I didn't start studying computer science until college,
which I think is really common for a lot of us.
And I almost took a programming class in high school,
but a girlfriend of mine had said,
"You know, nobody takes that class,
it's just a bunch of dudes."
And so I said, "Okay",
and then I took something else with her.
And then my freshman year at the UW
I took a computer science class.
And it took maybe two weeks I think
before I changed my major
and wanted to study that.
Well, in high school I had a teacher
who was my math teacher,
and she'd gone to a convention
and seen these things called computers.
Apple had just come out with their Apple II,
so she went to the principal of the school,
it was an all-girls school,
headed by a nun, and said, "We need to get some of these
for the girls," and so she succeeded
in getting about a dozen computers.
And she just asked a bunch of us in math class,
it was an all-girl school, "So do you wanna do this thing?
We can make it really fun".
And so a bunch of us signed up.
And so I didn't have the thing
about okay, were guys better than me or not.
It was just a bunch of girls
and we were just coding away.
And then I got in college, and not very many women
in my freshman class, and
almost none my sophomore year.
And so I just got used to that in college,
I was there for three years just basically
being in classes with males,
I mean that's just kinda what you did,
and yeah, so I got hooked.
You know, it's not like it came naturally
to me immediately, but the fact that it was kinda
challenging for me I thought was really fun,
and so I kinda kept at it and it felt really rewarding
I think, because of that.
I spent a summer, a week of my summer,
at the UW DawgBytes camp, which is like just
a week to introduce girls to coding.
And I fell in love with it because it's the perfect balance
of creativity and logic.
I can't draw for my life,
(group laughs)
but you can create a lot of things just with code.
Tell us more about TUNE House and what it does for you,
and the community of support,
and we'd just love to hear more about that.
The TUNE House is a program where I guess eight
of us are coming together who are interested
in pursuing tech, and it's a scholarship program
where we live in this space.
Sometimes in tech it's difficult for us
to share our stories of failure as well as success.
And this space has been really important for that,
having that discussion.
Kind of just having that time to think about what went wrong
and discuss what went wrong and how we can improve,
in addition to celebrating each other's successes,
which is equally important.
But having that balance, and having the really friendly
and open and safe space to do that
has been really important.
Yeah, it's interesting you use the word safe.
Cause that's what a lot of women will talk to you about
in something, anything they're trying to pursue that's hard,
having a safe space to do it in, right?
Makes a huge difference
to feeling like you can move forward
and that you're supported.
And who are some of your role models?
Actually a lot of my role models were astronauts,
so Kalpana Chawla,
Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin,
so all these people that were so brave
and they went to space
and just having that sort of
I'm pushing the boundaries of what can be done
and literally pushing the boundaries of
what can be done on Earth.
So just having that idea in the back of your head growing up
was really.
You know it's interesting so my dad worked on
the very earliest Apollo missions
like when they landed
(group laughing)
on the moon, he was an engineer that
they worked on radiators actually for the Apollo mission,
so as a little girl
he would take my sister and me and my mom
and we'd go in our pajamas to his friend's house,
who's also an engineer across town
and we'd all wait and wait by the black and white set
to watch the rocket,
of course you know it would take longer and longer
and I'd fall asleep and they'd wake me up for it,
but I think that idea that engineering and mathematics
is boundless, that you could put a man on the moon, right?
Cause then when I got into software,
that was what interested me so much
when I came and interviewed for the job at Microsoft
is they were creating something new that didn't exist.
They knew they were changing the world,
cause they're making something that doesn't exist.
And same thing when you all create a new app today, right
or any new thing that you're doing,
you're expanding the possibilities, which is pretty neat.
How important was it that quite a few of the TAs
and professors are women?
Like had it been all male TAs and all male professors,
would that have been a different experience you think?
Most likely,
actually the professor that I have for the first
class in the series, Riley Porter,
she was amazing and I looked up to her
and just seeing how successful she was,
even at such a young age was really inspiring to me.
And so Melinda, what would be
your biggest piece of advice to these
upcomings.
Stick with it.
(group laughing)
The possibilities are so endless in this field,
I mean what you can create from neural networks
to machine learning, to biology and chemistry,
to you know some new app that'll change somebody's life,
wow, just keep going.
If I was starting over again
I would definitely go into tech again, no doubt about it.
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