week has ended, I was really happy hearing the girls say that it was a fun week and they enjoyed the class. The one thing that made me touched was when a couple of girls approached me and said that I’ve had inspired them to major in something tech-related.
To Gen G; thank you for giving me the chance to mentor in the summer club, it was a really rewarding and unforgettable experience.
To Pocut, Diva, Shriya, Chery, Saskia, Hanifa, Aurel, Ilma & Hanicka; thank you for being such fun rookies, I know that you’ll do great in whatever path you choose in life. I hope that someday you will get the chance to pay it forward and share your knowledge to the society.
To the volunteers; thank you so much for your help during the week! It was a pleasure to get to know all of you.
Lastly, to all the young girls out there; don’t be afraid to try something new. Even if it seems that you’re the odd one out, it doesn’t mean that you don’t belong. You’ll never know if you like it or not if you don’t try! ❤
