 Okay, I guess I'm going to start now, so welcome to the Women in Tech opportunity, it's an opportunity to learn from the experiences of women in tech and the people that support them. My name is Zara Bakshi and I'm a high school student and a senior at Da Vinci Charter Academy in Davis and I'm one of the co-facilitators of the Davis Girls Who Code Club, which is formed last year by past and current UC Davis students. I grew up in Davis and have been lucky to enjoy so many great opportunities at UC Davis, such as the UC Davis Girls and Robotics Leadership Girls Plus Camp, UC Davis Youth Summer Camps, the Rec Pool and of course Aggies Games, Picnic Day and the Whole Earth Festival. I'm excited to share that 196 people have registered for today's event, 86 adults and 110 children and teens. So first, LaShelle May will speak about her career and experience as a woman in tech. Right after that at 2pm, we will have a panel discussion featuring Nina Amente, Donna Davies, Sean Glance and LaShelle May. The audience is welcome to ask our panelists questions. We will end the program with a reception from 3 to 330 with event speakers and the UC Davis Gender Equity in IT Group, which has several women in IT from UC Davis and UC Davis Health. Here to talk to you and to answer your questions. Today's event really took a village to pull off. I'd like to thank UC Davis Health for helping us get this amazing auditorium and for volunteering at the reception. My school Da Vinci Charter Academy helps spread the word about this event through social media and student district channels. I'd also like to thank Davis Media Access, a local nonprofit community media and technology center. Davis Media Access is filming today's event and will make it available to the Davis Public Access Television Station DCTV Channel 15. Davis Media Access is close to my heart. I took their production and animation summer workshops in elementary school, volunteered there junior high and high school and did a high school production internship there. Davis Media Access also supports and mentors the Davis Teen Animators Club that I have been a part of for the last four years. So let me introduce our guest speakers for today. LaShelle May is a computer engineer recognized for leadership and innovation in development of software and web applications. Mrs. May worked at CNN headquarters in Atlanta as a senior software manager and developer for 21 years and she continues to work as a senior technical lead. Mrs. May earned her bachelor's in electrical engineering from Boston University where she was chapter president of the National Society of Black Engineers. She received her master's in operations research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has reserved her as a leader of the Georgia Tech Alumni Association including its student mentoring program. Nina Mente, who is unfortunately not here right now, she will come soon though, is a professor of computer science and the chair of department of computer science at UC Davis. Professor Mente worked over 10 years as a computer programmer. She then returned to graduate school and earned her PhD from UC Berkeley. She was then a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin and moved to Davis in 2002. Professor Mente works in computational geometry to develop algorithms for problems in areas like computer graphics and simulation. Professor Mente is the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Career Award. Sean Glance teaches computer science at Davis Da Vinci Charter Academy. He earned a bachelor's of science in biology from the State University of New York at Albany and a master's of arts in teaching from Oregon State University. Over the past two years, Mr. Glance has spearheaded the approval of two new computer science courses in the Davis School District and has grown Da Vinci's computer science program from 17 students in 2018 to 99 students in 2019. One of his top goals is to recruit more girls into the computer science program so that the diversity in his classroom is more representative of his school's population. I'm in Mr. Glance's AP computer science class this year so I really need to do a good job with today's program. Donna Davis is a career educator and higher education consultant with extensive experience advising women at the UC Davis College of Engineering. She earned her associate's degree in liberal arts then transferred here to UC Davis where she earned her bachelor's degree in psychology. She obtained her master's in higher education at Stanford with a thesis on creating an educational pipeline for girls and women instead. Ms. Davis is interested in the role of undergraduate research in preparing women for advanced degrees and leadership in STEM and the power of women to women mentoring. I would now like to invite Lachelle May to the podium to speak about her experience as a woman in tech. Thank you, Zara. Is she not the best? I'm so impressed with her. Starting with her invitation to me, she emailed me directly and it was, she's, I'm, proud mom. That's a moment. So, thanks for having me. I give so many talks but it's nice to talk to young women about STEM. I get to be nerdy right now so this is fine. My first slide. I put this up. How many of you ladies actually watch the Big Bang Theory? Raise your hand. Cool. I like that. How many of you have never heard of the Big Bang Theory? Well, you're a little younger, but I put this up because I feel like it's really cool now to be a nerd. When I was in high school, who was in high school? Can you raise your hand if you're in high school or middle school? High school and middle school? Okay. So, I was in high school and middle school one billion years ago and, you know, when I was studying physics and calculus and things like that, I was the only girl and I felt, I knew I was a nerd in high school but it wasn't, right now things are changing now. You have programs like this for girls who code. The word STEM didn't exist when I was in high school. Has everybody heard of STEM? And now we're coming up with a new acronym, I don't know if you know STEM, for medicine and STEAM and you're continuing the arts. So I put this up because, and it's a little blurry up here actually because this was kind of like the first TV program to integrate and have some science and math outside of medicine. So I enjoy this as an engineer in a computer science, right, but you know, so many other shows about medicine. So I just put that up because of that. So I'll tell you a little bit about me quickly, not, I don't want to bore you to death. Who knows what city this is? Scream it out. I'm a native New Yorker and I grew up, my main name is Rodriguez, my father's Cuban and I grew up in an inner city part of New York City where was predominantly Dominican, Puerto Ricans, Hispanics, low income area. I can tell you right now where I grew up in New York City, I couldn't afford to live right now because New York has changed. But about me is that my journey to get here, I shouldn't be here statistic wise, you know, I was low income, a female, an African American, who knew that I would be married to the Chancellor beside that part, but our worlds met because of math and science. So I just bring that point out. I had my mom had to wear with all to move me from New York City to New Jersey and in New Jersey, I went to parochial school, I was probably maybe your age when I moved to New Jersey, middle school, and I was exposed to more AP courses and that allowed me to think further than what I knew in New York City and in Spanish Harlem. I'm going to fast forward to this one, but I studied AP courses and I started at Boston University studying electrical engineering. Does anybody know what electrical engineering really is or can give me an idea of what you think it? What do you think that is? No. Anybody want to tell me what you think, engineering, any type of engineering? Let's try. Yes, engineers, that's what they do. You're a civil engineer, you can help bridges, waterways, mechanical engineers work on parts of robots, then you have aerospace, they build airplanes. I studied electrical engineering and electrical engineering is really the meat of understanding your cell phone. I put that as an example, your iPad, the devices that are inside that, the circuits and wiring. Many, many years ago, a computer, your phone would take up this whole building, but that's the power of your phone. Years ago, I studied electrical engineering and in order for me as an African-American woman or woman, just a woman in a class filled with all males and Asian males, I was the only one. The courses are very difficult, there's no, when you study engineering and computer science, your courses are not light. Every single course is intense. You're going from calculus to physics to signals and systems and all these different type of things that are, if you just take physics and go to a new level, that's how hard the courses are. I put this up there, this is the National Society of Black Engineers. I became a member in college and that got me through because it was an organization that I could lean on and just have fun with, learn with, study with. My advice to you when you, while you're in high school and then you go to college, join some type of affinity group, there's mouths of research that indicate you may know more about this that you will succeed if you join something in college and high school, a band or whatever it is. But mine was this because we studied together and I had an avenue that helped. So this is where I work. Who's never heard of seeing it? I wouldn't be surprised if she hadn't, but has everybody heard of seeing it, you see? So it's a household name and I've enjoyed my time there. I'll give you a glimpse of my job so it's not just overwhelming. I won't get into many details so I don't bore you to death, but what I do is I build web applications for the newsroom. So there's a CNN.com. There's a CNN app that you may have on your phone as parents. If you keep up, then there's CNN linear. CNN linear is what we air to TV and digital is what we provide digitally. So web app, phone app. And so I build applications. So just imagine I'm building like an Amazon.com for CNN for the newsroom. So this is actually one of the applications that I built. And you could see up top the situation room is Wolf Blitzer. He's one of our anchors. New ladies may not even know him, but maybe your parents do. But he's one of our key anchors. And this is a type of show. This is a type of web application that allows Wolf Blitzer's team to create a rundown. So at CNN, when you air something at any show that you watch on