How I Became A Programmer, While Not Looking Like One
Growing up in an Asian household, I always assumed that I would pursue STEM. But during my last year of high school, I went to Italy where I took zero STEM classes and discovered joy in learning about different people and cultures. Soon, I found passion in mental health so I switched to Psychology. But during my time off in the Korean army, I found myself questioning my field yet again. So there I was, in my first semester back from the national service, taking my first programming class ever.
I told my graduating classmates about my switch to Computer Science, and they all wanted to know why I made such a drastic change, since I didn’t “look like a programmer.” I didn’t blame them; I didn’t think so either. At that moment, all I knew was that I liked listening to and helping people, which is what initially drew me towards counseling. But I craved a more immediate, real-world applicable approach, so I decided to learn some programming. Plus, coding is used in any field of research, so I thought that it wouldn’t be a waste of time. I would give it a try for a semester and then decide if I should truly commit myself to yet another different major.
In this moment of discovery and confusion, I ended up going to Stockholm for a long weekend in early December with a friend. I was mostly going there for the ABBA museum, but she wanted some local suggestions, so she reached out to a few NYU Abu Dhabi alumni who invited us to their office for a quick get-together over tea — and that’s how I first stepped into the world of imagiLabs. As two of the co-founders, Bea and Dori, talked about their experiences since graduating from NYUAD and starting imagiLabs, I was awestruck by their entrepreneurship. They were tackling a problem very personal to them (gender inequality in STEM) with a technology-driven solution (teaching young girls how to code). And that moment, as I was listening to them talk about their passion, was when I realized why I should continue studying CS: to create real-world solutions to problems that I want to address.
Less than a year later, I completed my two-months long internship at imagiLabs. As expected, I learned a lot about Swift and Xcode by working closely with full-time iOS developers and became a pro at GitHub, since everything was done remotely. But to my surprise, I also learned that a programmer does more than writing code; they think about the audience. As I participated in user story discussions during sprint planning and designed in-app learning content from scratch on Figma, I spent a lot of time brainstorming how to improve user experience. I found myself pondering questions about the needs and challenges of a typical English-speaking teenage girl, who is the target user of imagiLabs. This kind of thought process helped me grow as a programmer, who codes not for the sake of coding but for the sake of helping people.
I really believe that my internship at imagiLabs has taught me to put people first. So moving forward, I want to continue being part of projects that tackle social issues around me. In the next few months, I will be working for the Korean government as a Big Data Analysis intern to identify problems and propose policy solutions for my province. I hope that this experience, albeit in a different realm of programming, will further teach me how to use technology for bettering the lives of many.
I still feel uneasy about calling myself a programmer because I think the term by itself loses the nuance of the behind-the-scenes intentions. But as long as I am deliberate about the humans who will benefit from the tools I create, I think I can embrace this term.
So, yes, I am a programmer, while not looking like one.
