I Am the Girl That STEM Lost
Before we become women in tech, we’re girls who are interested in tech
I’ve been fascinated by computers since I was at least 12 years old.
I was a homeschooled kid. I had a lot of opportunity to study topics that engaged me. With encouragement and support from my parents, I grew into an autodidact before I even knew the meaning of the word. I disassembled discarded PCs my dad would bring home from work, taking components out of one machine and installing them into another to see if they would function as intended. I was always working toward creating the perfect Frankensteined computer.
I checked out a book from the library about how to build your own PC, and I read every word. I also read dozens of books on HTML and XHTML. I spent hours hand-coding simple websites in Notepad and comparing the rendered results between Internet Explorer and Firefox. I sent away for 10 copies of Ubuntu, but never successfully got the CD boot function to work on my late ’90s model hand-me-down PC.
One of my favorite books I read over and over was Hacker Cracker by Ejovi Nuwere and David Chanoff, an autobiographical tale of teenage Nuwere’s “journey from the mean streets of Brooklyn to the frontiers of cyberspace.” It was chock-full of danger, excitement, and a certain kind of power in the…
