10 Things I Wish I Knew Before and During My IT Education
Editor’s Note: The following article was written by Andrea Landis, first appeared on the Levo League.
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If you ask a group of 14 year old girls what they want to study or what industry they want to work in, I doubt that even a third of them will tell you “I want to work with technology”. It is just something girls don’t do, isn’t it? Why and how come is a very complicated issue (that we’re working on).
Looking back on my journey of graduating in software engineering and management, there are success and failures, but I wouldn’t change a thing. I loved every moment of my studies (especially writing my BSc thesis work) and I am even more happy to start my career within IT in one of the world’s leading IT companies. Before the start of this semester, to encourage all of the brave girls that went for an IT education as well as the ones wondering what they should study, I want to share with you some things I learned on the road.
Leave the stereotype behind you
Come on, you are smarter than that! That picture of a guy in huge glasses sitting nights and days in front of his computer hacking some code is just a big stereotype of how your classmates will look like. OK, yes be prepared to face people that are really passionate about hacking code and “geeky” with computers, but guess what they are also really nice people, helpful, and ready to give you a hand with your programming skills. So go ahead break that stereotype and expand your view, be open minded, and friendly to everyone.
Redefine what IT is all about
The days of working solely with mainframe computers, coding with low level programming languages like Cobol or Pascal, and working with the zeroes and ones of the computer are basically not all there is anymore. Yes, if you do like doing that you sure can, but in the IT field there is probably the largest choice of roles and profession paths you can take than in any other industry. IT needs requirements engineers-people that understand the needs of the customer, software architects-designing the architecture of the code, testers-finding and fixing bugs in the code, 3D artists, interface designers, IT project managers, IT sales professional…to name a few. During your studies you will have plenty of time to figure out where you fit.
Take an extra course
If you have never coded before, I suggest you take an extra or an online course in coding. It will help you a lot with keeping up with the study pace and being successful. Do this on your own or with friends. Start with simple exercises, but dive into servers, cloud computing, search engines and the like. Try to understand the hard and the soft parts of computers.
Go through your literature before the start of the course
If you haven’t got the literature list, email your program manager and request for it. It is also the best way of getting hold of second hand literature, which is much cheaper. Also you will have the time to dive deeper or beyond the topics of the course. Study how a problem is solved, but then also think for yourself or explore other ways of doing the same thing. The more you know, the more capable you will be of coming up with different and better ways to solve a problem and that’s what IT is all about.
Study agile
Agile is huge right now. It is a buzz word in almost every field, from IT to reqruinting to studying. What it means is that you have to be iterative in your process (whatever you are doing) that is, not spending too much time on thinking about a problem. Instead just go trough a quick overview and then go ahead and start solving it. In IT this means don’t think too much—just start writing code, in the process you will improve the solution to become better and better. You will not learn anything by reading the whole book first, read a little—do it in practice more!
Join a group for women in IT at your university
This is really important! For me this helped in landing my first job.
Sharing experiences and knowledge with other girls from your class or other classes is extremely important for boosting your confidence and making new friends. It is very likely that you will be able to attend seminars, workshops or lectures trough a group like this.
Ditch the know-it-all philosophy and gain confidence in what you know
It all boils down to “The Cake Story.” Different people approach eating a cake in different ways. Imagine IT as a big big cake. Every year, people lay several new layers on the cake and with time it becomes huge. Some of them take a bite of the cake and say, “Wow! I just had a bite of this amazing cake I know all about it, and I will know even more when I finish the rest of the cake”. Others are a bit more reserved and say, “This cake is huge, I will never be able to finish it, I know so little and it is impossible to learn all of this.”
The point is, IT is a huge area and it is expanding more and more every year. You will never be able to “know-it-al,” but you can choose the attitude you have when learning it, your approach when “eating the cake.” Delete “I don’t know this” from your vocabulary and add more “I will figure this out.”