Reflecting on why #IChoseSTEM — and why I’m choosing AI
Today I was invited, along with the rest of the McGill AI Society executive team, to a conference hosted by Microsoft in celebration of women and girls in STEM. We heard from some of the most successful women in STEM today, namely Jennifer Chayes, Mona Nemer, and Dominique Anglade. A recurring theme raised in the keynotes was the need for women mentoring women, and how necessary it is that we set the stage for the next generation of women innovators, scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.
The statistics presented were unsurprising — yet another reminder of how underrepresented females are in STEM fields. Only 28% of STEM graduates are women and unfortunately only 23% move on to careers in STEM fields. The numbers are even worse for women pursuing advanced degrees in Artificial Intelligence.
The central vision behind the creation of the McGill Artificial Intelligence Society was to create a platform and a space for undergraduate students to become better educated about machine learning. It is our goal to encourage our undergraduate population to pursue graduate degrees in AI fields such as deep learning, natural language processing, and operations research, or to pursue industry careers as developers for AI companies.
My own path to STEM began in high school when I was accepted into a prestigious and highly selective summer internship at the Yale School of Medicine in 2013. For 8 weeks I was immersed in the Discovery to Cure program, working in a lab for two brilliant female scientists, and alongside another high school student Ann Marie Guzzi (now graduating from Duke University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering!)
I was excited by the use of medical imaging technologies and how incredible it was to be a part of the initial stage of creating a PET precursor to be used in numerous clinical trials, all for the purpose of finding a cure for Parkinson’s Disease and the treatment of alcoholism and Alzheimer's Disease. This was the inception of my budding path into STEM.
A year later, I came to McGill University where I took a class on hacking, ethics, and cybersecurity taught by the incredible Professor Gabriella Coleman. I was enthralled by the hacker archetype and her interdisciplinary approach to the computer sciences that integrates an anthropological perspective, so much so that I totally majors — into Software Engineering, while keeping my love for the neuroscience of language and starting a second major in Linguistics.
And this past year my interests in software and linguistics (and more specifically their intersection as computational linguistics) have allowed me to become an undergraduate leader in AI through the McGill Artificial Intelligence Society. It wasn’t until recently that we saw female leaders in AI popping up in the news — especially our two McGill Professors, Joelle Pineau and Doina Precup.
As an undergrad, it has been hard for me to see where I fit in, in terms of being a mentor to other women interested in pursuing a career in AI. What can I do? I don’t even have a career yet! But Sara Sabour (a researcher at Google Brain) spoke today at the conference on how she chose STEM, and emphasized on the importance of encouraging women and girls starting at the high school level. That’s when I realized that I can make an impact with future undergraduate women interested in AI — I don’t have to be a prolific AI researcher or a CEO of a tech company to make an impact on encouraging other women to join STEM and AI fields.
It’s a chain. It’s women, at every level of their education or career or even retirement, sharing their knowledge, experiences and passion in navigating their own paths into STEM.
It was in high school where I was lead and encouraged by three remarkable women in STEM.
It was in university that I was educated by a remarkable female professor that further inspired and kept me on my path into STEM.
It was today that the community of women and men, who shared their stories of why they chose STEM, that will carry me even further.
