This is the first in our new series called techVoices. This story originally appeared on Pacific Online (www.pacificonline.org) and it is a personal story to inspire the next generation of young IT professionals especially women.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
As a child, I was persistently asked this question. It was one of my least favourite questions. Dreaded too, because I felt it placed an uncomfortable pressure on me to respond with the correct answer. The truth being, I (or any child) had no clue!
Worse, at that time for a girl like me, the consensus or assumption was that girls were destined for certain careers and the education path deemed as appropriate.
For the times that I did speak up and say I want to grow up and do fifty different things, I was reminded and with good intentions too, of the “appropriate” career and education path.
For some people their single answer could most likely be the job they will have for their entire working life. And for the fortunate, this single career might turn out to be their dream job too.
But for the restless at heart, setting goals can allow one to rise through the ranks in any chosen career path or chart many different paths in life.
As a child I always knew that I wanted the exciting education and lucrative career paths that boys got to pick from. And even though I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, I knew it had to do with technology.
In retrospect, my parents careers influenced my career choice. My father was a mechanic. Growing up, I watched him fix cars, heavy plant machinery. He looked like he was just solving puzzles. I liked puzzles, analytical thinking and mathematics. But I wasn’t too keen on the grease and grime of heavy plant machinery.
My mother worked in the banking sector. I remember, she would use a terminal with a command line prompt. It was fascinating to watch her enter commands at the prompt and it would respond with data. This sparked my curiosity to learn more about what was happening behind the command line prompt. It seemed like a good puzzle to solve one day.
These early influences inspired me to set my heart on IT.
Continue reading on Pacific Online