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1) How’d you get started in tech? Willing to share anything you like working on?
2) What are your hopes for the future for women in tech? OR Do you have any advice to encourage fellow and aspiring women in tech?
I'm going to kick this off with answers from Nicole Jass, Senior Leader Data Products at Vantiv. She works on our data & analytics, fraud prevention and loyalty products.
How’d you get started in tech? Willing to share anything you like working on?
I didn’t know what to list as my major for college and my mom told me to do engineering. So I did and it stuck. I tried getting out after an internship in structural engineering but my professor/advisor told me to take his Intro to Illumination class first. I did, then I took every other class he taught all the way thru to a graduate level class in radiative transfer (very fancy terminology for how exactly light bounces around a room) and my first job was as an optical engineer. I then took a left turn and started a company in the ad tech space helping brands measure offline ad effectiveness and creating direct consumer connections from those offline ads. I like to talk about my background as an engineer and a shopper. One was genetic I love working on anything that brings both of those talents (shall we call them) together. Makes my mom proud!
What are your hopes for the future for women in tech? OR Do you have any advice to encourage fellow and aspiring women in tech?
Be a nerd, be passionate, be steadfast. So many barriers have been broken down already, it’s our opportunity and our obligation to appreciate and leverage that. I’ll pass along some great advice I got early on from a guy engineer on my team whose wife was an executive - he told me to be a woman. He said that he had seen so many women try to climb the ladder by acting like a man, or acting how they thought men would want them to act, but that we bring so many unique talents and perspectives that get missed if we try to be like anyone other than ourselves. I liked that advice a lot; it was both insightful and much easier to just be me.