I always think it’s weird that more girls aren’t encouraged to go into STEAM careers. And then I remembered the fact that I grew up in a very different household from most of the other girls in my generation.
I put emphasis on STEAM and not STEM because that is the kind of household we had. STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math) is a much more “Renaissance” way of looking at it. It’s well-rounded. So well-rounded in fact that the phrase “Renaissance Woman” was used in every single one of my college recommendation letters.
Growing up I had parents who had both graduated from college with Computer Science degrees and minors in Electrical Engineering. My dad had even met Dr. Grace Hopper when she came to their university to give a lecture. My favorite museum in the whole world was my local science museum, and the summer camps and classes that stuck with me the best were all at that science museum. It was almost like being a part of the Maker Movement before Maker Camps existed. I watched Jack Hanna and Bill Nye the Science Guy with religiosity and asked for microscopes and chemistry sets for Christmas. In third grade, my classroom teacher had a husband who worked in animal rehabilitation. Science became an ever lasting love that year. I loved getting my hands dirty in marsh mud and samples.
Music was also essential. We were required to learn one instrument through the school system and we also had to learn piano. (My chosen instrument in elementary school was clarinet.) We had to be in band through middle school and participate in some music group through high school. On top of all of that, I was also enrolled in ballet. My sister went the way of art. She is now a practicing artist who sells her work around the world. Both of us took art classes in various mediums both through school and through the local art museum. Understanding mathematics through visualization and sound are tremendously helpful.
Part of our fortuity came from the fact that we grew up near a large city that had access to all of these things. It’s a fun part of going back there that I can visit places and know the weird quirks and the unknown cafeterias that most visitors don’t know about. It’s like giving an exclusive tour of the secrets of museums to friends because I know so many of them.
But that’s not the important part of why I’m writing this blog post. The important part is where we get back to my original statement.
It’s weird that more girls aren’t encouraged to go into STEAM careers.
I think I may have also hit the generational line just right. There was something about growing up in the 90s that just seemed to scream “WOMEN IN TECH” as opposed to the early 2000s, when for some reason we started regressing again. I mean, we had Clarissa Explains It All in the 90s.
I am also just unafraid of being the only girl. I actually take pride in it sometimes. I was often one of the few girls in my college computer science classes. I was the only girl in one C++ programming class I took at the science museum growing up. I was brought along when my dad taught a C++ class at a local college at the age of five and there were hardly any women in that either, so perhaps I just got used to the idea really early. Dad also used to bring me on business trips – I suppose I must have been well-behaved enough for this – and it introduced me to tech that I wouldn’t see available to homes until much later. I would get excited about the prospect of these technologies.
I am often asked why I decided not to get my undergraduate degree in technology. It’s an extremely complicated question, but it starts with one foundational idea.
When I first though about getting a degree in computer science, I was only doing it because that’s what my parents had their degree in.
I also decided that I likely knew a lot of what they were going to teach me anyway, so why bother? I wanted to learn about something I didn’t already know about. That is the point of college, isn’t it?
Now, of course, that line of thinking has bitten me in the foot a few times. And while I’m quite sure I never really wanted to work at IBM in the first place, they wouldn’t even talk to me at a college job fair once because I hadn’t majored in any of the STEM fields. I still argue that this is the worst mistake they could have possibly made (even if I didn’t want to work for them) because my resume is absolutely covered in technological literacy that surpasses a good majority of my generation.
A similar occurrence happened during an interview for an administrative assistant position at Hewlett-Packard. I have a lot of retail experience mixed in with my tech experience. Most of that was choice because I am still very much an active dancer, and my retail position was as high as I was going to get with a local dance store. Because of the retail background, they didn’t take me seriously when I said I had an extensive background in computers and could pick up any program with relative ease. They decided to hire someone else as a result. I heard through the grapevine later that the candidate they did hire ended up not working out because they had no clue how to edit documents on a word processing program. That was a major requirement of the job, and a fairly simple aspect of it in comparison to some of the other requirements. But by then I had decided I didn’t want the job anyway – I had just applied and gotten in to graduate school.
Now I’m heading into education – and guess what – I’m going to be a social studies teacher who might actually assign coding projects. Or at least put them out there as an option. Coding has become more accessible these days through sites such as CODEcademy. And even better, there are groups like #GirlsWhoCode who are encouraging more girls into the STEAM fields. And yes – if a student (no matter their gender) comes to me asking for help with learning to code, I will be the teacher who helps them learn and shows them how to learn more when I don’t have the answers and lends them my most recent copies of programming books.
That’s how I learned.