Girls In CS Panel

Today the CSA classroom had a panel regarding WISTEM (Women In Science Technology Engineering Math) and today there were a few college students coming to present their experiences. Many seemed to be from Purdue and one of the panelists spoke of how there was an event where people around the world had the opportunity to meet people at Perdue and give them resumes as they can evaluate how they can improve their selves. Another panelist spoke of dedication to what someone does in an issue and showing off work to someone in an executive position has value, and by proxy, increases how valuable you are. There was a focus on agile methodology and visualizing the process in which someone does work. This takes forms in things like UML (Unified Modeling Language) and draw.io to draw flowcharts as programs can be large to visaulize, and planning is just generally important. It also matters in the context of both the development team and also the end users in which use case diagrams become more important. One of the panelists had experience as a Northrop Grumman intern and how the skills our class in CSA are the same skills hiring and admissions officers are impressed by like working with Git or team managment.

Technical Skills

The panelists spoke of how they made coding projects such as a Dijkstra’s algorithm simulation in Python and used the SCRUM based workflow in a team. They also spoke of how in college they went to various hackathons that felt like the projects in the CSA class but on a faster scale. The point on using modeling was further reestablished as for the Dijkstra algorithm, almost all of it was labeled out in a flow chart with labels and writing which file is needed per step. Furthermore, in one of their classes they had to write of how they need to cmment every line in their codebase otherwise they would have their points docked.
There was a strong promotion of using LinkedIn for resources and opportunities and to take more chances as “you’ll never know where you’ll go without trying it”. Their mindset on what choices to make are also choices that I strongly agree with, being to get a feeling for what you enjoy and to do things because you’re passionate about them and not because you want to put them on a college application. linkedin for resources. It’s important if computer science is something I want to fully persue, to fully invest into my CSA class and give it my all.

College Applications

The following tips were for how they got into their colleges and what advice they’d give us

  • look at the university for what specifics they require
  • take community college courses, two of one of the panelist's roommates had associates degrees before entering
  • in terms of jobs, they don't care too much on your GPA so much as your skills and your projects
  • Extracurricular's such as developing websites, Science Olympiad, CyberPatriot, and just do things that you have a genuine passion for

After they gave some tips for college away, they offered a few other tips about general computer science. It’s great to do LeetCode problems to be ready for interviews, how computer science has applications in almost every field, and how LinkedIn is important, and to make frequent updates on it for possible job offers.