 The Cube presents On the Ground. Hey, welcome everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are really excited for the second year in a row to be at the Anita Boer Women of Vision Awards 2016. It's a phenomenal banquet evening, really celebrating companies, women, students, and everyone that's really contributing to the Women in Tech show. This is a small event different than the Grace Hopper event which we'll be back to in Houston in October. So we're really excited. Our very first guest, the student award winner, Alicia Jovolanos, welcome. Thank you so much, I'm so excited to be here. Awesome, so you're a sophomore at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. So how did you first hear about Anita Boer? Talk about the process. You've said a couple of times since we've been sitting here that how excited you are. What does this mean to you? How is the process? How did you get here today? Wow, well, a little bit of that I'm covering on my speech is kind of an unconventional way that I got to computer science in general. But how I found out about the Anita Boer Institute, I actually found out about it on an online community called Lady Storm Hackathons. It's a Facebook community where plenty of women all across the world in the US, Canada, everywhere, they kind of join and they talk about different awards are available, events that are going on and that's how I found out about the Student Vision Award and I applied and I guess I'm here now. Awesome, here you are, congratulations. Yeah, thank you so much. So how about computer science? So for the folks out there, how did you get into computer science, share a little bit your story of how you entered that field? So I entered computer science quite late into the game, I'd say in comparison to a lot of my peers. I started programming when I was 18, I'm 19 now. And so I originally was on the path to medical school. I didn't really know what computer science was in high school, my high school was the only one in the school district that didn't offer a single computer science course and I didn't grow up around engineers or no one really worked with computers for a living around me so I didn't know what this whole paradigm of computer science was about. Wait, so your high school was the only one that didn't offer computer science and here you are now the award winner. Yeah, so it's absolutely unbelievable for me to, I'm just still taking this in and I'm just so happy to be here. Right, so okay, so you go to school, you're thinking you're pre-med. If I had to guess, I would get you ran into Okim because I know that's the great killer of most pre-med students. How did you make the change over to computer science from pre-med? Well, I wasn't in the pre-med program but during high school is kind of what I prepared for. So in grade nine I took one of those career questionnaires and one of the top choices that I got was doctor and I told my parents and of course when you tell your parents that doctor could be a choice for your child, they get really supportive. They jump on that, right? Oh yeah, do it for sure. And they're so supportive and I didn't really know anything else. So I was always good at the sciences. So naturally I fell into that path but I wasn't really honest with myself. I felt like I couldn't really envision myself being a doctor for the rest of my life. I liked those things but I couldn't find my passion. And it wasn't until but I met by chance, my brother actually started dating a girl who studied computer science and I was a nosy little sister. So I asked her a lot of questions and I found out about her career as a software engineer and what she did and I thought that was really cool. So that borderline interrogation turned into a life-changing pivotal moment for me to consider computer science as a career and I last minute applied to a computer science program at one of the top engineering schools in Canada and surprisingly I got in and I have been practicing ever since and loving it. So what is it that you love about computer science? Now that you're in it, I mean you had kind of a vision based on under brother's girlfriend about what she did but now they've actually touched it and been a part of it. What is it about computer science that makes you so excited? I think it's the impact that computer science can have. I think it's crazy that you can create applications just by typing out text through a screen and it can literally affect millions of people. I kind of experienced that sort of thing firsthand when I did my first work term it was a research term at my university and I spent the summer developing tools to teach children how to code and to date it's been used by over 4,000 students. So that to me was incredible and that experience alone was enough for me to keep me there. I thought, wow, I can do so much with this and I have a lot of fun with the math so. That's great. I just love it. I'm so excited and I feel like I've found my passion. That's terrific and one of the things we talk about a lot when it comes to women in tech is when should they get involved? How should they get involved? How do you get over the negative geeky portion, not necessarily the positive geek portion? So you actually built an application to help people get involved in programming earlier even though you didn't get involved with it until later in life. So as you look to some of the people using your application, girls and boys, how is it that you encourage people to think differently about computer science, get excited about computer science, take that first chance and try programming to get the hook? What advice do you give to people? How do you kind of guide the little sister looking up at you saying, how do I get involved? No, I think it kind of seems scary sometimes, especially since software is so much around us. It looks so sophisticated on a phone, you think there's no way I can do this. But there are so many resources online that reduces the barrier to entry and even some of my cousin starting, she's seven years old, had a program using one of the tools I created online. I just think you can just research the different tools that are out there and go for it. The great thing about the computer science communities I've found that so many people are willing to share their knowledge and I find that whenever I see kids who are interested in potentially building these applications, I get so excited. I'm like, oh, how can I help? Do you understand? And I try to explain it in a way that they can understand and then when they run that first line of code, that first hello world or they create a drag and drop game or something, it makes me so excited. And how do they get over the ones that are saying, oh, I'm not smart enough, I'm not cool. It's not the cool thing. How do you help them kind of break through that and really just give it a try knowing that if they give it a shot, chances are they'll probably get hooked. Yeah, I think I often use my story as well, but I didn't get into it until really recently and I just dove into it. And I think when they see role models or other people who are doing it, they naturally become curious and want to try it out as well. And especially when they're young, if they see one friend who's making a heart, they're making a heart simulation or something like that, they get excited and they go, oh, I want to make that. How do you make that? And they start helping each other. It's really exciting. All right, Lisha. So you're in town for a couple of days, you're gonna see San Francisco, hopefully see the sides before you go back to Canada. Right, yeah. Awesome. Well, congratulations again on your award. You had a big presentation tonight. I'm sure you will knock it out of the park. Thank you. And we'll see you in Houston in October. Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much. All right, Lisha, the student, Women of Vision Award winner here at the Anita Board Institute, Women of Vision Award Banquet. We're excited to be here. I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE.