by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

Anecdotally, a lot of the men I know in science/tech/math have been interested in these fields since grade school; by the time they got to college, they’d already taken some advanced classes and were ready to major in these subjects. And while there are certainly plenty of women I know who were on math team in high school (or something similar), I also know a lot of women who realized they were interested in these fields later in life, after they’d already studied a non-technical field in college, and took a less traditional path to learning about it; some of them are self-taught in technical fields, and some of them are going back to school to learn more about their newfound interests.

My story is sort of in between. I’d always been somewhat interested in computers, but never really learned any programming. In my third year of college, when I was already well on my way to a linguistics degree, I decided that since I was interested in computational linguistics and natural language processing in particular (at the time I thought I’d go to grad school for linguistics), I’d benefit from taking an intro to computer science course. I decided I was up for the challenge of the honors level of the course; even though technically no programming experience was required, I assumed I was starting from behind. And indeed, the guys in the class (out of the 20-some-student class, I was one of two girls) projected an air of confidence and experience, and I felt like I was struggling to keep up with the assignments.

I was surprised, then, when at the end of the quarter, I had one of the highest grades in the class! (This made me wonder if some of the more experienced students had been overconfident and hadn’t worked as hard — I also think it helped that we were learning Scheme, which isn’t something many high school hobbyists pick up on their own :P) I’d also discovered that I loved programming, and started taking classes toward a computer science minor — which quickly turned into squishing a full computer science major into my last two years of college, and deciding I’d rather become a programmer than go to grad school. Since then, my web development skills have been mostly self-taught, though the programming I learned in college certainly gave me a head-start on that.

How did you first get interested in STEM? When and how did you start training in your field (if you’ve done that yet — or how do you plan to)? Share your story in the comments!