How I Grew from a Little Girl to a Software Engineer
In January 2019, I posted the Chinese version of this article and received more than 1 million views. Many people have been telling me that they found my story inspiring. This time I am sharing it in English and hope you enjoy reading it.
Hi everyone, here is my personal story that I long wanted to tell — about dreams, reality, and self-realization.
When I was a little girl back in China, I saw my mom using Adobe Flash to create animation at her office. It intrigued me and I memorized the steps. I made an animation on her computer when she left, and she was surprised to see my cute Star Wars production with rainbow aircraft. My mom sensed my passion and signed me up for a programming class. Many years later, I heard that she wanted to major in computer science in college but was told to become a teacher instead. As her daughter, I carried her dream.
In the programming class, I learned Visual Basic. The teacher would showcase, line by line, how to write a program. I liked to go to the bookstore reading programming books and taking notes. I self-studied ActionScript and Java in high school and enjoyed making computer games in my spare time. For my Super Mario game, I wrote a detailed design, drew UML diagrams representing the inheritance relationship, and followed a timeline to complete the project.
While my public high school in the US only taught Microsoft Word and Excel, the college opened a new door for me. Studying at Washington University in St. Louis, I realized that computer science was not just about programming but many intriguing topics to explore. I learned to use Google to search for documentation of the frameworks and to use websites like Stack Overflow to solve technical problems. I was thirsty to learn, like a kid who just learned how to walk and wanted to explore the world of computer science.
Looking for an internship, I submitted hundreds of resumes and yet did not hear back. At the career fair, I went to almost every booth. The recruiter looked at my resume in doubt and asked why I wanted to work at the bank while having so many game-related projects. I quickly answered that I believed my game development experience demonstrated my programming skills. He was persuaded and thus accepted my resume. Thus I got my first internship in college working as a QA at the bank.
My sophomore year of college turned out to be tough. I had three part-time jobs and seven classes at the same time. When I heard about the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC), the largest women's gathering in computing, I still decided to go. To save on hotel fees, I got up at 3 am to catch the flight. I was a bit late for the opening keynote and, as I walked into the stadium, the speaker on the stage already started talking about the future of artificial intelligence.
A few minutes later, the speaker turned her head and said that she was originally from China. She recalled that, when she was sixteen, her whole world was turned upside down. Her family moved to the US and she had to self-study English while helping in her parents’ dry-cleaning shop. Dr. Feifei Li! I was so excited that I almost cried. Moving to the US at a similar age to restart life, I found her story so relatable and told myself to become a cool person like her in the future.
The conference was so inspiring that I wrote in my diary:
I was confused at first, feeling that I could not contribute much as a young woman and that my ambitions might be too big compared to my strengths. Through the three-day conference, I realized that I was afraid of potential not being discovered and efforts not being rewarded. Nevertheless, I am now assured that I will have someone to take the journey together and someone to guide my way through difficulties. Hope that one day, I will have strong skills and a strong heart.
The same semester, I fell in love with the theory of computation. In my Advanced Programming class, my professor would award extra points to students who were the first to solve a question in the problem sets. One of the questions was so hard that even my master's and Ph.D. classmates were not able to solve it. When I submitted a workable solution, my professor was surprised to find out I was only a college sophomore. Later, he wrote me a recommendation letter and I transferred to Columbia.
After I moved to New York, a friend of mine encouraged me to apply to Google. She helped revise my resume through several drafts and gave me an employee referral. Weeks later, I got interviewed on algorithms and object-oriented design and, surprisingly, they were not as hard as I thought. All the things I did from years of passion suddenly helped me out like magic. That afternoon after the interviews, I felt like I was in a dream. A few weeks later, I received an offer from my dream company to work as a software engineer.
Countless times, I heard my relatives and teachers saying that science was too hard and that we girls should study art and literature instead. Throughout these years, there were moments when I questioned my abilities. I always felt the pressure to perform well so I could prove of girls until one day I heard about the Tiara Syndrome — many women tend to believe that, after making some great achievement on their career path, people around them will eventually recognize their abilities. That day, however, would never come — the crown does not come from others but themselves.
Everyone, regardless of gender, race, or age, should have equal opportunities to pursue their dreams.
