When I walked into my first computer science class in freshman year, I had no idea I'd fall in love. At the time, I held about as much interest in and knowledge about computers as the average teenager. My initial trepidation was only compounded by the discovery that I was one of only three girls in a room filled with males, most of whom already had programming experience. I felt somehow that I was already behind on the first day.
But as I moved past the confusion and frustration of coding and debugging my first Java programs, I found that the process had grown on me like climbing ivy. With each class and every successful program, I was more overcome with a sense of the limitless possibility that programming skill entailed. I felt that given my faculty for logical thought and by amassing enough knowledge, no creative challenge I devised or software problem I discovered would be insurmountable.
Although schedule conflicts prevented me from taking more computer science classes until senior year, that initial spark of interest compelled me to continue exploring computer science outside of school. I honed my programming skill and expanded my reportoire of languages by learning Python and delving into front-end and server-side web development. Through an after-school program at Columbia College, I also gained valuable exposure to circuitry, robotics, and artificial intelligence. These learning experienced converged, producing an intense curiosity about the theoretical underpinnings of the programming languages and concepts I use regularly and a certainty that I should pursue a degree and career in computer science.
Going forward, I aspire to utilize the abundant research and educational opportunities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the pursuit of my passion and the advancement of the field, and to encouragement of others in underrepresented groups to do the same.
I wanted to mention that I'm also black, which made me feel even more alone in my freshman class (and in the classes I'm now taking) because I've always been either the only black person there or the only black female, and I always got the sense that certain people were talking down to me or assuming that I didn't know what I was talking about even though my answers were usually correct. I would say something and people would disagree or doubt it, but then someone else would say essentially the same thing and they'd all agree.
How can I express this without it seeming forced/like I'm just trying to make myself a more desirable candidate by being a URM?
But as I moved past the confusion and frustration of coding and debugging my first Java programs, I found that the process had grown on me like climbing ivy. With each class and every successful program, I was more overcome with a sense of the limitless possibility that programming skill entailed. I felt that given my faculty for logical thought and by amassing enough knowledge, no creative challenge I devised or software problem I discovered would be insurmountable.
Although schedule conflicts prevented me from taking more computer science classes until senior year, that initial spark of interest compelled me to continue exploring computer science outside of school. I honed my programming skill and expanded my reportoire of languages by learning Python and delving into front-end and server-side web development. Through an after-school program at Columbia College, I also gained valuable exposure to circuitry, robotics, and artificial intelligence. These learning experienced converged, producing an intense curiosity about the theoretical underpinnings of the programming languages and concepts I use regularly and a certainty that I should pursue a degree and career in computer science.
Going forward, I aspire to utilize the abundant research and educational opportunities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the pursuit of my passion and the advancement of the field, and to encouragement of others in underrepresented groups to do the same.
I wanted to mention that I'm also black, which made me feel even more alone in my freshman class (and in the classes I'm now taking) because I've always been either the only black person there or the only black female, and I always got the sense that certain people were talking down to me or assuming that I didn't know what I was talking about even though my answers were usually correct. I would say something and people would disagree or doubt it, but then someone else would say essentially the same thing and they'd all agree.
How can I express this without it seeming forced/like I'm just trying to make myself a more desirable candidate by being a URM?