September 1, 2021
My experiences as coding-amateur participating at the Summer Camp 2021
First of all, some information about me. I’m an 18-year-old girl who has just graduated from high school. My advanced courses? German and English.
Coding is only for hackers, highly gifted people, and boys who secretly build a drug empire from their room via the dark net. That’s how I thought about the IT business. But spoiler alert: it’s not like that.
I didn’t learn much about it at school. To be honest, nothing at all. Yet this is the field that teaches us the qualifications we need to shape our digital future.
Everyone is talking about digitization and technologies developing at an ever-accelerating speed, while German schools are finally getting rid of the overhead projectors and leisurely moving towards the unknown terrain “Internet” – and this even not by choice, but because the pandemic makes it necessary.
The tech industry is different from what everyone thinks it is. Only a few have a realistic picture of it. The world keeps on spinning, in technology always a bit faster. We humans (and girls) must be able to keep up. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to understand this. Just as it is useful to be able to speak English, French or Italian, it is useful to know a programming language like Python. In the future, you will not only have to communicate with human beings, but also with computers - the problem: they do not understand our languages.
Programming is not just for hackers and computer geeks. Anyone can speak it, or rather type it. In fact, it isn’t difficult to learn. If I had not participated in the Summer Camp of moinworld, I would have never believed so.
Even without any experience, I was able to create simple games and algorithms after I understood the basics.
Thus, to stay in the picture, I spent 5 days talking to my laptop, and guess what: it can do quite a lot of what I ask it to do. This, even though I really only speak (or type) Python in fragments so far.
Yes, sometimes it was frustrating when not everything worked as I had intended. But then, it was even nicer when it came out exactly as planned - and with further training, that happened more and more often. Learning something new always involves effort - but it’s worth it.
At the Summer Camp, we didn’t spend the whole day typing in random programs, we got lots of inspiration, so that in the end we could manage quite a few things on our owns.
In addition, we had the opportunity to meet new people and build up a network that can support us on our further career path. This also works, despite the Corona pandemic, although it would of course be even cooler in physical presence. The fact that it could unfortunately only take place digitally was something I found very sad, because I would have loved to meet the incredibly inspiring people in person that I now only got to know via video.
Our programming trainers from Thoughtworks were really cool, so learningand practicing was great fun. They gave interesting presentations to help us understand the material. These were well designed and easy to understand.
Besides the coding course, we also got exciting and more realistic insights into the tech industry, as well as we got shown possible career paths. Especially for seekers, for young people who are still unsure about where to start, workshops like the ones at moinworld are helpful.
Personally, I found the Google presentation the most exciting. We had the chance to talk to employees of the gigantic tech company at eye level andthus made new connections. Even professions that are not directly related to programming or technology were presented to us. We were able to gain a broad insight into the multifaceted IT industry.
I now not only know a bit more about technology, but also about myself. It has given me a better overview of all the possibilities that the world has tooffer, and I have also learned about new potential areas of interest for me.
IT is multi-faceted. All the opportunities and many new paths it brings would have been stayed unknown to me.
If you discover that programming itself is not your passion (after having tried it first!):Also, if you’re more creatively inclined, would rather see what you design, or are more of a poet and thinker, philosophizing about the happenings and developments of the world. There are endless possibilities in this industry. Even ethical questions, arise in technology and need to be answered.
To decide what you want, you must have seen enough.
So, I advise anyone, who is perhaps as overwhelmed as I am by all the career opportunities and courses of study, without really having an idea what they might also be interested in, apart from typical career ways, to try out as many things as possible. Attending at moinworld’s Summer Camp or the Mentoring Program, would be an option. Read more here.
People who have IT skills are in demand, jobs well paid. Those who work here are shaping the world of tomorrow. And so must women, even if STEM subjects are not usually the ones we identify with. By the way, it’s a weird phenomenon when you look at history… Women have been very successful in this field in the past, it’s just that they’re not well known. Why? Because they were female.
An article by Annabel Runge, participant of the Summer Camp 2021.