A new book has come out describing why some women do get into computers and how information is useful to getting more women in the field. That made me think about how I got here.
Two factors started me on the path to a career in computing: education and opportunity.
Given an affinity for math and science, I went to a small college with the plan to get an general engineering degree and then build underwater cities. I’d taken calculus in high school (a giant school where very few graduates went to college). In my freshman year in college, I was taking the college level calculus and acing derivatives. But then we got to this flattened S symbol that I had never seen.
Physics, chemistry, even biology and psychology, were all much harder until I learned integration (and I never gained the same level of confidence). But intro to computer science? That was blissfully easy compared every other class I was taking: I could understand it just by thinking like an idiot (and I felt like an idiot a lot given the math situation).
I know computers aren’t easy for everyone. I don’t know if they would have been easy for me if I hadn’t been doing so poorly in everything else. But I was so computers were comparatively simple and a welcome refuge.
Anyway, around the end of the semester, since I’d done well in intro CS, I was able to take a work study job as a student consultant to the CS department, helping the system admins by answering common questions and leaving the serious problems to the CS staff members (juniors and seniors doing work study). I stayed with it, eventually becoming part of the admin staff and learning to take care of a variety of unix systems (and manage the front-line question-answering consultants).
I kept going back to systems engineering (how can I hate integration but love Fourier?). However, CS jobs were more prevalent, particularly given my shiny new resume with experience of sys admin and some odd programming jobs for math and chem professors. The systems engineering math has been awesome for embedded software (motor control and signal processing!) so I got what I needed, more than I expected, much more than I knew to ask for.
I’d still love to work on underwater cities. But I bet they’d have microprocessors so I’m good.
