UCMOM
Women solving problems for women
“Did she ask any boys if they wanted to work on it?” I ask.
The team giggles.
The two ladies behind UCMOM—a tool for scheduling lactation rooms at UC San Diego—are telling me about how they started working on the project. Gina Chen, a UCSD senior, and May Ng, a junior, were introduced to the project by an enterprising professor, who came up with the idea after chatting with a nursing mother who was waiting for a room. “You don’t know how long it will take,” May explains. “It’s just frustrating, or inconvenient.”
So, I ask, were there ever any men working on UCMOM?
“No,” Gina says, with a sheepish smile. “You really want people who will understand the audience, and understand the problem.”
I speculate, too, that a lot of boys might be uncomfortable working on a lactation-centric tool, though May is quick to point out that they’re just working with calendar data—which, by the way, wasn’t easy to get. They spent much of a quarter cajoling the school administration in order to set the project up.
Because they started working on UCMOM before hackTECH, it’s not eligible for any awards. But as a solution to a real problem, UCMOM absolutely exemplifies the spirit of hacking.
