Participant Story: Zhenzhen
Zhenzhen is one of the participants of our six-month software engineering program! You can support her journey at techtonica.org/donate.
Originally from a small village in China, Zhenzhen was the first person in her family to graduate from college. She went on to complete a master’s degree in sociology and was set on working with one of the top professors in the field to learn as much as she could. Her work focused on female sex workers. During her fieldwork, Zhenzhen went to the red-light district every day to learn about these women and their lives.
“With a blue-collar family background, I wasn’t very confident at the very beginning,” Zhenzhen said, explaining that it’s incredibly difficult to earn the trust of these women. “It’s hard for them to trust me at first. They couldn’t believe that I could be so nice to them and I wouldn’t do any harm to them. I had to try my best, and to be very, very honest with them and pass no judgment. And I needed to trust them, too.”
Over time, the experience made her more and more relaxed communicating with all kinds of people, and more and more confident with herself and her capacities.
“The day-to-day interactions between female sex workers and me changed myself little by little. I didn’t know how it happened. But it just happened,” she reflected.
After completing this research and with greater confidence, Zhenzhen left China to complete her second master’s degree, this time in anthropology, at Purdue University in Indiana.
“I first learned programming in SAS when I was taking statistics courses at Purdue. I really liked it, and was really good at it,” she said. “I spent hours and hours on class projects in SAS, and didn’t feel any fatigue. Instead, I felt fulfilled and excited. That’s when I decided to pursue a career in the tech industry.”
After graduating, she had the perfect opportunity to do just that when she moved to the Bay Area with her family. In 2016, she started taking classes in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, GitHub, and website design through MotherCoders, a local nonprofit focused on helping moms break into tech. She also did self-paced courses on Python and SQL through Coursera and Codecademy. Now with Techtonica, she’s particularly excited to go deeper on her skills and prepare for interviews.
“Besides taking care of my daughter, I can have my own career and be myself,” she said about transitioning from being the primary caregiver for her now 4-year-old daughter. “I’ve been a mother for these years, but with her in preschool, I want to do something for myself and find my own future. That’s very important to me too.”
If you or your company might be interested in supporting program participants like Zhenzhen, please donate at techtonica.org/donate or look at techtonica.org/sponsor.
To read about our other participants, please click on their names below:
