 All right, this is super exciting. So, you know, by a show of, no, let's not do that. Let's just clap because it's a good day. Let's give each other a hand, a round of applause. It also wakes us up a little bit. Sometimes I make people stand up and do that and then I take social and like, look, I got a standing ovation. No, I would never do that. But really excited to be here to close out. We have just a few minutes left together and I thought it would be a great opportunity to hear the story that often we don't get to tell, which is, you know, how we got started. What was that moment that we were like, let's do this, or maybe even a moment that encouraged us to stay? Our hero's journey, if you will. So, if you wouldn't mind, we actually have a recording that we're gonna be doing that other people can see, so hi to everyone on Zoom. But also later on where we're collecting lots of different people talking about their career in tech and how they got started. So, we wanted to take a moment and contribute to that as well. So, Charlotte, maybe we'll start with you. Give us a little bit about yourself. Okay. My name is Charlotte and I grew up in an inner city school. It was a place where I had a high poverty rate. My dad died of cancer when I was 15 and my mom entered a mental facility shortly after. So, my high school years were not filled with basketball games and theater. Those were in fact the things I gave up to take care of my mom. And I did manage to get a scholarship for college at the school that I wanted to go to in Florida. I was in Michigan at the time. And I couldn't take it because the amount of money I would have still had to pay was more than my family made in a year. So, I took a scholarship to the local community college instead and I did pretty well. I liked my classes but I was working multiple jobs in order to support my family and I missed one too many English classes. The teacher had a policy that you weren't allowed to miss a certain number and so I lost my scholarship. I wanna share that story at the start because where you are now, if your family's circumstance is not ideal and even if you experience a major setback like flunking out of college, even community college, it doesn't mean you can't go back. And in fact, I went back five times. And the fifth time, I went to Harvard. So, you can still go to Harvard and flunk out of community college. That is my story. Go ahead, Ms. Renee. How far back? Four score and... Oh, no, just maybe turn it on. Okay. Okay, I'm sorry. So, I think I shared some of my journey with you. My life has been very non-traditional and I have done many things. I think growing up, I was always very curious and sometimes a very curious student could also be a very disruptive student. So, I would say my high school journey was me on a quest as my teachers would say for entertainment. And I think I also spoke so much in class, sometimes being so disruptive. My principal said to me, she prays that I'll be able to make a living speaking. Actually, I've done that quite successfully. I say that to tell you that one of the... If it's one thing that I want you to remember is that question and I spoke about it about imagination and I continuously over my... And I continue to imagine now, always imagined myself doing something. If it was working in fashion, if it was working in music, if it was broadcasting, if it was meeting certain people, I think in my own journey, I got the opportunity to meet women who really inspired me. Among them would have been Dr. Maya Angelou, who I was able to spend an extraordinary amount of time with, able to interview as well, and really informed much of the ways in which I have tried to live my life. I always come from a place of justice because I have so many friends and people who I care about who have had interactions with the criminal justice system that have been far from favorable. And really it's always about just finding ways in which we can make society more equitable. As I said to you in my presentation, I am very committed to legacies and I always think in the work that I do, how could I enhance an individual's opportunity to build an extraordinary legacy because we inherit a legacy and then we are able to create our own legacy that our generations are going to inherit. And one of the things that I have seen in particular with technology is how technology has a way of undermining in real time your ability to acquire a really sustainable and resilient legacy and just wanting everyone to be able to imagine the things they want to do and the things they want to be and have the kind of opportunities and access to create that. So I think for me it is always about justice, equity and inclusion and ensuring that we have the kind of diversity because diversity and imagination is what this world was built on. Wonderful, thank you. That was awesome. So my journey into tech, I think I restart my journey into tech every few years. Like I recommit to going back in to the technical world but my first introduction actually came more from understanding what I was good at. So I've taken, I take lots of tests on like personality tests. I took recently an enneagram test. Anyone know what that is? Anyway, it's another kind of test. I've taken the Myers-Briggs and the, it's like called Colby A, anyway, all these tests. And in attempt to figure out like my purpose, like what am I here to do? What am I inherently good at? What I figured out that what's the best way for me to contribute myself to the world? So I take all these tests and it's very interesting because a theme that I saw very early on, and I was trying to figure out earlier like why I ever did this. But in my young, I was like 16 years old. I was given a chance to share, in front of a bunch of people, my experiences. And at that time, it wasn't, it was Hurricane Andrew. I don't know if you all, you wouldn't remember it but it was a tough time. Basically this huge category five hurricane came and blew away my entire town. I don't have any pictures of myself as a baby unless my grandmother gave them to me before she died, which like four. But I have no pictures of myself as a baby, as a young person because all everything got destroyed in that hurricane. And it's weird what happens when everything gets destroyed and you lose that like looking at pictures. As a result, my poor children, I take pictures of them all the time and I make them look at them all the time. Like, look, I don't have this. You should look at it. But I got interested, that made me realize like in telling that story, so many people were like changed. People came up to me afterwards and they're like, oh my gosh, I thought I was the only one who felt this kind of weird emptiness when that happened. And all these people were impacted, not in like a dramatic, oh, you did a such an amazing speech, but in this like teary-eyed, I'm not alone kind of place. And I was like, how do I use that? And so when I first got into tech, someone told me that I would make a great teacher. And I was like, oh no, I'm a terrible student. And they're like, oh, it doesn't matter. Being a student and a teacher, not the same. But what happens is that you make tech relatable. So my first job was teaching a programming language I did not know, Java. I was teaching Java and learning Java at the exact same time. And I learned something. Actually, there's a movie called, I can't remember, but it's about a con man with Leonardo DiCaprio. Catch me if you can. And he said, he ended up becoming a professor at a university for like a couple years and no one ever questioned him. And at the end, the FBI guy was like, so how did you do that? How did you end up staying like credible? How did people still come to your class? And he was like, oh, I just stayed one chapter ahead of my students. And I literally did, I mean, I'm not a con person, but that's what I was, maybe I was at that time. I was a 22 year old Hispanic, Latina teaching Java to cobalt programmers, none of whom looked like me. They all called me kiddo, like legit kiddo. Kiddo, can you get me some coffee? I had a guy cut his nails in my class. I had another one, pull up the newspaper. We still have those, I think. But at the time, pulled up the newspaper and read it while I was teaching. I only later found out that the male instructors never had this happen to them. They were appalled at the fact that I had someone cutting their nails in my classroom. Like, I was terrible. But the reason I mentioned this is like, that was my first job. I was going in and I immediately, there's a little short I want to encourage you to go take a look at, it's called Pearl. It's by Pixar, the Toy Story people. And it's about a little ball of yarn who goes to work and goes to work in like Silicon Valley, Bro country. And what happens to that ball of yarn? And it ultimately happens to a lot of us. And NPR has a podcast on this, as well as a movie was just created, it's called Code Switching. Have you heard this term? All of us do it. The funny thing is it knows no gender, it knows no ethnicity, everyone switches. And the damage that's done when you decrease who you are to be accepted by the people who you are not, it changes the way you perform. I didn't realize this at first. I noticed it over time. But I then became a huge advocate for authentic communication. And guess what? In a technical world, it's an anomaly. I am one of very few people who talk about this. So I began to, there is now an entire profession called technical evangelism, developer advocacy. And you can have a job paying you six figures where you teach people other tech that you just learned. Literally, that's the job. You learn it, then you teach it. You learn it, you write a blog post. You learn it, you do a Twitch. You learn it. If you're into tech and changing all the time and you like I'm one of those people, I need new tech all the time. Advocacy worked for me. My job was to help people who were one chapter behind. I didn't know that that was a job. Otherwise I would have purposely gone after it. But I'm telling you, like there's so many jobs available that, and actually I've had companies say to me, well, what do you wanna do? Those are good companies. What are you good at? What do you care about? And then they make a role that fits you. That doesn't happen everywhere. But here's the sad thing. What if you don't know the answers to those questions? What if you've never thought, what am I good at? What would I wanna do if somebody asked me? What job would I get if I could pick the job? Because you might run into a leader who asks you those questions and is serious and will give you the role that makes your internal, personal, it basically is that blend I told one of our breakouts of getting everything you want, doing something you love, getting paid to do it, and then ultimately sharing it with a community. I mean, it doesn't get much better than that. But yeah, my journey, that's how my journey started. So what one thing I did wanna do is, I don't necessarily want it to be a sad story, but I know all three of us have gone through some pretty significant challenges in our career. And I do know, I want you to know that they are overcomable. Is that a word? I'm sorry, English people. They're not easily overcome, but we do overcome them. I always say we've all overcome 100% of our bad days or we wouldn't be sitting here listening to us talk. So I'd love to talk about maybe one of your bad days and how you overcame it. I guess I'm going first again. Again, yeah. So 2008, perhaps you have heard of the dot-com bust. At this time I had been creating things. I may not have had a college degree at this time, but I guess it was 2006. Little bit, well, let's see. We gotta back up even further. 2003, 2003 was the time of this dot-com bust. I did not yet have a college degree, but I had made a bunch of tech stuff and I was working in tech. I had had some college courses enough to get a job and the most important thing there is to actually make things and be a creator and have things to show a portfolio that identifies your work and that is how you get your first job. It will not be the most awesome job and you do it anyway to get the experience and skills. So I had been working in the dot-com space and 2003 was the time when things were shifting technology-wise and my husband and I both lost our jobs on the same day and we had a six-month-old at home. So we very quickly had to find new jobs and pivot and that was maybe not the best day and it ended up being a long process, 2004, 2005, 2006. Every year you're needing to get a new job because the companies are closing or the workplace is shifting or you need a new skill set and the way that we solved that problem was to move. We actually came here in 2008 to the Raleigh-Durham area because the job market was better here. So when you're solving a problem like facing unemployment, you may have to make a shift in either the work, the type of work that you're doing or the place that you do it and for us that meant moving away from family. So I just wanna say one way that you overcome is to work the problem and sometimes the solution might not be what you expect. By the way, I'm glad I came here. I would say for me a very long time ago I stopped looking at days as good and bad and just introduced the word challenging in my vocabulary. So some days we're definitely more challenging than others but I think I come from a place of a very strong faith and whatever day that is and whatever I'm dealing with on that day, I always believe it's something that's going to make me grow and something that is going to make me stronger and something that is going to strengthen my resolve and that's the ways in which that I have dealt with challenges. There is no life that is unchallenged. There is no experience that goes wasted. Many times I would ask myself over the years, why was I doing this or why am I doing this? And I had many careers and many times people will say to me, why don't you settle on one thing? Why is it that you always have to do so much? Why is it that you just can't focus on one career? Why do you need to do three and four things at the same time? And I think now that I speak a lot about the interdisciplinary imagination and now that I bring such interdisciplinary skills into technology, I realize why I was doing all of this. It all eventually comes together. So for the days that people would say are bad, whatever it was and I have had moments, trust me, I have had many moments and moments that make you cry some days, moments that make you question yourself some days, moments that just make you feel as though whatever you're putting into this thing is somehow not working for you. But those are the times I think for me that I really said to myself, there is a lesson to be learned from this experience. And not every time I have been open to those lessons, but most times I've been able to really gain the experience and the knowledge from that moment. So what I would say is as you navigate life, you too would realize that there are some days that make you question yourself and some days that make you feel challenged and some days that make you feel overwhelmed. But it's just one day. It is just one day sometimes, it's a few days and it could feel like a lifetime. But eventually you're able to negotiate and to move past those obstacles. So it's really just about believing that in you you already hold all the potential and all that you need to do the great things that you are destined to do and let no one day or no one month or no one year ever make you feel that you are not going to reach that potential. That was amazing. I'm like, I can't go after that. That was amazing. What was the question? Challenging, oh yes, okay. So I was going to tell you all about a very specific time where I did, and I actually do, I go in these, throughout my career, I've worked at some of the best companies, but I've also had some of the worst experiences. So I'm like, sometimes I think to myself, I don't wanna do this anymore. I've often asked myself, do I want my daughter going into tech? Do I even wanna approach it as a thing knowing the challenges that she might face? But the hard part, one of the hard parts I realized was not about the technology. It's almost never about the technology. It's about the humanity. And I was actually in my last year, I didn't know this at the time at Amazon Alexa, and I went out on maternity leave. And I took it, which not everyone does. Most people take the minimal amount and go back to work as soon as they possibly can. It was just the Amazon way at the time. I didn't, it was my fourth child, I presumed probably the last one, like I was having, I had a lot. And I was like, I'm gonna take this, I'm gonna enjoy my time. I even did 100 days of Jocelyn on Instagram, like took pictures every day. Anyway, thoroughly enjoyed it. I got back though, and my manager changed, had changed over that nine months. I was gone nine months, which is a long time, but nine months that I was gone. And no longer, like she was my champion when I left, like as I was a hard worker and I done a lot of stuff. But when I came back, I was like irritating her, I could tell. So much so that I stopped getting asked to come to certain meetings, and then eventually I stopped getting asked to participate in projects that I started. And I was like, what is going on? So I, you know when something's bad, right? When something's not going well. So I sensed it and I was like, let me just find another opportunity, which I had done before. I'll just find another place, go to a new team. Cause obviously something happened with me leaving. I don't know what happened, but anyway, it's not working out. So I go to another team, speech recognition actually. I get, go through the interviews. They love me, everything's good. I tell them what I've done, tell them what I can do. They're super excited. They give me a verbal offer. I'm like, awesome. Let me know when I, you know, when we can start. They have to do the formalized paperwork. Well, two days later, I remember it was Christmas Eve. I get a call and I'm like already mentally prepped to be on this other team. I get a call from that person who had given me the verbal offer, the team lead. And he, his voice was really weird, like cracking and nervous. And I was like, what's up? I'm super excited. He's like, yeah, so I'm gonna have to rescind the offer that we gave you. And I was like, wait, what, why? I talked to everyone on the team. I've talked to your leadership. Everyone's excited. And he was like, I can't tell you why, but I'd encourage you to talk to your manager, who was this person who had basically started cutting me. I'm like, why would you even talk to her? Like, what does she have to do with this in my future? And he was like, I can't tell you. You're just gonna have to talk to her. And I immediately started crying and was like, how is this possible? How can someone have so much power that they can completely disintegrate my career? Like that in a second, how is this possible? And of course, to your point, my entire life was built into this one moment where I was like, this is everything. This is me. This is my work. This is my worth. Of course I got through that and I always say work hard and silence and let success be your noise. I never go back and rub my success in my manager's faces, maybe a little bit, but not really. But what I did realize though, is later, years later, the person who ended up telling me that they couldn't hire me, even though they wanted to, was at Twitter and he reached out to me and was like, hey, I wanna hire you as a TPM at Twitter. And I was like, yeah, I'm not going to Twitter. Not for any political reasons, just I didn't wanna work there. My brother works there. No, not gonna go work there. And he was like, look, I wanna make right what was wrong that day. And I was like, tell me more. And in that moment, after years, I was vindicated. Like, okay, it wasn't about me, but I will tell you in that moment, I thought, I questioned everything. When you have a bad day or a challenging moment, you question yourself, your goals, you're like, are you on the right track or are you the right person? And it often has nothing to do with you as this had nothing really to do with me. But you have a choice in that moment to act on that and take the direction of, oh, it's me, I should do less. Or to take the other path, which is, I know who I am, I know what I want, and I want to do more. And that's when people around us start saying, no, well, my goodness, you don't have to do all the things. You don't have to be in all the things. You don't have to have a startup and be an entrepreneur at a company. You don't have to be talking to high school kids and Fortune 500 CEOs. Like you could just sit down, you could rest, you can enjoy your family. And I do all those things, but I choose at the end of the day. And so my hardest day was that day where I now look back on it and I'm sad that I questioned myself. Like I literally was like, am I not supposed to do this? And how many women, since I've shared this story, have come up to me saying they have these moments all the time where they're like, is it me? Am I not supposed to be here? And sometimes it feels like you're not supposed to be in the room when you're the only voice saying what you're saying. And so I encourage you all to just keep, be one, self-aware of what you want to do and what you want to be in this world, but then also be willing to stand up for yourself in these moments when you're starting to question. The last thing, and we'll start with Renee, so you don't have to go first. The last thing we want to do is kind of do a bit of advice, right? If we could tell our younger selves or just tell you what we would do, either as a first step or a next step to move into technology, what advice would you give to all of you as we push you out of the nest into the world of AI? What advice would you give them? To my younger self, I would say be kind to yourself. That is the first thing. Don't be too hard on yourself. Celebrate yourself because every day, every week, every month, every year, it's a milestone. Be kind to yourself, celebrate yourself, and understand always you already have in you that unique ability and extraordinary potential to be what you want to be and do the great things that you want to do. If you've imagined it, you've done it. Now just go out there and do it. So that is what I would say. Thank you, Charlotte. Well, first I want to say what you described was a crime and you should have had people there supporting you and I'm sorry it happened, but she's a survivor. I think what I would say as advice is that you have the ability to do the things that you want to do, but you have to scrounge up the motivation. And if you are not motivated in school, it doesn't mean you can't do the things that you want to do, but that you have to do the things that you want to do and not just hope for them. It's not really about the grade, it's about the doing. And so if you are a person who doesn't love every class or maybe your teachers aren't nice or you're not learning in a way that's best for you, go do the thing that you want to do, go chase it. And for the most part, you can do it. I'll give you an example. I am a girl who loved baseball. And shocker, girls can't play baseball. I mean, literally they wouldn't let me try out for the team in high school, but I loved baseball. And so I got a job at our minor league team the first year they opened, I ran a scoreboard, I worked in the press box, I ran a camera for the Detroit Tigers, I've worked in the audio booth for the Detroit Red Wings. And so I got to do the thing that I wanted to do, which was watch baseball every day and get money. And so it might not have been on the field, but I did get to drag the field with the tool out there and the fifth inning or whatever. And so find a way to do the thing that you want to do and it's probably some terrible job to start, but start and don't let your current circumstances determine your future. You make your future. Awesome. Okay, my advice, I would have to say, I forgot my phone, you know I gotta take a selfie with these ladies up here. My advice would be around network. It's why I take pictures and because I'm traumatized from Hurricane Andrew. So I take pictures of everything. But, and you know, terrible, funny story. I guess I attract these experiences about five years ago. I was moving, I loved what you said about just move and sometimes that's weird. I have moved for tech. Well, my entire career, I go where the tech is and it's offered me incredible opportunity that if I wasn't willing to move, I would never have worked in Amazon if I wasn't willing to move to Seattle. I would never have gotten where I did at Alexa if I wasn't willing to move back to Cambridge. And in that move back from Seattle to Cambridge with my family, I was pregnant with my fourth child. A trailer that all my stuff was in caught on fire. So everything we owned burned. And I then got to see what my parents I guess saw in the trauma that my kids endured losing everything that they thought was important. Here's a cool thing though. I am not very materialistic anymore as a result but now my kids really aren't either. They don't, they just don't think about things the same way when you realize how fragile and just non pertinent and permanent things are. So, but weird, right? Like Hurricane Andrew, then I never put that two together. But I've learned to let go. And I think that's part of what keeps me in technology is that I let go of things. I learned cloud. It was, I was awesome at it. It was my favorite thing. And then AI came and I became a voice person. And I voice became my favorite thing. And then I learned about computer vision. And then computer vision became my favorite thing. And then I learned that people were getting hurt by technology and now AI and ethics is my favorite thing. And none of that was connected. Like it just, I keep myself open. But the number one way I got to do everything I did was because I created a network of people everywhere I went. Every stage I got on or every stage or audience I sat in, I took pictures, I tagged people, I connected with them on LinkedIn. And that is everything I do now comes from someone I know Renee is here because we met, you know, we didn't meet in person at first. We met on a social media network, talking about the same stuff. We found our tribe remotely, but you never know. Like you could end up being on stage with someone you're meeting here five years from now. I always tell people I spoke at Girls Who Code five years ago. And this girl was in this session. A few years later, she sent me a message and she was like, I'm so glad I heard you speak back then. And I remember when I read this, I cried because she sent me a message on Instagram. And she's like, I just want you to know that I decided to go into tech, to stay in tech. And I just got my first job at Microsoft. And I was like, that's my baby. I barely knew her. I don't even think I knew her, knew her. I know her now, because we're friends now, but she ended up doing the thing because she saw someone who looked like her. Someone who was one chapter ahead. Okay, I was a little bit further by then, but just she could see it. Here's the key. If each of you share even a little bit about your journey as you move into some of the technology we talked about today, someone looking over your shoulder is gonna be like, okay, well, if they can do it, I can do it. And you never think what you do is important until that person comes up to you and go, and tells you, I took that job because I saw you do it. And it is life-changing, and you don't have to do anything. All you have to do is be willing to share your story. So sharing your story, be willing to create real connections through social media, create a network of people you actually will talk to. I think that is probably my biggest advice. Care more about the people than the tech. The tech will change, but the people over here to stay. Oh yeah, thank you. Let's give a hand for all of us. Thank you very much. All right, I'm looking for someone who knows what I'm doing. Okay, are we good? Are you gonna come up and do your thing? What's that? You're gonna like close yourself. I was gonna wrap this up, but let's get one more round of applause for the panel. Oh, and really quick, if you all wouldn't share just the best wafer that I selfishly told you about my Instagram, but if you have a way for them to connect with you, do you wanna share that really quick? Sure, any social media platform, as well as the University of Virginia's website and Columbia University's website. My numbers are there and my email address is there. Renee Cummings, everyone, thank you. Yeah, I do AI, so I'm afraid of social media. Charlotte at aiedu.org, or I am on LinkedIn, so if you are looking for a connection, friend me. Thank you. Thank you for the privilege of your time. Always.