TV, it goes like this. If it's a 3 p.m. show, there's an entire group of people who are building your TV show from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. And every slot has some kind of content, commercial, or something about the show. And those are called rundowns. So this is actually a web application I built for rundowns. So every single rundown at CNN will use this. And as you can see, they have an intro show. At this point that I grabbed this, it said Trump assails major parts of Obama's legacy, I don't know. And then commercial break, out of commercial break, show, show, show. I can't display it, I can't show you what really is. But this is a cool app because it allows the newsroom to drag and drop content in here so I can build, drag and drop stuff. Really fun computer science geeky stuff that allows them to open and close things and bring in content from the newsroom, I mean newspapers, et cetera. But this is just an example of something that we use right now. The reason I have television versus IP up here is because this app is also available via IP. Television now is changing. How many of you guys, I might ask you right here. Would you be more mad that your Wi-Fi went out or versus your cable? See? So IP in our world means Wi-Fi. So as CNN's starting to change, our linear content is TV. We realize this is a whole new generation who are not interested in TV but more interested in IP. So this right here is a web app that we allow distributed to mobile applications too. So it's just something how things are changing. That's a picture of one of our control rooms is Control Room A. I just wanted you to get a glimpse of what CNN's like. And you could see in every newsroom we watch all the other stations to know what's happening and who's displaying what. This is another application that I built. And this one actually I won a technical Emmy, not a primetime Emmy. It's a technical Emmy. Let's not get it to us there. Actually my husband's like, we're going to go get you an Emmy. I want to go with you and a bunch of nerds. But this became the first newsroom digitized newsroom web app. Years ago, you may not remember because you were a little bit, do your parents have tape decks? Do you ever see a tape? Yes. At CNN we used to like, wind tapes and bring in the news that way. And then so we changed it 20 years ago to be digitized. And that's really why I was hired there. So this is a web application called Media Source. And basically what it does is just every single piece of video that comes into the newsroom is one row. And you can watch the play and thumbnails that come out. This is a lot of work. It's a lot of UI work and a lot of back end work for those who are. Is anybody in here actually coding? Do we have any girls who code? Yeah. Somewhat. Are you ladies thinking about it? Well, okay. All right. So this right here is kind of like every person in the newsroom will use this because this is where you add robust content to every single piece of video. So I'll give you a heads up. CNN had video before YouTube existed. Like I started here when there was not an internet, but we had content. And content is a YouTube video. YouTube came way after us, y'all. I'm just here to tell you. Just way after us. And you can see this is kind of like a video feed. Each of those are routers that bring in, do you guys have you guys heard of satellites? There's satellites in the world that feed us content day and night. This is the Atlanta Bureau. We have bureaus in London all over. I've been to all of them, but they really just bring in the content via these routers. It's a black box. But anyway, at the end of the day, this is a YouTube video. Now it's just bringing in digitized content. And that room that had content, you can see these are all ingests that are happening right now. So it's kind of like somebody's taping or you're having your phone coming in. This is all, these are things that have been aired or coming in and these are being ingested right now and these are soon to be scheduled. So for us at CNN, we constantly schedule content over and over again. This is a web application that I help build. And so I'm just trying to get you a feel of the kind of work that I do in terms of software development. I just want to briefly talk about the impact of software, which I'm sure our panel will discuss. I just happen to gravitate toward a great field. If you go anywhere in software, you will never be unemployed. There's always a job out there. The reach of software is endless. Every device that you have will require some type of software development. Every website, you can't even shop. Where do you shop? Give me a place where you may shop. Where do you shop? We're in 21. Is it? Do they have a website? Yeah. They have an app. That's where you shop, right? Do you really go into the store? Oh, you do. Well, some stores at the end of the day, most of your generation would love to shop online. So the websites are endless. And you can't have a business without one. And so that requires development and software people. And then music plays into this. I always bring this up because it does transform into the arts. We've digitized music. And then robotics is the artificial intelligence. Who's heard of artificial intelligence? Yeah, see? Everybody's heard of artificial intelligence. I like that. That's good stuff. But this is actually made for someone who's a quadriplegic. They have this new robotic thing where it can follow his brain and walk. It's kind of cool. That's not me. I've not stepped into these other worlds. I'm strictly a web developer, website developer. There's cross-pollination between software and biotechnical engineering. For a fact, I know that who knows what this is. Everybody knows what that is. Do we all have one? So that's an ear pod. You kids have all-head devices in your ear from a very young age, right? I'm old. I have not had a device in my ear from a very young age. Your hearing will be compromised before mine. I guarantee you that, right? Do you know what this is on that side? Do you hear an aid? OK. So there's research now to make sure that you guys can hear your music and have an ear aid, because you may need one before that. But that made us deterred. This is research that I do know is going on. But I just wanted you kids to see how you have biotechnical engineering cross-pollinating with technical stuff that's happening now. So when we have the device that you may need in probably 15 years, you'll be able to hear your music and hear, because your hearing will be compromised. You have the same name, Jerry. Well, by default, listening to devices in your ears that close, compromising your hearing. The only way not to is just not to start listening to music. When we were growing up, we didn't have air pods. We didn't even have hearing things. And there were big, giant things on your ears. And then your music's louder, and so you can't get around it. But this type of device will allow you to hear your device as well as improve your hearing. Not everybody's going to be a hearing aid. I'm not a need one. I'm not a doctor. I'm just telling you, I know that this research is going on. So the world's through collide. Did you have a question? OK. And then software apps, who's ever actually played with software when mobile apps? Developing one? Yeah. OK. But I'm sure everybody's. The question is, who hasn't used an app in this room? I'm sure all of you have. Yeah. So that's a lot of software. It takes to build one. I can get into the different languages, et cetera. But that's not my expertise. But it's a good one. And it's hot right now, so if you're thinking about it. I put this up because I thought maybe we would have some high school kids who were interested in learning different languages. So this is a very technical slide. So it was almost homework for somebody like Zora. But there's a word called purple squirrel. Has anybody heard of that word before? No? Have you heard of it? Yeah. You've heard of it? No. It's OK. I'll give you an example. Does anybody in here who work or have a job? Well, a kid. Yeah. So any of the little kids, any teenagers work or have you? I have one. What was your job? I babysit kittens. You babysit kittens? OK. So the idea of a purple squirrel is, I'm going to see if I can relate it to babysitting kittens. It's actually a list of qualifications for a job that are almost impossible to fill in, that you are just dynamic. So it would be if I'm looking for someone to babysit my kitten, I wanted them to be five foot two. Actually, in the fourth grade, and have four A's and two B's, and that they could come to my house and have all these stipulations that you think, really? Who can fill that? But that's kind of what that job description means. And there are a lot of software jobs out there, software or not software, but they call them a purple squirrel. And I put that up here because I'm going to talk about these four things that I think could make would be the avenue to being a purple squirrel. And a full stack developer for us in the software world is a person who can develop the UI, the fun stuff that you see, and the back end stuff that you see. So again, remind me who in here has done software who's in Girls Who Code with you, you, Zara, and is anybody else here in the course? No? OK. Well, I won't get to details because I know we have some young middle school kids here. But briefly, software developers, I was going to tell you you need an IDE, which allows you an environment to do your software coding on your machines, your laptops, et cetera. Everybody has a laptop, right? Yeah. The languages is powerful. I would say gravitate toward one, master it, and then the others become easier. Understand databases is one that I never get from college kids that know well the database structures. And some system admin stuff. I don't know if your students play with some system admin things like macOS? Not much. OK. Yeah, and that's one that I say. So I say whoever's in here who is in Girls Who Code and is thinking about this as a future, these four entities will make you the purple squirrel and give you the full-step stack development tools that you need to become very proficient. I'm excited to be here with girls who are thinking about this. The future looks good. Forbes recently named UC Davis the first among best value calendars for women in STEM. So we have hats off. We're really excited about that one. Nezbi, when I was in Nezbi, was very small, but has grown to 25,000 members. So that's great improvement there as well. And we're here with DaVinci Girls Who Code, right? So this is success. Women in STEM is growing. I could give many, many more examples of what's happening there. And finally, who's seen this picture before? You know who she is? You seen DaVinci before? Does anybody know who she is? Zara? I put her face up as she's Grace Hopper. She's the first female. You know who you heard of her? Yeah, I know who she is. She's been replicated, and her inspiration was from her grandpa, who taught her. And she was in the Coast Guard, and she was a general, too. Mark one. She's really like, it was what it felt like. Yeah, she developed the first compile. You're exactly right. Yay! Gross. I'm into it with this. This is it. So any questions to the panel? Or did you have a question? Well, who really influenced you a lot in getting into STEM? Was there someone who just kind of pushed you in that direction? Yeah, that's a good question. Both of my parents were not in STEM. But I gravitated toward math and science. So by default, I knew I wanted to study something. For example, when I was in high school, I signed up for AP Physics. And then I did AP History. And I thought I was going to die in AP History. It was like the worst course. But I love the AP Physics. So it was like by default, and I knew that I had to do something in that area. I was not excited about biology. So STEM is you've got the computational sciences and the non-computational sciences. So biology is the non-computational. So I didn't really care to memorize a whole bunch of things, which would have led me to medicine and that kind of field or biological sciences. But I preferred the mathematics. So yeah. That's a really good question. Back then, again, we didn't have the word STEM. And in high school or middle school? Or either or, yeah. No, not really. Again, I went back to that first slide. I really do think I was a nerd in high school. So I had my little group. And so I just gravitated and made sure I hung out with the people who were alike, who were with me. So not really. You mean the Girlsuit Code, this kind of program? No, this is a great program for it. Yeah, so you can join Girlsuit Code. It's nationwide. And there's several clubs. We ran a club at the beginning of this year. And it was very successful. If you want to learn it by yourself, I would highly recommend doing code studio, code.org. Mr. Glantz actually teaches that class also. If you go to school and they have a course, you can try doing it yourself. But by yourself, I always found doing an hour of code or 20 hours of code on the website code.org. It was phenomenal and taught me a lot. And it's very helpful. I do. Let me see if I can go back to the slide that I had that Oh, yeah. So the resources at NSF.org that are specifically focused for women and girls advancing in the engineering and science. So in those spaces, you can find dandy annotated quick and dirty lists of what is biomedical engineering? What is biotechnology? What is mechanical engineering? What is aerospace engineering? So NSF.org, it's division focused on that's totally dedicated to diversifying our critical industries, especially across gender and ethnicity, where we still don't have proportionate representation. Lots of resources in there at NSF.org in the division of diversification of engineering. And you can see a lot of early education, and then middle school, and then high school, and then pre-college preparation in STEM and engineering. And STEAM, I like that term. That's awesome. Because I like the Renaissance people who are down the dabble in the arts. The STEAMs, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics, is that what that is? Yes. Yeah. Neat. Engineering, arts, and music. I mean, I'm not even going to start. And then they're adding another M in the skulls. Yeah, literally Da Vinci-ism, right? So yeah, check out NSF.org. Some good resources. Sorry for the introduction, but the camera goes in the mind of us to use on mics. Oh, I'm sorry. Is my voice carrying enough? Shall I be louder? You want to play the video? Yeah. Not for the video, right? OK. So I mainly use, it's called code.org. That's a website that's completely free. You sign up with your email. And then also, it's called Girls Who Code, the nationwide clubs. I don't know exactly when the Davis one will start again, but we normally hold it every year. If you're interested, you should take a snapshot of this page. Because of this slide, the only reason I say that is because whatever you learn, you're going to touch on something here. You're going to either hit a language. JavaScript is the hottest language right now in terms of jQuery bundle packages that allow you to build web apps in a day. We have these enterprises with Node.js and Ruby on Rails that you can Google and play. Do you have a Mac or a window? I'm a Mac person. Mac, yeah. So be careful when you download things. Make sure it's for the Mac. If you're seriously thinking about it, your IDE is the most important piece. As an application, you'll download to your Mac or machine. And then it'll allow you to play with code and software that you integrate. These things right here are the places where you get your code. It's like a pulling in, get hubs, and get CVS. And then as you play on your Mac and machine, start to know them better. Things that allow you to maneuver through your servers. These are actually called servers now. Years ago, a server was a big giant room, but now these Macs are so powerful. Your phone's a server, really. And I'll say this one. This is really for advancement. I was thinking I was talking to some kids a little older. But your language is the best thing. Learn some CSS. That's really fun. That's the color and the gooey and the making things drag, drop, jump, gifts, and fun stuff like that. I love this stuff. I wish I could take you home. No? Yeah, no, no, no, no. I'll be honest. When I first joined CNN, I was the only developer. This was a news organization. There wasn't CNN.com. So for a while, I was a key developer working on these different projects. But then as the internet grew, et cetera. So now the whole CNN.com group is a whole different monster. I don't even bother with them. Our group is about four senior managers. I was a senior manager before I moved here. And then there's teams underneath that. So I'd say a good 100 people to maintain all the newsroom web applications is a lot. I just gave you the most powerful ones that we use, because the content becomes really important. So yeah, but now it's a big group. And when I won the technical Amy 20 years ago, it was a small group. I could claim it. Now we win Peabody awards for some of our technical work. But it's the whole team that wins it. So mine was special. That's a good question. And I love that question coming from you, because you guys, the world as your oasis, you think about where do you want to go, specifically what do you do? Like, let me tell you something, darling. Many, many years ago, I was just happy to get a job. Way back when, it wasn't that way. But how I actually got my job at CNN was I did a great job with another company. I used to work for a consulting company called Arthur Anderson, which is now Accenture. And my hiring manager there said, oh, we're trying to launch CNN.com. Do you want to come and join? I love to have you. The job was mine. I didn't even apply for it. She just wanted me. And I had a good friend who was my quality assurance. So every website that you play on or mobile app, there is a quality assurance. And do you have any idea what that person would do? You are good. That's exactly right. A quality assurance of any site is most critical, is to make sure that things work the way they should. But she and I came as a peer to CNN. And I've just been there. And I tell you something. It's the best job that I've been there 23 years. And I never feel like I work a day in my life. It's a fun, fun job. Everything I do is something new every single day. So it's not like I'm doing the same job every day. It's just always something new happening in the news. So we... When you first started working in a field that was traditionally name dominated, what strategies did you use to advocate for yourself or to make sure that people took it seriously and respected you? Yeah. Good question. Let me see how I can politically say this. When I knew I was right or I felt dismissed, I would always say it to the men in the room. Okay. When I prove you wrong, I reserve the right to tell you I told you so. So I've never been the one to be very vocal about my opinion a lot. I just knew I had to be academic. I tell you girls, always know your stuff. I could say another word instead of that. But always know your stuff. Study very, very hard. So there's no doubt you know what you're talking about. And that's what I've always done too. But when I was confronted, I was like, oh, you know, she don't know, she's just, you know. I would say, mm-hmm, and know that I knew my stuff and then prove them wrong later. But there's many times I was not included in lunch or activities, but I found my own way. I would work out or do something else. So not being included sometimes is hard. But you, once you get a mentor or an advocate for you within your company or area, that helps. So I had an advocate for me so that, actually a female who was a VP and that helped me too. I don't know if I answered your question, but yeah. Okay. You hit upon something that's so significant as far as advocates, I think kids are heard mentors. But an advocate approaching an advocate, how do you develop that kind of relationship? Because even now, at their age, they really need to know how to do that. Yeah. For whatever they do. So can you give some advice on how they can develop advocate relationships? Or what's the difference between a mentor and advocate? Yeah, that's a good question. I think a mentor is somebody who can temporarily help you through something, but an advocate will watch your whole life. I think it's just like a journey, like advocating for you every step along the way. But a mentor could say, hey, I want you to study this or do this. I mean, to me, advocate is a long journey. Somebody, a lifetime friend or a lifetime, and could put a good word for you or help you out in some way. You may know more about the whole advocate. Now, in terms of how you speak for yourself and find one, that's another part that I'm not sure is networking. And networking is a big thing too. And business acumen that comes into, are you approachable? And it's almost, this is almost an adult question. I'm not sure, you know what I mean? I'm gonna show how to bring it down to their level. You guys got a little bit of time to worry about these things. You don't worry about this stuff too soon. So that's a great question. And I would say that in the high school setting, in the college setting, women and girls, well, you're all women by the time you're in high school, in my opinion, I mean, you're women, not girls. And I think you have a keen opportunity with the web being what it is, where you can learn about somebody before you approach them, right? So, for example, I would often coach women in the engineering programs here on campus. Before you go in and try to talk to a faculty member and say, gee, you know, could I come in and do some research in your lab? Or, you know, could I cross some kind of a boundary that wasn't just already available in curricular delivery? I would say like, you know, go pull three of their papers. Read their papers. You may not be able to get your head around like every little detail, you know, at your stage in education, you'll be able to discern kind of the general gist of the paper, the thesis, the methods and the conclusions. And faculty love to talk about their research, right? So if you go in and you appeal to their sensibilities and say something open-ended like, you know, I noticed that you were working in, you know, carbon-based nanotubes to deliver medicine to tumors in the body. Could you tell me more about that? So it's describing and being authentic about your intellectual curiosities, right? And then that leads to opportunities to start talking about your career curiosities. And by the time you are in that lab, maybe under wing of a graduate student, maybe that professor may not have a whole lot of time to directly, intellectually or scientifically mentor you, but they can be present for you and also deliver an opportunity for your graduate student to really take you under their wing and ideally it's a woman or a woman of color who is relatable and connected to you and advocates for you like you talked about. So mentoring but also giving that graduate student the opportunity to learn to mentor because there'll eventually be faculty, right? And we want them to be approachable when that next generation of undergrads or high schoolers approaches and says, gee, can you tell me more about the science that I read that you conduct? So I think that that's one door in and that's even true in work settings, right? So maybe before approaching somebody who you've noticed up the ranks who is doing something you're interested in or you think might have some merit in advancing you in your career, find out what they've done, just notice and then connect on that level and be open-ended about it and authentic. You know, I really want to learn more about this. Can you tell me more about this? So, thanks. That was helpful, yeah. So I will be now starting off the panel so if all the panels can come on up. So I'm going to start off by asking a few questions and then we're going to basically kind of have like a conversation up here and then when I finish asking my questions I'd love for all of you to ask your own questions and I'll give you information. I can see you. All right. So I would like to ask my first question. My first question is why should women work in the tech field? Who would like to take that first? I'll go. I'm Nina Amenta. I'm the former chair of the computer science department here at UC Davis and I also teach the course in web programming which is a great class. Anyway, so I think there's a lot of good reasons why women should go into tech which is similar to the reasons that men should go into tech which is first of all it's a really interesting field. I mean you're never bored. There's always new things to learn. There's always puzzles to be solving. So it's very intellectually stimulating. Also it pays really well. No problem with that. I mean since I graduated from college and started working I felt confident in my financial independence. It's been great. Very satisfying. And the other thing is that there's a lot of directions that you could go in tech. If you change your mind later in your career you want to do something else there's a lot of opportunities to move into something different where you're spending more time working with people or you're spending more time on a particular problem that you want to solve or you just have a lot of freedom. Yeah so I think again a lot of reasons I would echo all of those that you just said. Another thing is so I think that technology is influencing everything. Our world is so rapidly changing so we have a lot of new problems in our world today and I think that we are going to need to leverage all of the tools available to address those. And when we have a number of our population that is not engaging in those problems those are minds and ideas that are not being put forth. So I think it's really important when we look at half the world's population being women that we have the whole population engaged in solving the problems of today. I would just say one more piece diversity in mind. It's so well known that when a woman is present some kind of new whether it's a new app or whatever that diversity of mind the product will prosper. You ladies may know things like for example I'll give an example when they first invented the airbags they didn't have a woman my husband uses this one we both know this one when they first invented airbags you girls would have died if it popped open on you when in the research facility trying to figure out oh well the frame's a smaller hello so you have to have that in the mix as well as well as minorities too but women are important too. I love all those points about why women should go into the tech industry that's okay. So I'd like to also open up the question of like what are some of the challenges that women will face when they're so interested in the tech field and the majors that are out there. So working with mostly high school populations what I've found as a challenge is I would say it's not your fault but the way that our high school system kind of sets you up to go through their checkbox list of high school degree requirements and then you're suddenly supposedly able to just pick a major but you haven't had much career exposure to decide like well a major's supposed to map to my eventual career plans so you're asked to really you're asked kind of an impossible question to answer in an informed way right unless you've spent some time in high school maybe even as really as middle school certainly in elementary school too summer camps but also I think using your network and now a fifth grader in this room might say like network I don't have a network I'm only in fifth grade I'm only nine or ten years old well actually you do so our first networks are who our families, our communities our schools right and so one of the challenges that I often see with others about to sit down and write their college essays like well gosh you know I had my nose to the grindstone I was working really hard I did really well with my grades and I did all the I jumped through all the hoops they told me to but I don't really have a lot I don't think I have a lot to say in this essay because I haven't had experiences to put my intellectual curiosities to the battle test like in a summer internship or a science immersion college program and so I would say the biggest challenge that I could tell you now to try to ward off when you get to that point is create experiences for yourself jump in and try things, use that network and by that I mean like parents, friends every person in this room has a parent who probably has five friends at least who kind of cross the disciplines or the industries that we think about as being sort of common engineering and science medicine, law education environmental studies and environmental work policy and leadership in their own right maybe not with title and prestige and privilege but let me tell you being the lead grounds person at a campus like UC Davis is leadership and so in your parent friends that you have a network and if you have people that are willing to let you just shadow them for like four hours on the job on some afternoon that maybe your teacher will release you or maybe you can hit that workspace at two o'clock as soon as the bell rings or three o'clock whatever go and do those things and doing things when you're young immersed in things you think you might want to do and finding out oh god I hate this or I don't like this environment that's time well spent right because you've ruled out a whole lot of time and years and money that you might go spend in a degree program or pursuit of a career that you won't that won't fulfill you and that doesn't really keep you up at night because I really think grad school undergrad school and then some of the biggest questions in our jobs you know that we're called to answer and solve they should keep us up at night like we should be driven by an intellectual and an emotional and you know a social and professional drive to make transformative change right because that keeps us fresh and strong especially as women like you know man just listening to your you know small short bios like whoa impressive this is somebody I trust and want to listen to she's got accomplishments under her belt so you can start that accomplishment list today and it's free use your networks yeah so I guess again I think one of the maybe initial barriers and myself as a middle school high school teacher so the lens that I'm taking is that that first experience right or that first step into maybe this is something I'm interested in maybe this is something I have a knack for and so there are unfortunately like limited opportunities right now because as you mentioned there are so many boxes to check letting your teachers know letting people around you know that this is something that you're interested in exploring I have a lot of my seventh grade students come up to me and say are we doing coding in seventh grade science and I always try to make a little space for it but there are those opportunities and also talking to your teachers about doing something even like like the hour of code which is a great just first step into what is computer science and programming and there are resources for your teachers or for your peers or your parents and guardians to help support you in those kinds of first experiences even if they themselves don't have the expertise in it right it's really can be an empowering experience to kind of learn side by side with somebody who is also like a mentor and advocate I was throwing one more thing which is high school students nowadays have this great advantage that wasn't around when I was a kid which is these robotics clubs they're just fantastic and you know it's a great way to learn about what you like and what you don't like and you know meet friends and stuff like that I would also kind of say with like especially for myself as you know a high school student I have found that for especially I wanted to get into computer science and I found oh I'm not good enough was the thing popping in my head so many times oh I can't do this I'm not smart enough for this and I would always compare myself to the other some reason guys in my class they always were smarter than me in my own head and I realized with just kind of looking in I do have the potential plus also it's not just about the coding there's so many passages within computer science within tech it's not just the one thing about you have to sit at a computer all day and code there's so many aspects and that's what I love about it that's why I got back into deciding I want to be a woman in tech okay okay um um so I'm gonna ask my next question more so our question was before kind of just for students now I want to think about what are the some of the challenges women will face in a tech industry what what are some of those challenges so I spent several years in industry between when I graduated from like college and went on to graduate school and um that was certainly a challenging period where you know I was one of very few women in my lab there was you know people would have posters and naked women in their offices and stuff that like nowadays would never be allowed um and um uh so uh things that things you know got much much better in the intervening years um but now you know from from what I read and when I talk to people there's the suppression that things are are starting to get a little more difficult again um and that there's there's you know beginning to be the sort of the bro type culture in uh in industrial settings um so uh I think it you know it's it's it's certainly challenging um and I think one of the things that uh was positive about it for me was that um uh you know I like self-consciously identified as a feminist you know and so I was like this is my opportunity to enter male-dominated environment this is my opportunity to demonstrate that you know I'm smarter than at least half of the people here because I'm average you know um uh you know this is my opportunity to call out sexism in the workplace yes so um it's it's unfortunate you know that that people have to deal with it but um uh in a way you know if you want to like see yourself as a warrior and as a change maker it's an opportunity um yeah well I'm still in corporate America right I've been there all my life I've not been in academia um it depends on the feel so there are a lot of feels out there that you ladies can choose from in terms of tech I've been we we're here to talk about computer science and of course that that sounds sexy because you can go to Google and Facebook and LinkedIn you can do websites for a news network etc but there's a whole world out there um you get back to robotics you can be on a team to help who's heard of that robot the um iRobot does anybody have an iRobot right I mean you can be on a team to build that and that is a technical world you could be um help building airplanes without the five ladies who just flew to the NASA that's an all who's heard of who did you ladies here the all women and that's cool you can be part of that the tech industry is vast so um so it depends on which feel you go to there are some that have a lot of dated um men I should say that have been there a long time and then you can go into an environment with a young millennials you guys I think are Gen Z and so if you step into an environment where a lot of millennials you'll have less of it because they're a customer and they're not taking it right so I love that about this industry and so for me I became the change the voice at CNN being the only woman for so long I started to say okay now we need I need to give back so I started to hire more women so the problem here sometimes and what you're alluding to is that there are not a lot of women in higher structures so I just imagine how many CEOs you had there were women from the top down they could say hey look we need to increase the numbers so what I started to do is a bottom up let's increase more women bottom and then by default you guys the women will grow and grow and grow so I see your question but it all depends on the environment in which you go to and it's a whole vast world out there with IT so also I mean most IT jobs are not in the tech industry you know they're not at google and facebook they're doing the IT for hospital they're doing the IT for a company that makes dish soap you know there's a huge number of jobs out there and you know different companies have wildly different cultures you know and it's a and that's a big opportunity because anything that you're interested in in addition to programming there's probably a way to combine those you know programming is like writing you've got to write about something you've got to program about something you know and so it's a great way to so different sectors you should be looking at all sorts of different sectors one thing that I might add to that you alluded to before is there's been a lot of progress a lot of positive change in the last decade and recently right where we've been seeing more women getting into tech and that's great and I'm actually an optimist and see it continuing that way but I think it is also important to notice that when we see these positive trends it's easy to step back and say things are going to be fine right and the reason we've seen these positive trends is because there's so many advocates saying that we need these changes need to happen and so keeping our mind on like why that change is occurring at the rate it is and seeing what parts can we all play in continuing that momentum and keeping that change moving forward so just to recap on the question was what are the challenges of being in a male dominated environment mostly just kind of what challenges yeah so I guess from a feminist standpoint many of you girls and women in here have probably already felt the marginalization or the isolation or being singled out for being intellectually curious or displaying traits that conventionally have been associated with boy stuff I mean can you raise your hand and just be real brave and honest about that anybody feeling that in their classroom environments sometimes sometimes yeah you don't actually yeah you don't have to feel that way but so think like so as a woman who's a member of another proud minority group right I'm a woman with a disability right and so we have a legacy too of historical underrepresentation in every level like higher education career fulfillment under employment and then you add triple whammy's like black lesbian and blind you know and then you've got people with intersectional identities that don't even get to really fit in any of their communities right fully and be embraced and empowered so what I would say is as girls and women and then additional traits and backgrounds that you all stem from be that ethnic, religious, citizenship status whatever that is disability it's crucial that you connect to your community like wherever you are at whatever educational level you're in like find somebody that looks like you it may seem like you can't but I bet you can and even if you just have one person that looks like you that you can get real with and just talk about on the down low to start out like what you're experiencing what you're witnessing and get that support and that empowerment and that person who can look to you and go like yeah it's not you it's them do you know what I'm saying that's the difference between survival and attrition in education right so not being alone and if it takes you you know that first semester on a you know wildly radically different campus to what you're used to or inside of a population of people that might have like more money more prestige more accomplished parents or whatever you know the comparative rankism that we foist on people in the society go find your tribe like whoever it is and whatever it is if it's just the other girls in your CS class or the other women in your CS class or the other women that you saw at the NSBE conference you know go find those people and be brave because even if you're scared that doesn't mean it's not worth doing right take some risks make some connections and that will give you the power and the bravery to stick on the days when you really feel like quitting or giving up or leaving this you know bewildering place that just doesn't get you and doesn't embrace you you know what I mean and yeah that's what I would say like that's how we meet the challenge of sexism or any kind of like racial or social marginalization is go find our people and like connect to them help them out on the days when they're struggling and lean on them when the days when you are okay that's a great question I don't think they'll get a positive you know what's the positive light so advantages well I would say this as a white woman with a disability having a disability and being called to consistently kind of fight from my spot and my space like from an architectural standpoint right like this world still isn't anywhere near how accessible it needs to be to integrate women like me but let's also talk about other disability identities ADD ADHD people with quiet and silent chronic illness blindness other mobility impairments the gamut hearing impairment so that's a diverse group in and of itself right and so I would say that belonging to this I'll call it a proud and struggling minority group because I'm politically active I'm always fighting for people like me to be treated equally and fairly right and so that means women people with disabilities people who come from first generation to college backgrounds like all the different little boxes I check off personally what how that has advantaged me is I do believe that it's given me some added modicum of sensitivity to the marginalization experience that people of color might experience people with language barriers might experience people with who are like targeted for deportation might experience do you know so it's like the so it's flipping that that struggle into a kind of consciousness that enables me to understand people a little bit more and where they're coming from and then to try and be present for liberation and equality so I'd like to ask my next question which is how can we effectively increase diversity in tech fields well my husbands for you ladies who may not know my husband's the chancellor of this UC Davis or president their chancellor is president something so increasing diversity has to start even younger than you ladies for sure you have to start thinking about when you're younger um that math and science we and I always say you know people would say oh I'm not good in math and science well you can't how is that said and that used to be said a lot and oh you can't say I'm not good in English so it's like why do people say I'm not good in math and science so that has the that has to not exist anymore and I think that that's increasingly going away but when we were younger that was a common statement oh you're good in math and science or not but you couldn't say I'm not good in English so increasing diversity has to start younger in these programs so I what's great is that you guys have girls who code you've got STEM programs this gets younger people thinking about STEM and not just necessary IT but medicine and a care mom that's important too because we need during the biological sciences as well you know the programs help too but also it's important to the high school you guys are oh you know we need you to like encourage all the girls to apply I've seen so many girls in high school in AP biology and in AP calculus and then they're like oh I want to be I want to do something completely different I mean you do have to follow your passion and love what you're doing but if you're gifted in that area it becomes that much easier I never work a day in my life as I'm doing something I love and it becomes natural and so that encouragement from the high school is key for me is what I think sure yeah happy to say things about the high school yeah no with the high school and junior high getting students getting girls interested in tech right and and not having to you know I don't expect that every student in my computer science class is going to go on to become a computer scientist I'd love that but you know the real reality is as long as they've got some grounding some background in how computers how technology works and some confidence in their ability to solve a problem that comes up in technology or to teach themselves a new skill that's needed for whatever there they need to do those are all like really really key and important and so you're all here right now which is fantastic but as the question was you know what can we do to increase that diversity bring more friends in right talk to your talk to other girlfriends say hey maybe we should try out this class when I had so last year I taught a middle school computer science class for the first time and I had only three girls in it I had only 17 students but there were three girls in my class and I was intentional you know when we did recruitment I asked those girls to come to sit at the table right and they were amazing and they did a fantastic job in the class and they recruited but still this year my 9th grade computer science class has 32 students in it and three girls so I was really disappointed to see that right I thought like you know we're making this more accessible making this more interesting but it wasn't enough so I think being thoughtful about events like this what can we do what opportunities do each one of us individually have what opportunities what impacts can we make in order to to reach that that goal right that we're all kind of striving for so so one thing that you know is important for me is like sort of part of the institution now is and has also been like really important for me personally is that there's a lot of second chances also it's not like you have to decide at the age of 11 that you are going to be you know a tech giant or a computer programmer or whatever you know you're going to change your mind most people change their minds a lot over the course of their career right and so in terms of you know improving diversity in industry and at the university and everywhere else it's important for the people who are running those institutions to make it easy for people to change their minds right you don't have to come in to college as a CS major but there should be an opportunity for you to get enough programming courses that if you want to get a tech job when you graduate you're going to be able to do that when I the way I got into graduate school and computer science was that I had been working in industry for several years but my undergraduate degree was in something else entirely and there was this program that was designed exactly for people like me we want people who majored in something else have experience in industry and want to go to graduate school and computer science I was like yes that would be me and they just sort of funneled me right into graduate schools so second chances yeah ways to give people second chances I always think that especially what Mr. Glanz was saying is that letting your friends know that you're interested in this saying oh I took this computer science class I loved it you should try and join it with me because you tend to want to have your friends around you and so if I tell my friends oh you should take this class with me I'll have my friends over and we're also making more women in that field interested and so if you tell your friends I'm taking this I love it you should try and maybe give it a shot or you get yourself for me I got involved in the community I started co-facilitating 35th grade girls this is what I love this is what why don't you try it out you start when you grow older or even now tell the younger one generations this is what you can do then they'll decide this is really influential I should try and so just start at an age just pinpoint someone say you should try you have potential okay so another question I have here is what is something interesting about you that cannot be learned through your resume you go I was once saved from a bear by a calico cat yeah I can kind of on that line I once went sledding on a glacier that was on the side of an active volcano in Chile see me at the reception I can't top that but I would just say that I'm a runner something mundane but you know big fit is important cat saved me those are very interesting points yeah I mean they are definitely something that your resume won't say about you I would like to ask for the students here I want to hear kind of what was your favorite class in high school or even college that just kind of maybe drove you either to your profession or maybe had nothing to do with my profession at all so I mentioned that I majored in something else what I majored in was classical civilization which is like Greece and Rome it was kind of like majoring in Lord of the Rings or something you know I was a real fantasy oriented kid so that was great I had fascinating classes in that you know I remember like one class about the letters of St. Paul I mean I'm not even Jewish I'm not even Christian but it was just fascinating because you think of these things as letters that somebody actually sent there was a person who wrote this what were they thinking what were the people receiving it thinking it was really interesting so there's a ton of interesting stuff out there there really is so when I was in high school I kind of known that I was going to be going down the stem I was really interested in that so career wise and as you mentioned right once you're in university studying stem field it's real busy you get a lot of courses a lot of challenging courses so when I was in high school I chose to take every culinary course that was offered at the high school I really liked to eat my parents were wonderful but the cooking was not really their forte and some of my friends parents were like I knew that was a skill that I wanted for myself and it ended up not only paying off for being able to cook for myself but throughout college actually high school and college and then even for a little while before I went back to grad school I worked in restaurants so I was able to always get jobs wherever I was living as a line cook met some fantastic really interesting people in those careers and it was just one of those things where like opportunities for second chances I was in the food and beverage industry thinking maybe this is actually a career I said no I don't think so I'm going to pursue education but having those skills and things like that and experiences has definitely been wonderful so yeah definitely my favorite classes were my cooking class so my favorite class came way after my baccalaureate degree at the Davis Center from Los Rios they have this wonderful community college satellite out here on the west side in the village and it was ancient art history and I mean a lot of things because I had a psych background and you know more counseling human services but literally the ancient art history it exposed me to like the architecture of ancient Egypt right and some of the incredible engineering solutions that the ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks and even let's go over to you know Mesoamerica at the same time in parallel you had well formal pre-Incan civilizations who were creating Pukios so Pukio is like a it's an aqueduct right it brings water to the surface but these people were in the Nazca desert which is still the most arid region on earth and these people literally had designed aqueducts that could bring water to the surface grow enough food for their massive civilizations these things still work today I mean most of the cesarean aqueducts can't claim that these things still work today and so I became really interested in technology essentially but technology is created by the ancients I started to feel a little disgruntled about how it is that you know modern engineering believes that it leans on only Greek and Roman for the most part western European and well Greek and Roman origins but we have a lot of incredible technological history in other populations and civilizations that have been kind of systematically by curriculum left out and I'm really interested in bringing those technologies back and I still to this day can never understand why Egyptology is a British discipline it's almost like they grabbed Egypt and they're like oh yeah but Egypt that's not Africa no that's Africa that's what I'm saying so that kind of stuff is interesting to me and that really kind of jazzed up my counseling that I provided in the engineering field so then working with students from some of these backgrounds it was like hey did you know that ten generations ago the people were making these very very advanced technologies, astronomy astronomical inventions and all kinds of mathematical solutions to the natural world around