 I remember distinctly the first time I coded Hello World and the little Hello World popped up in the little print box and I thought like, this is doable, this is something I can do. Before my freshman year at U of M, I had had zero experience with coding. I got a flyer to do CS Kickstart, which at U of M is the women's intro to computer science boot camp right before freshman year. Throughout the week, I got to learn how to code and how accessible coding really is. And I also met a lot of really, really cool people, particularly other women, other members of underrepresented groups in STEM. That community kind of traveled with me throughout my career at Michigan. The one nice thing that I've come to learn throughout computer science coursework is that the professors really are there to help. They also just like talking about what they do outside of that particular class, the research that they're doing, or some paper that they read recently. You can talk to them about that and they'll very gladly talk to you about it and help you narrow down what you're interested in. The intro classes are never going to hurt you. They're really meant to just teach you the foundations and help you decide if you really want to continue on and also in ways that you would never have expected. So for example, right now, I think my interest is natural language processing. I never would have gotten to that point had I not taken EECS 183 and then continued down the line all the way to taking information retrieval in the second semester of my senior year. My name is Eileen. I graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in data science and I now work at Microsoft as a technical solutions architect.