Learning to Code at NDSU Women’s Entrepreneurship Week
At NDSU, gender equality is important. Empowering its women to enter high demand careers or even ones that are not necessarily considered a woman’s career. Recently there was a large series of events called “Women’s Entrepreneurship Week” which is a program putting on events for the week to empower and teach women about entrepreneurship. . All of these workshops and events aimed at bringing together women, teaching skills in order to improve their savvy in entrepreneurship.
One event I attended was completely online, called “Learn to Code: HTML/ CSS.” This course overall purpose was to give the attending women the basic tools in order to learn more about coding and computer science. About 17 women attended this virtual event which focused a high demand area that also happens to be dominated by men. As a young woman in the modern world, I am interested in this field that is responsible for so much of the wonderment of our age. It is always talked about, it’s something that is in our daily lives and yet I felt discouraged to learn in a professional setting. I remember once enrolling a computer class in high school, I was the only girl. I felt so uncomfortable by the other males in the classroom I ended up transferring to another class. Many other women have been discouraged whether upfront or otherwise about pursuing interest in computer science. That is why this course was so important for me to take in light of my past experiences.
The event is supposed to teach women about basic coding skills and the computer science industry and what it all entails. I took this event which was hosted by emerging prairie leaders as well as Liz Cambell, Mary Hoagland, women in the computer science field. We used an application called Atom, This helped us to practice writing our code and seeing the results. We were able and instructed to play around, learn how it works. We learned some about computer science in theory, the need and specificity to communicate with the computer in order to make it do what it was instructed . We learned about the general structure of how to write code, that <head> <body> and such.
After taking this workshop, I feel much more confident in perhaps learning in depth coding in class or on my own. I feel like I now have a good basis of knowledge that I can apply to the real world and perhaps even one day put on my resume as a skill. The future outlook is largely technology and male based. Offering courses and workshops like these can help tip the scales so that women are an equal part of that future.
