My Unexpected Journey to Becoming an Advocate for Diversity & Inclusion
“To be simply in the field isn’t enough to help increase diversity. You must help empower others to join you”
When I picked Computer Science as a major, I didn’t know what all that meant. I didn’t know about the pay, or the lack of diversity, I barely even knew what CS was. I simply chose it because I couldn’t imagine my future being in something that wasn’t technology.
Now that I’m here, I have a wider understanding of what it means for a Latina, like me, to be in this field. Looking around my CS classes, and around the GDC, there weren’t many people that looked like me, there still aren’t. I found my new familia by joining diversity orgs such as HACS and ABCS, and while this has given me a fun and safe space to grow, it’s no secret that our numbers are low in the tech field.
My freshman year I mostly focused on learning more about the tech field, getting familiar with this new world that I was now a part of. After I felt that I finally had my feet on the ground (at least for the most part), I allowed myself to look past the academics of it all, and focus on the bigger picture. I wanted to help the underrepresented numbers grow, mostly thinking about how much it would’ve meant to me to have a mentor or someone to look up to before I arrived at UT.
I quickly became an advocate for diversity and inclusion in tech. I made myself become more aware of the opportunities out there to help minorities, and I shared them with anyone that would listen to me. One of my proudest moments was when my (not so) little cousin told me that he saw what I was doing, and had decided to also major in CS. I almost cried right then and there. And recently I found out that my youngest sister is highly considering majoring in either CS or CE, and has even started coding. This was huge to me because at their age I didn’t even know what CS was. I hadn’t been coding since I was little, I wrote my first lines of code in Mike Scott’s 312 class. But they noticed what I was doing, and now I can help them grow from the start. Sharing with them what has helped me, what challenges I’ve faced, and the opportunities I’ve already found. If all goes well they’ll be better at this than me.
Fast forward to now. Younger me couldn’t have even imagined what all I’d be up to. I have been the social officer for HACS, joined an online fellowship where women in tech help empower each other (Rewriting the Code), joined a fellowship made specifically to help minority students grow professionally and gain connections that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible (Management Leadership for Tomorrow), and recently, I, along with other amazing students and Dr. Norman, are creating a mentorship program targeting minority students in CS classes in local high schools in Austin. Becoming an advocate for diversity wasn’t something that I intended to do when I came to UT, but now it’s something that I couldn’t see myself not doing. It simply started with my huge need to help others become their best selves.
Despite seeing how low the numbers of minorities in tech are, I have a lot of hope for the future. But this isn’t something that will happen by itself, and much less something that’ll happen overnight. It’s something that we have to actively be working towards. To increase the numbers of minorities in STEM. To increase the numbers of minorities in the industry. To increase the number of minorities in leadership positions in their industry. 33% of the US is Black, Latinx, or Native American. Yet currently only 5% of senior executives at self-reporting Fortune 500 companies are Black, Latino, or Native. At UT only about 20% of undergraduate CS students were women during the fall of 2017. They don’t seem to provide more recent data, nor do they have data on the race percentages by major, but instead lumped all of CNS together, which doesn’t paint the most accurate picture. As for the Cockrell School of Engineering, 29% of undergraduate students are women, of those, 21% are women from underrepresented ethnicities.
How can you help with this? Being aware of the problem is a good first step. And then searching for what all opportunities are out there and sharing those opportunities with your friends. Knowledge truly is power. I don’t believe that there’s a lack of interest, but rather a lack of awareness and aid.
I’ll leave you with this: Don’t let others tell you that you don’t belong, in whatever field you’re in. Imposter syndrome is real, but no one should make you feel unwelcomed here.
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