As a member of a group that’s not well-represented in tech, I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to explore and learn in an area in which I never would have envisioned myself about a year and a half ago. I’m grateful for the support I’ve received, the women and men I get to look up to, and the exciting places my love for computer science has taken me so far.
Having said all of that, I’ve become aware of a culture in my classes that perpetuates some of the worst things about tech. While I appreciate the educational opportunities I have, there have been several periods of time during which I felt I had no choice but to make my coursework the only place I invested any time. The expectations in certain classes are not only that students be pushed outside of their intellectual comfort zone (this is good!), but that students are spending basically all of their waking hours on their coursework.
I’ve felt a sentiment from many of my peers (and nearly all of them, like me, have an easier time jumping to the conclusion that we don’t belong in tech because we are surrounded by people who are nothing like us) about the impact of these expectations on the things that make us unique, valuable, and well-rounded people. Last quarter, I lost so many parts of myself that make my perspective valuable. I wrote less, hardly read at all, didn’t make a single webpage or learn a new technology, ran a lot less (much to my own detriment during the marathon I ran in November), didn’t bake a single pie, created absolutely nothing, and even skipped visits to the young woman I mentor with Big Brothers/Big Sisters to work on assignments.
I know my time management skills could be better and I also know that I wasn’t particularly passionate about/naturally good at the material. I get that understanding how to solve seemingly impossible problems matters, but I also feel that the intangible experiences I had scrambling from loading docks to corporate events to wholesale food warehouses back when I was a delivery driver and dealing with all kinds of problems along the way is just as valuable as any problem set I’m arbitrarily told to solve. For most folks, problems in the real world aren’t going to be solved by tediously writing a formal proof, and what I’m getting at is that as we chisel away at the characteristics and passions that make students who they are, we also strip them of chances to face non-contrived adversity.
If what proponents of diversity in tech (particularly those who champion the benefits of a diverse workforce to a business) are saying is sincere, we have to ask ourselves what it really means to have a diverse workforce. Yes, the data is important and continues to show that the tech industry fails at representing the larger population. But beyond that is recognizing the pieces that make us who we are and allowing them to flourish. If it weren’t for the loom I got for Christmas I wouldn’t have a fun framework through which to think about concurrency. If it weren’t for my experimental poetry class last quarter, I wouldn’t have been so excited about computer memory and the poetry generator I wrote. I’m not asking for the lab computers to be covered in glitter or for the keyboards in the CS building to be pink. Instead, I’m pushing back against the notion that in order for me to be successful in the tech industry I need to devote my life to every part of computer science. I’m pushing back against the mold that has been formed by the myriad of people who I don’t relate to.
I can’t deny that people who are willing to sacrifice all of their time to perform well in computer science classes have a lot to offer, but I also wholly believe that there is a large group of people, many of whom make up groups that aren’t well represented in tech, who have so much potential to bring valuable insights to the table. Yes we need to challenge people to solve problems in new ways, but especially at a public university like UW we need to also consider the benefits of fostering humans who will succeed well beyond cogdom. I fear that otherwise, we run the risk of producing students who compete for fewest hours of sleep and spend so much time staring at their computer screens (me right now!) that they forget about what a complex and interesting and messy world exists outside, a world that they have so much potential to change for the better (but also for the worse).