Joining Hackergal
“The most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘we have always done it this way’.”
- Grace Hopper
Hey, my name is Samia Hassan and I’m a grade 8 student at Don Valley Middle School. Middle School has been great for me and this year is my graduating year. However, with the current pandemic and quarantine, I won’t be able to go on any graduation trips or even see my class one last time before we split up for high school. The one good thing about me being in quarantine is that I now have so much time that I’ve started to bake and cook a lot more. I find it to be therapeutic and delicious. So far, I’ve made cakes, cookies, brownies, doughnuts all from scratch and a lot more. The thing that I’ve found the most bizarre is that I haven’t messed up any of my recipes yet. And I don’t plan to either!
That is a bit about me and how my life’s going so far, but my reason for writing this blog post is to explain why I love tech and my experiences with Hackergal. If anyone asked me when I started to learn about technology and when that it was, I would have said when I was 5. At that time, I knew what Google and YouTube were but I thought that’s all that tech was — websites. I never knew how Google worked, I just knew that it did. It wasn't until grade 4, that I learned about coding and how code is what builds the websites and apps we use. I got super interested in the topic and started to do some research.
In late 2017, my dad told me that he signed me up for a program called Hackergal, and I was pretty excited to go. It was through Hackergal that I learned my first coding language which was Python. Since then I attended more of their sessions and loved them more and more.
My experience with technology is pretty normal but one thing that I didn’t like was that not many people around me had the same passion for tech and coding. I would usually just work with my dad when it came to things like coding. When I went to Hackergal, everyone around me felt the same way about tech and it felt pretty awesome! Growing up I never learned about women in tech and that’s something that I feel needs to change. Having a role model is really important. Hackergal really showed me the ratio between men and women in the tech world and I hope in the next few years women and men ratio becomes more equal.
The quote that I put, in the beginning, has been a quote that I really love and pushes me to do things in a way that hasn’t been done before. That quote is, “The most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘we have always done it this way’.” When someone gives me the justification for what they’re doing and it is because we’ve always done it that way I make sure to change it. Just because we’ve “always done it” like that doesn’t mean that we have to continue to and who knows, if you try you can probably come up with a much better method of doing things.
By joining the Hackergal Ambassadors, I’m hoping to make a difference for girls that are younger than me or even older than me. I want them to be able to ask for help or advice from their parents, teachers and girls that are around their age. By connecting a lot of girls who are passionate about tech through Hackergal, they will make many friends who share the same interests as them and work together on doing something they love!
One piece of advice I can give to girls or even anyone, in general, is to always ask questions no matter how simple you think they are. By staying quiet you’ll never know the answer. That was and somewhat still continues to be one thing that I need to push myself to do. And who knows maybe everyone around you had the same question but weren’t ready to ask it.
If you can only take away a few things from what I’ve said. Remember, just because something has always been done a certain way, it doesn’t mean it can’t change!
