 project she's done. Yeah big rubble for RuPaul. So hi everyone before I begin I just like to say thank you Ms. Enthea. Oh there she is. I really enjoyed learning about your experiences in both marketing and in the tech sector. Yeah that's the word. So hi everyone my name is RuPaul Kenyapudi and I am a geek girl. Thanks to Joyce and the Singapore Geek Girls for allowing me to give this give this talk today and also to you for being here to support me. Today I'd like to give you a little understanding of my journey as a geek girl starting in 2012 as Joyce said at the Singapore Geek Girls workshop on HTML and CSS all the way up till today when I've just released an Android app called flora SG. Here's a snapshot of my life today I'll go through a few of these things one by one and like I said earlier just starting with you know me when I'm two years old and all the way up through high school summer internships until today. I'll start at the root in my childhood of session with everything related to computers. This photo was taken in 2002 if you can already tell by the bulky monitor and the fact that I'm wearing a denim jacket it's all their age back then and I've clearly been interrupted while doing very important two-year-old business. I'm at the edge of my seat my hand is on the mouse it's very small when you compare it to the mouse but I believe this picture sums up the fact that my interesting computers began at a very young age all the way up till I was eight till today and into the future. Next we'll talk about the leaves and how I really got interested in STEM and not beyond just the computer side of things. Being a geek girl is a multifaceted position I've learned organization leadership communication collaboration most importantly I've learned about being myself. In 2008 my dad brought home this huge Lego set and I dedicated the next two weeks of my life building this a red Lego helicopter and I still have it this is a really recent picture and you can see it's dusty and old and a few of the pieces are starting to fall off but it was the first lesson in organization. There were so many little pieces that I had to keep track of so I devised a system I organized them by color and using double-sided tape I stuck them to plastic bags so I wouldn't lose them. In retrospect it wasn't a great system but it really lay the foundation for how organized I'd be in the future. Even today I really like color coding and I organize so much that my email inbox is empty because every single one of my red emails goes into a folder so I can find it in the future. That obsession with Legos didn't end with the completion of the helicopter. In 2010 I got a Lego Mindstorms kit for my birthday and I built this an NXT guitar. Can you hear it? Yeah it plays music. I can't play the real guitar but I still consider it an achievement that I can play an instrument that I actually made. In middle school everyone is just beginning to scratch the surface of who they really are and I'm younger than most of my classmates by a year maybe two and it was a distancing factor between me and them in the sixth grade and you know because of this I had to work extremely hard to form collaboration and communication skills. There's kind of an ongoing joke that engineers and computer scientists while very intelligent are lacking in the communication and collaboration department and I think it's because coding is so often a solitary exercise but there are so many opportunities for STEM people like mathematicians technologists engineers to work together. On the middle school level there was the Indian Robot Olympiad and in when I was in 2011 I was part of a team of me and two boys. These two boys were worried as interested as I was in the competition so I had to learn how to become more patient with them because when you're working with middle school boys they tend to you know be distracted really easily but I also had to learn about leadership and the IRO was my first taste in leadership. The next year I moved here Singapore and it was on this little island that I was really given the opportunity to delve deep into my interests in STEM. One of the first things I did was this workshop in with the Singapore Geek Girls the HTML and CSS workshop. I was eager to get past my Mindstorms phase and begin coding in a real language so when I saw this workshop in an ad in the newspaper I signed up but I was the youngest girl there in a room full of 25 like an above I was 12 and it was a little intimidating at first but I found that everyone there was committed they were driven and they were willing to do whatever it took to complete and see their their plans through and even though I didn't meet anyone my age there I met Joyce and she encouraged me to set up a Geek Girls chapter at my school SAS. In the three years we've been a club SAS in three years we've been a club Geek Girls has been under the Science National Honor Society we've visited Microsoft in IDA labs, invited speakers, raised money in creative science ways. In this picture we're selling dry iced tea and we're planning a panel of women who work for Apple this year to come and talk to us about their experiences in STEM. Mrs. White is the Geek Girls