Cohort Stories: Meet Leevanni
vol. 5, no. 53 — guest post by Leevanni Goncalves
Growing up I didn’t have many hands-on experiences with technology aside from using common household things such as turning on a television, using the microwave, typing in a word document, and having to use a dial-up connection to access the internet, etc. It wasn’t until later on in my life during high school that my curiosity for all things technology blossomed and just using technology wasn’t enough. My last year of high school is when I can distinctly remember I started questioning about the works of computers and all the nitty-gritty stuff that pertained to them. And thus my love of computers sparked, and my journey to becoming a software engineer began. My first year of college is when I took my first computer science course on introduction to programming and my professor had us working through easy programming assignments using python. At the time concepts such as loops, methods/functions, variables were all foreign to me and took a little bit to wrap my head around.
Once I got the swing of things and became comfortable with those concepts and started my first program, I immediately fell in love and my hands felt magical.
It was mind-blowing at the thought that the lines of code I was typing into a text editor was actually speaking to the machine in front of me and telling it to complete a task that I wanted. After that experience, the possibilities of what I would be able to accomplish seemed unlimited. Once the course was over I remember feeling powerful and thinking programming was so easy and that my road to being a software engineer was a piece of cake. Little did I know that that was only the very beginning and that there was way more to computers than just loops and functions. There was a whole other vast world out there in computer science. It wasn’t just one concept, it is comprised of many topics and there isn’t just one job but many computer science jobs.
What excites me about Hack.Diversity is the chance to get the professional development that I feel I lack when I graduated from college. In school, it was all about textbooks and didn’t quite reflect the actual job field. Due to the gaps and holes I had coming out of college and not having much experience, becoming hirable was very difficult. I would send out hundreds of applications to job offers and wouldn’t hear back from companies. At this point is when I started to feel very discouraged and had many self-doubts. I began to feel that I wasn’t smart enough or capable and internalized not getting any offers and being rejected as a sign that software engineering just wasn’t my thing. This opportunity at Hack.Diversity will give me chance to work on my craft all while developing my professional skill set to become more hirable. I will get to work with others just like myself and receive mentorship to help make my journey a little better.
I’m also excited that this program is geared towards diversity. One of my biggest wants when looking for a company that is the right fit for me is work culture. As someone who is of Cape Verdean descent and a woman trying to make a come up in the world of technology, it has made the journey harder. In all my computer science courses and just researching how diverse the field of computer science was it was no secret that both women and people of color make up a small population of the field. Although I hated to feel a little bothered about that fact, it was hard to not notice that there weren’t many people that represented my background. My culture and identity are a huge part of who I am and so working alongside others that share that same struggle and who also feel that there isn’t much representation in the tech field is what I’m very excited for.
With this opportunity, I hope to encourage others that look like me or share a similar background, and let them know that anything is possible as long as you try. We are powerful in numbers and together we will create a voice for the underrepresented and begin to close the diversity gap in computer science.