us that now we're asked and I think that we should embrace and give credit where credit is due for yeah well I'm sorry my favorite class was Calculus Math, Calculus Math Calculus Math I mean when I was in college I was like okay N and A in Calculus all through college, all through high school that was my easy A English was horrible actually took Shakespeare to avoid writing papers but I mean yeah Math is noted alright so what is something that's most important in your life and what drives you no doubt a daughter like you I have two daughters and this young lady is amazing you know the moms here there's no doubt your girls, your kids are the most important thing that drives you and that's why your moms brought you here today am I right? They want you to learn a little bit yeah so at the top of my list would be a young lady like you, my two daughters they are my joy that's why I do all that we do and being at Davis campus it's a lot of work a lot of meetings, a lot of things actually I'm doing an interview tonight at Mondavi Center this is part one of a part two but my life is so busy but I'm happiest when I'm with my girls I don't know I like being here and I like being busy I don't have kids you don't have to have kids so I mean I like being here and I like being so busy I like you know lots of students and being able to give something to them and I like creating things that didn't exist before it's exciting you know exactly look at it that way I was going to say I don't have biological children but I always joke that I have 162 kids this year and that will change it's not going to tell me years but yeah so I think what's motivating me right now is and I think it has in the past right is seeing what can we do to make this world better right it sounds cheesy but that's initially why I got into so I studied biology in college and I love the outdoors and so I was always thinking what can we do to conserve the natural resources our forests and all those kinds of things and I worked for the Forest Service for a number of years kind of you know of my hands in it like really doing the science and doing some of those things which was phenomenal but I also felt like you know it's the next generation and passing that enthusiasm that passion on was going to be where I could have the biggest impact but then when I got into it I still love teaching biology and I love teaching general science I was noticing both the need for a more technologically literate generation to come up and help us and also the lack of educators particularly at the middle school and high school level like the lack of teachers that were teaching those skills because there's this gap between educators but most of us didn't have a chance to take a lot of computer science courses or if we had the opportunity it wasn't prioritized and so now we have a lot of teachers today who are lacking confidence in teaching that kind of subject matter because so every day I go into my classroom I'm pretty confident that I am not the expert in the room on whatever it is that we're learning related to CS it's very different in my biology class in my general science class the students with the computer science they've done some self learning or they've got this concept and boom they're going with it and I love that and that gets me excited every day in the classroom when it's me going around saying hey that's a cool thing how'd you do that or when somebody asks me for help and I say I don't know let's figure this out and then we go through that process and the kids are able to come up with these really amazing solutions why did I want to be a teacher of tech science awesome it is fun so I've always brought in a little bit I took one computer science class as an undergraduate it was an intro to computer science so I had a little bit of a background and when I worked in the Forest Service because I had that little bit of confidence just that little bit but I knew at least I don't remember exactly what I learned in that class but what I do know is that I came out of that class with the confidence that if something goes wrong on my computer I can figure out how to fix it but before a service I thought I was just going to be going out there I worked as a botanist so identifying plants and it turned out they needed support with their mapping software and so they asked to the department is anybody interested in learning this and I said yeah that seems interesting and I have confidence in myself to be able to learn that technology so I went out and did it and it led to some great opportunities so as I was teaching general science I had a lot of students asking me hey can we do computer science? I really like to code but I also noticed there was a pretty significant gap that there was some students who asked me about coding and who asked me about computer science and who knew a lot about it but there were a lot of students who didn't ask me about it and a lot of students who never had that exposure early on so I felt like I could make a big difference by being a person to offer those opportunities to the entire school population and get more kids interested in it in the beginning and the classroom itself it's like it's really fun it's just a problem solving course and the kids get really excited about it so as a teacher I can feed off that energy each day so what do I like about technology? was that the question? the question was what's the most important thing in your life oh most important thing in my life right now is this election specifically it's truly and I'm glad we've got some high schoolers in here it's getting young people engaged in the political process getting their voice on it's massive voter registration drives no matter who you pick I'm just looking for your generations to start to define what's important how long we're going to think about it and what we're going to do about it because we failed I'm going to be true you all will be inheriting this planet which is skating on thin ice right? you all will be inheriting this globally tense set of conflicts that we our generations have created or maybe not done enough to solve and fix to prepare a way for you all to thrive this is where engineering and technology comes in so what I invite you to think about for the rest of your of your primary and secondary schooling and then as you pick a major and go off to college and I know you all will I don't think it's a question of if it's going to be when and where y'all should you don't have to necessarily know what you're passionate about and so sometimes when I'm coaching pre-college students I don't lead with that question or if I do and it's falling flat because who knows what they're passionate about at 16 they may not know yet I say something like well what outrages you you're looking around this world I know you see stuff in this world that you're not satisfied with or that might give you some fear in the future these are also good points of departure things you're passionate about and things that outrage you that you're not satisfied with that you can leverage the blessings of a higher education to make impact and change you know what I mean so let both of your curiosity or all of your curiosities your passions if you know what they are yet and also what really dissatisfies and outrages you maybe even makes you afraid like meet those things in their face and do something you know what I mean like leverage your education to make change so that you can hand a better world to your next generation alright thanks my next question is what do you like to do in your free time but I do like to travel I've been all over the world I've just named a place I haven't had experiences like that I think travel removes bigotry so if you have any predispositions about cultures and women and this and that and who's this just travel the world and just open your eyes up and expose you to different things and I'm talking anywhere third world countries not just your Paris, Italy but just go to Peru somewhere fun but anyway I like to travel yeah I agree I like to travel and one of the great things about being at a university is that you get to travel a lot you know and you know some corporate jobs are like that too you know if that's your thing you know you can get paid to do it which is great yeah I think other than that I'm mostly kind of a home body person I've always been in my mom and I like to work in the yard and stuff like that I mean I do sports things because it's important it is important to be fit it's true but so free time I guess I'd say an outdoors enthusiast so snowboarding is my biggest thing in the wintertime and hiking and camping all the time up in the hills, up in the Sierras whenever I get a chance I think for me it's road trips with my dog and my husband we take advantage of being here in Davis it's often been said like Davis that's in the middle of nowhere and I'm like no Davis is at the center of everything you know we're 90 minutes to that beautiful lake and 90 minutes to that beautiful sea and 90 minutes to I think the best city in the west with all the cultural and civic opportunities we could possibly jump into in San Francisco 20 minutes from Sacramento so there is a lot of day-trip travel to experience nature and then also what we've all created here in beautiful northern California culturally, artistically geographically everything and then travel abroad like you so we don't get away a lot but now my husband and I have made it a goal just once a year to go somewhere radically different and just go without expectation but curiosity and just plop ourselves in and watch, listen, learn and jump in and like you say it does reduce it transforms your worldview it really does we think we know so many things we travel to different places and then having that frame of reference when I'm in the middle of maybe like a blind spot I'll be like oh yeah but there are people on the other side of the world right now thinking about this differently and solving this differently or you know yeah I just love the concept of like all the places that I've that I've ventured to like they still exist inspired by what the present moment holds like oh yeah but there's like McDonald I've been Glacier National Park and then I start thinking about it and my heart starts beating it so great so I would say like travel, try to get around try to go do and see things so that you have that just that experience I'll actually add one more thing too and that is just in general in my free time like learning new things so taking whatever opportunities so I read a lot of books and go down weird rabbit holes into a lot of podcasts