sponsor and one of my mentors and I'm really glad that she's here today. Most importantly I found that Geek Girls has fulfilled its purpose. More girls than ever are taking computer science classes. More girls than ever, well since I was a freshman, have joined robotics team and more girls are just interested in majoring in a STEM field in general. From one member me in 2012 we've grown to almost 20 and we even have two boys but they're not in this photo but they're real okay. My experience with Geek Girls taught me to be a leader. As a founder and president I had to learn communication and leadership skills. I lead a small team of officers who in turn helped me lead the club. In this sense I've helped younger girls and I've fostered them to become leaders themselves. Outside of Geek Girls I'm involved in a lot of other STEM related activities. I'm a programmer on the SAS robotics team the cleverly named one degree north based on Singapore's location and I've attended competitions internationally like VEX first robotics competition and I needed to learn robot C, a programming language to to really get into the programming aspect of it. Mr. Millar and Mrs. White are also part of the robotics their robotics mentors so yeah I'm really happy that they're here to support me today too. I'm also the czar CSAR and president of computer science club. Ms. Goode is the sponsor and she was my teacher for AP computer science in sophomore year and her enthusiasm and passion for the subject has no doubt influenced me and I really I want to major in computer science in college. I continue to learn outside of class. I've taken online courses and Python and currently I'm taking the Harvard CS50x course through edX and that's that's a course in C so I'm learning new languages and I love to learn new languages. These are a couple that I have learned in my journey so far robot C and Arduino through robotics classes in the team and Android Studio and MySQL I'll talk about in a little bit because they have a lot to do with my project Flora SG. I love finding patterns I love logic and I think that's why I enjoy pro programming so much. I also think it's why I like writing so much other than programming I'm also I really love to write and I think it's because writing code is really similar to writing a story or an essay. It needs a purpose. It needs a structure. It needs a logical progression both writing and programming has that and you wouldn't think that writing you think that programming is really you know I don't know it's it doesn't require as much creativity but I think you know miss anthia showed us that we have we need design we need creativity even when we're working on the technical side of things. Next I'd like to thank a key part of my geek girls journey the Girl Scouts. Julia and Erin are here today they're from my troop and and Serena's also a Girl Scout she's not in my troop but she'll yeah so when the time came for Girl Scouts troop 99 to start working on our Girl Scouts gold award which is an 80 hour service project they were the first people I pitched my idea to they helped me refine my goal make it more achievable and most importantly they supported me 100% service is all that much more meaningful when you're interested in the probe in the problem that you're trying to solve for me this issue was the digital divide a gap between the people who have the means to educate themselves about technology and the people who don't in a world where technology is so prevalent education for it is crucial and that was the issue that I was trying to alleviate. To combat this global issue as a teenager I capitalized on my own skills and developed a basic computer skills class a curriculum for it that I implemented and an underprivileged school in Bangalore India these are the steps I took to see my project through as a start I taught helpers in my neighborhood to get feedback right here at home in Singapore these helpers gave me really helpful feedback like don't talk too fast or make your presentation more engaging and be more clear these these helpful helpful feedback I incorporated into my final presentation and I also got suggestions from a local younger Girl Scouts troop Serena's troop. My project was also peer reviewed at the Global Issues Network Bali conference where not only did I peer view my project and but also learned about other ways that we could solve such a big global issue. Finally I went to India I taught 80 high school kids the basics of Microsoft Office and internet safety in two days. Fun fact when I asked them how many of them had computers at home maybe four or five raised their hands but when I asked them how many had Facebook accounts nearly all of them did. Closing the digital divide is a first step to closing the poverty gap and it also provides women with more opportunities to find work. Giving people the education to learn how to use the technology they have it ultimately opens up new avenues for them to improve their livelihoods and the Girl Scouts Gold Award is the highest achievement a Girl Scout can receive. Only 5.4% of eligible Scouts earned the award and so I find myself and I feel truly privileged to be a part of this small percentage. The