This post has been written by Jessica, 16 who attended our #BeepBoopForChange Hackathon on 4th March, in celebration of International Women’s Day 2017. It was hosted by Stemettes partner, Salesforce.org.
On the 5th of March 2017, my life changed.
I found a new career path, new friends, and a lifelong experience. In full closure, I can officially say that recalling the events which happened that day has opened my eyes to new possibilities in the STEM areas. Alongside my sister and some amazing bright sparks managed to solve riddles, complicated math questions, answer questions about Mendeleev’s wonderful periodic table and of course, eat our way through the building due to the array of Dominoes pizzas stacked up along the floor above the ceiling in which withheld genius FEMALE minds who managed to programme a robot to accomplish a writing task in which takes years of human practice until it is achieved.
We all can achieve amazing things, whether you are male/female, young or old, big or small; however cliché it sounds, it’s possible and the Stemettes Hackathon has managed to promote complete equality in today’s 21st-century society to help achieve that. We are now at a time in society in which we need to start forming bonds by creating exothermic reactions by giving out our love for technology and science and the only way to do this is by promoting women in STEM careers so that our workplace stays diverse and for everyone passionate about STEM subjects to be able to share this mutual love for all things out of this diverse universe. STEMETTES are like a catalyst, lowering the activation energy required to allow more opportunities for women in STEM career paths and it’s up to us as intellectuals to allow that to happen by sharing our knowledge and experience in one giant covalent bond. Let us share the best element in ourselves with those who work well with us, just with different properties.
“The distance between us cannot be measured in parsecs but in knowledge, because we need to build that bridge to unite with the other side.”
Images from this momentous day are now up on the Stemettes Flickr. Thanks go to itis3D for lending us the robotic Dobot arms and to Kano & Emotion Robots for supporting us with demos.
We run hackathons throughout the year – they are listed on our home page but you’ll hear about them first via our mailing list. Want to host a young woman like Jessica at an event? – drop TeamStemette a note.