now because it's just a great way to like consume information right and learning different things whether they're related to my current field or just something that I'm interested in I also love to travel it's just something that for me when I travel somewhere find somewhere like when I went to Ireland we just shadowed a I basically interviewed a director for a movie Cartoon Saloon that was directing such a beautiful well-made film called The Breadwinner if any of you heard about it it's about a girl who basically helps her family out and it was I always find a way when I'm traveling how to put that in what my future career might be and it's always interesting taking different viewpoints of different cities see just their style of just innovation so lastly my other last question is if I could have asked you any other question what would have been yeah if I could have asked you any question what would it be and after that they will ask you any questions too these questions before yeah yeah yeah yes so one that seems good is like what did you wish that you knew when you were in high school or junior high that's a boy and I gotta say like I mentioned that I was a real you know fantasy fan you know I was like often my own little world and it never really occurred to me that I was gonna grow up and so it took quite a while to figure out you know where exactly I was gonna fit into the world and I think at the time I wish that I had spent not a lot but like a little bit more attention at the time to you know sort of what the adult world was around me and thinking about the fact that there was a future you know it's very hard when you're a young person and you've got your high school world it's very hard to think outside that box and the next thing you know you're gonna be like booted out of that box and you're gonna have to face it one question that I always get is how did I balance a career with a husband with his job and my kids are somewhat normal and then the other question I get is how am I making a difference for the future women in the world so those are two questions that I always get and I already talked about earlier how I made sure I hired more girl software developers and try to increase those numbers but if you choose to get married or not get to choose to get married or have kids or no have kids you just go day by day I always tell people it wasn't like oh I have this you know plan and this and we're gonna do this by their 12 and da da da da da it's just getting through each day and trying to figure out the course and my girls are different I have one girl who's very high maintenance and none of you girls are like that she likes certain fashion things she likes to eat sushi and then have another girl who likes Chick-fil-A and so when you have different girls that's the way you know and you don't treat all I didn't treat my kids different in that regard but different personalities change that and then you know it's good for me I had a good network my mom was around me so she kind of helped me so grandparents if you have to spend time with them but my mom was a big help so anyway I guess one thing that I don't even know is that my sisters and two of them have had a career change and both of them have gone from one was a social worker the other one studied linguistics and both of them have changed careers and are now in tech and like doing really really well and loving it so my youngest sister who I still call my baby sister she's 22 now but she was 12 years younger so she was one who studied linguistics and took one programming class in order to to study the whatever she was studying in her field and was like wow this is just like solving puzzles all day and I think she's got that feeling of never feels like she works a day in her life and right out of college she was hired by the city she works in city hall now she makes more than all of her older siblings you know with her four year degree and they're just like really happy with it my other sister after she had her second child was like I need more flexibility in my life she worked as a social worker for a school district in inner city st. Louis and so she's like I love this job I'm super passionate about it but I need to have more time with my kids and she went to one of those coding boot camps so she did it online as she was working developed some skills and now she's got job offers rolling in that are going to allow her opportunities to work from home some days so um yeah I don't know what the question was that would have brought that out but my little sisters are awesome and kind of just examples of like women in tech and that idea of I guess in their middle school and their high school years they would have never thought of themselves in the roles that they currently find themselves now but that there are those opportunities just throw one more thing in there calculus not to take it but the fact is that you know the fact is it opens up a lot of doors for you so even though you know in your high school mindset you know the importance of calculus is really not clear it opens up a lot of doors further on and so it's it's good to take it absolutely and I will say to add to that too though you've got to learn to walk before you run so if you go and look at a calculus textbook can you think about that and it's not quite there yet don't think because you don't get calculus today that you can't get into the STEM careers right like I so that idea take calculus, take the math they are more fascinating the deeper you get into them but there is a learning career of everyone why am I learning these things right and then all of a sudden it opens up and you can see how it makes these real connections to the world around you but also if it's this moment like know that over time you can dive into these things and yeah we have people who didn't take it in high school and then took it in junior college or we have people who didn't take it in junior college and took it when they came to UC Davis as a junior I mean it's something you have second chances with again but it's something you have the opportunity to do right here in high school so I'm glad you both brought that up I guess what I wouldn't know how to phrase the question but I would say that something important to keep in mind is don't think that if you're an 11th or 12th grader and you may not have all the college prep down with perfect grades that it's over and that you can't do you know I mean so I'm a big I'm a product and I'm a fan of the community college transfer pathway so I invite all of you to examine what that is and what that looks like the idea that if you don't have the money or you may not have the course completions and the four year eligibility by the time you're 17 or 18 and a senior you can happily go to your nearby community college which is a phenomenal lower division education arguably delivered better than we do here at UC Davis no offense Mina but in the lower division you've got your calc and your physics and your cs1 and all of these kind of baseline freshman requirements that we would be requiring our fresh engineering students to take here and you would take them in parallel at the community college with like 30 people in the classroom a teacher that isn't completely sidetracked with research or overwhelmed with a lot more commitments than just teaching you and teaching you calculus in a way that you get it and you're not weeded out of a 400 person lecture tank but it's more vertical than these seats do you know what I'm saying so know that that education those first two years at a community college has taken on the transfer pathway are identical to the academic challenges we'd be giving to our undergrads here as fresh and sophomores and if you for any reason don't have the bio maturational readiness the money or whatever the ability is or the you know for your college eligibility out of your senior year you can have a blank slate at a community college and start over and explore it in a much cheaper lower risk environment but that's not to bag on UC Davis because I ultimately transferred here and it was awesome but I just want everybody to keep in mind that you know going from the senior year right into that freshman year out of four year institution is not for everybody and it actually doesn't really happen for most students even out of UC Davis excuse me Davis Hire DaVinci it isn't maybe at DaVinci I don't know I'm sorry I don't want to speak for DaVinci stats but you know or any of the other high schools you stem from community college is an awesome and available open access pathway it's you're in the door there's no grilling of you to walk on a community college campus and get in like there's no qualification that you have to meet except for having finished high school or have a GED okay so don't give up it's never too late and like he said it is never too late if you have a passion or it curiosity about stem or you want to leverage stem training to you know solve one of these things that outages you like the cancer rates the dirty water the air you know I mean the things that we're facing with sea rise the capitalist markets that are crushing some of us beneath their boot so there's so many fields that technology can apply to and make change in don't ever give up if you decide you want to be that change maker and you'll find your path okay good alright so I just want to know if there's any quick additional questions we're getting close to three so is there any really quick questions anyone has otherwise I'll move on to our next segment alright I will move on to our next segment we so I'd like to thank all of you for speaking over here it was really insightful and it was a really awesome experience and I would also want to thank all of you for your attention and participation that was really lovely so we will be heading outdoors shortly on the patio in front of this building for reception in addition to today's speakers we have four women from the UC Davis gender equity in IT group will be available for you to talk being the reception so could they please stand up and say hi when I call out their names Kyra Dunn Kyra Dunn okay okay uh Punit Gil is a masters in computer science from Sac State and works on electronic medical records at UC Davis Health Yana Yana works in information technology applications at UC Davis Health Amy Slavish Amy works in computer and network management on the UC Davis Health's electronic health records and billing team so I hope I've learned a lot today from amazing speakers and I hope you guys did too and so we can all head outside now for the concluding part of this event. Thank you