Girl Scouts Gold Award to me was truly gold. It allowed me to learn invaluable skills, how to take criticism, how to be a teacher, how to make my big dreams into small achievable goals. Next I want to talk about a few of the summer internships I've been involved in. The summer before 10th grade I spent eight weeks at the CSI Cancer Research Cancer Science Institute working to express the eGFP HBX gene mammalian cells. As you can see I have a few pictures it's a green fluorescent protein the GFP that I managed to express in a mammalian cell. There at the lab I wrote a report detailing all my experiences and all the experiments I had performed. It was my first experience writing a scientific paper and it taught me that I really loved the hands-on experience. In the next two summers I found myself at the NUS School of Computing working on an app called Flora SG. These are a few screenshots of the app. The goal of this Android app is to allow an amateur botanist to search, display, and browse native Singaporean plants. My main job in this to work on this app was to improve the database functionality so in addition to learning Android programming I had to learn SQL. I worked with Prof Roger Zimmerman who I'm extremely grateful to for this opportunity unfortunately he could make it today but I also worked with a few of his post-docs and grad students. Again this age gap was a little difficult to conquer but my middle school collaboration skills yet again came into play. Now I was more confident in my ability to communicate and I wasn't afraid to ask for questions to ask for help. Of course I ran into a lot of problems. Creating an app is a lot of hard work and I ran into so many problems even as I was attempting to upload the app to the Play Store but I approached them as I do all issues. I work backwards starting with my main goal where did I want to end up and I work backwards step by step until I know just where to start. In tech fields sometimes women are expected to be passive or not too forthcoming but I've learned that unless I'm the opposite of those two things I will never get anything done. So for Flora SG I made sure that I was the opposite of those two things. I'm happy to report that the first version of Flora SG has been uploaded onto the Android app store so if you want you can download it and if you have an Apple device you can still play with the app. The iOS app was designed before I joined the team. If you see any errors let me know it's still version one and I have a lot to improve on I'm sure. So where to next. I'm applying to college now and while the university experience might be fun the application process is not. I have to balance essays have to balance activities I have to balance grades it's just a lot to take in. I'm really looking forward to college. I have so many more ideas for projects that I just don't have the time or resources for now but most definitely will in the future. I want to continue to improve Flora SG. I want to help solve the water crisis in California and my biggest dream is to work for SpaceX or start my own company. Most of all I want to make sure that every girl knows these two traits aren't mutually exclusive. Don't worry I won't forget to have fun I love to read and I said as I said earlier I love to write so I'm definitely going to continue doing these things when I'm in college. I'll end with this photo. It's a restaurant in Malaysia that I took a picture of it earlier this year and apparently it has the best chicken chop in town but its name IT RU that's me. I think I know a sign when I see one. So if you want to learn more about what I've done you can visit my website it's very nicely laid out and thanks do you have any questions right now I'm focused on college but when I definitely when I go to college I'm definitely keeping my eyes open for whatever I can get involved in I definitely want to keep doing something hopefully related to water because that's one of the things I'm really interested in helping solve oh I see that's just my big dream I don't know what it'll be about but if I can you know in the end of my you know high school or college life I can end up starting a company doing whatever you know something related to tech something related to an issue I can solve that would be really great sure why not I'm not gonna do it all by myself that would be really hard sometimes there will be people who you know say you're you're a girl and you like computer science like what's wrong with you shouldn't you be interested in like I don't know what's a what's a traditionally girly thing cooking dolls yeah majoring in dolls in college yeah but the biggest thing is to make is to know that these whoever says that you know in the end if you don't let them have a big impact on who you become then you can really become whoever you want to be so really keep doing what you're doing so Rupa will be around and and you'll also be around for a bit more I guess so if you guys have any questions for them please just have some pizza and then talk to them okay okay and thank you no no no I did nothing compared to your teachers and your parents do you want to take a seat and then I'll just wrap it up over here okay