#WomenAreExperts : sharing my history
I became a Google Developer Expert GDE in Machine Learning in 2019.
Here, I’d like to share my journey, join me :)
Google Developers Experts is a community of passionate developers who love to share their knowledge with others.
There are over 150 women in the community. #WomenAreExperts is a series that features their stories and achievements, with an aim to inspire more women to follow their path.
Deciding for Engineering, Studying Abroad & becoming the 1st woman GDE from Bolivia
I was born and raised in Sucre, Bolivia. While at high school, I was a bit confused and anxious about which major to pursue since I really liked everything. In my senior year at high school I was selected to go to the US for a 2-week educational and cultural program called: Youth Ambassador. 🇧🇴 🇺🇸
During this program, I learned about the US culture and education, also I shared about my Bolivian heritage. We visited universities and high schools and I was amazed about the access to great chemistry and physics labs.
When I came back to Bolivia, I decided to go for an engineering degree. I loved Math and Physics so much and I knew these were going to become tools for something great later on. 🤓
A few years later I graduated from Telecommunications Engineering with highest honors and a full scholarship. Like everyone, I was unsure of what to do next, my major has many options to develop as professional. 🤔 But good thing, that same year, I found out about the Google Developer Groups and the Startups Weekends for the first time.
2013, I landed my first tech job as a telecommunications software engineer at one of the largest mobile telecommunications in Bolivia. It was indeed very challenging and it was hard to see a road to my developer career, however tech communities helped me a lot!
In 2015, after many attempts, I got a full scholarship and was accepted for a Master in Computer Science and Engineering in Belgium. My dream to study tech abroad was coming true!
It was my very first time in Europe! I am really thankful for the opportunity to study there and to get to hang out with people from tech community that was always eager to share what they were learning.
In 2018, I moved back to Bolivia with a Master’s Degree and many projects to contribute to my local community. It was challenging to get an AI related job but I started working at my local university as a professor for Engineering and with some friends as a software dev.
That same year, I was starting to meet up people to share about AI and the gender gap in tech. With one of my best friends, she is a software engineer as well, we started running workshops in different cities in Bolivia, showcasing other females engineers and scientists to younger ladies. The idea was… raising awareness about the gender gap issue in the tech industry and the importance of digital literacy and data driven mindset.
That year was full of activities! such as attending Latinity and Grace Hopper Conference for the first time and getting to know other outstanding ladies in tech and being inspired while I was still studying about data thanks to Udacity data challenges where later on I became a mentor myself for Udacity students.
Recently, I started teaching more about AI, recording classes in Spanish and creating content for big tech-ed platforms in Latin America.
All of these activities, and practices and workshops, and content creating finally lead me apply for GDE program (btw, I was really encouraged by friends!)
After examinations and interviews, I became the first women GDE from Bolivia.
Last year, I worked in the public sector, leading different projects. It has been an interesting journey! I’ve been part of the committee for the covid-19 emergency, at its beginning.
Supporting women in tech
To be honest, I was not too aware about the gender gap in tech during my first years at the university. Until I realized that most of my professors were male and at work all the decisions seemed to be made by my male colleagues.
I started to wonder: why are there no female professors teaching tech subjects? Why don’t I see female tech leaders around me?
Back to Bolivia from my Master, I started to get involved in tech communities to encourage women to get into tech and/or to advance in their tech career. As first steps, I met with a couple of friends in Bolivia and we decided to start running meetings with women in tech and science from our region.
We started with some workshops in La Paz, Cochabamba and Sucre, that were quite simple: we were meeting some other ladies in science and tech and got them talking about their journeys in tech: how they decided to go for a STEM major, how they overcome the difficulties and what they learned from them. We met a lot of girls that wanted to listen to those stories.
These meetups kept going on, we called this community MentorHer because we wanted to keep mentoring younger ladies. In 2019, as MentorHer, we won a small grant from the US Embassy with our project: MentorHer Camp which trained over 50 girls in Bolivia in foundations of Data Science and AI
Currently, I am leading the TensorFlow User Group in Bolivia and joining different events as a speaker, as well as creating content about AI, tips to study and learn languages, and trips.
I have learned that tech can be applicable to anything in today’s world and that it leads us to new interesting jobs and tasks that can be done. In Latin America a lot of women are doing jobs that are important for society, to support their families at low wage. But if only they could have a job that pays a fairer and higher salary — for example in tech — all our economies as countries themselves would be better and that might lead us to have better investments in education and health.
Women can do any STEM job and aspire to lead tech companies, and everyone regardless or their gender should be aware of this.
I like the idea about sharing experiences and showcasing role models to young girls, and everyone in general, so they can realize that STEM should be for everyone. Men should encourage girls to follow their dreams in tech and also give them the opportunity to intern or do any other practice to understand more about the real job world. Women should inspire young girls to stand up for themselves and be confident about their job and skills.
Motivation for being active at communities, being a mentor, TEDx speaker, content creator
I love being active and sharing with the community, also I am very curious.
What motivates me to keep doing these things is the satisfaction of helping other people to achieve their goals and help them discover new options in their career path.
I frequently think about my journey and I see how I was inspired by some amazing stories and awesome people who opened my eyes to a whole world of opportunities that the tech world has to offer.
And what keeps me very enthusiastic about creating courses, tutorials, workshops about Machine Learning is the power of this knowledge in our region and the importance of training more people to learn about ML.
Our region — Latin America — should start developing our own products and services powered by AI.
Finally, introducing ML to people from different backgrounds is fun!
Of course! I recommend the Google Developer Expert program to other women
It is a great experience and an interesting network. Being a Machine Learning GDE has been a bit intimidating at the beginning because I met brilliant and inspiring people doing awesome things such as writing books, doing research and writing papers, being CEOs and so on but at the same time it was really inspiring in order to keep working for the best.
I decided to take the best of this experience and instead of feeling intimidated, I wanted to be inspired by the passion they have about Artificial Intelligence: not only for their work related purposes, but also to develop AI for helping the community and for social good. (Also GDE summit was great!)
Also, I enjoy meeting brilliant people in Latin America that are GDE in different technologies!
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