What would Ada Lovelace think of our 51% Female Cohort?
I bet she would be super proud!
A few months ago we partnered with ThoughtWorks and launched a scholarship to get more women coding! Guess what? It worked!
I’m excited to not only introduce the 5 amazing ladies that are being sponsored by ThoughtWorks to do the Makers Academy course but also to announce that we finally have our largest female cohort ever at 51%!
It was not an easy task finding these amazing women as Jade Daubney from the ThoughtWorks Recruitment Team said
“We spend a lot of time focusing on gender parity but we wanted to do more. We have met so many incredibly talented women who didn’t have the opportunity to progress with their dream role in tech, women who couldn’t afford university, women who had to leave education to become carers for their parents or their children or women who have had every obstacle thrown at them and need someone to recognise their potential.
The scholarship and partnership with Makers has been such an amazing journey and we are looking forward to seeing the scholars hands on in an environment where they can learn and grow in their dream job, just where they belong.”
Without further ado I present you our amazing students!
Tam Borine
Tam was in and and out of uni, switching from humanities to sciences when she discovered code. She found herself randomly at a hackathon and seeing the amazing things others were building, she wanted desperately to understand. She did some MOOCs but the code world seemed hugely overwhelming and she didn’t know where to start. She had heard of Makers Academy but didn’t entertain the possibility because she had no money. Instead she scoured the internet for bootcamps with scholarships. Thoughtworks seemed amazing, a few interviews later and she’s on her way to becoming a developer. Tammy is currently a senior on the course. She’s liking Javascript and Node.js. Read more on her journey so far on her blog.
Caitlin Gulliford
Caitlin is a half-American and half-British gender & media guru with a MSc in Gender, Media and Culture from the LSE, as well as 2+ years experience of SEO work in the Berlin tech scene. After becoming a victim of workplace sexual assault, Caitlin returned to London to pursue a new career and fell in love with coding as both a hobby and a therapy. As a gender rights activist, Caitlin continues to speak out against negative issues affecting women in tech, and informally counsels others who have experienced workplace violence or discrimination. In her spare time, she also works as a travel writer and is looking forward to launching her new travel and surfing blog in 2017 with all the new coding skills she is learning. Caitlin is currently in the junior part of the course and you can follow her journey here.
Kornelia Szabo
Hungarian minority, born in Yugoslavia, raised in Hungary. She has a MSc in Psychology and did some years of research/university teaching in Hungary and Germany and clinical practice in London before she realised that psychology and the academic/clinical field is not really for her. Technology and computers were always a big interest in her life and she was seeking a solution in this direction. In London she had the courage to take advantage of the many free opportunities, courses and get involved in the tech community. She did a few online courses and finished two Code First: Girls courses (Beginners course and Python). The moment she started learning Python she knew coding was her true passion. She also started a blog for beginners listing a lot of free resources for coding and created her own website just after 6 months. Her plan is to develop mental health apps, especially ones focusing on body image as she thinks, it is a huge issue nowadays. Kornelia is very committed to social justice, such as fighting against discrimination, sexism and abuse. You can follow her on twitter here and her blog.
Sara Veal
Sara is Filipina-English and grew up in Cambodia. She created her first website in 1999, with the help of HTMLgoodies and very patient web gurus in IRC chat rooms. She retained an interest in internet magic but fell behind in her knowledge as she worked through two degrees at the School of Oriental and African Studies, specialising in gender, postcolonialism, popular culture and Southeast Asia, and a career in journalism, working in Tanzania and Indonesia, and then in publishing in London, working at Atlantic Books and Harlequin. The arrival of her son gave her the opportunity to take a step back, as well as the courage to be bad at something. She restarted her coding journey in May 2016 with Mums in Tech, and began attending as many coding events as she could, such as RailsGirls and PyCon, relishing how inclusive, supportive and/or baby-friendly they were. Alongside coding, she has recently set up a book campaigns business, Huhbub, which offers services for authors and publishers, with a focus on creating events that benefit the community. She is thrilled by the life-changing opportunity that Thoughtworks and Makers are offering, and plans to use technology to create safer spaces for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, as well as enable more flexible forms of working. You can check out her website and follow her on twitter.
Edyta Wróbel
Edyta is a ex Project Manager who loves the languages — both human and programming ones.
She’s been always interested in computers and tech — when she got her first Intel Pentium PC at the age of 9, she wouldn’t stop playing her Spacewar! or Solitaire games (good old 90s’ !). Not to mention Dota or SimCity later on… Her first steps with coding in her teenage years were connected to her other passion, music. On her old last.fm’s profile, she played around with HTML to customise the looks of her pages, so they could be different to those of her friends. At the time she thought there was no future career connected to her interests and as a girl(yes!) she was advised to study the human languages — German and English which she went on to study.
She came back to her old passion a year ago thanks to Code First: Girls’ influence and their free coding classes at the Twitter HQ in London, and she hasn’t looked back ever since. Now an active community member, she attends various tech events and meetups, so you might bump into her at one of these. When she isn’t glued to a computer screen, she spends time reading books and sipping her nth cup of coffee in one of the London’s great cafés or at the gym, letting it all go. Her greatest weakness, you guessed how, ice cream! Her long term goal is to give children greater access to education through the use of technology. You can reach her on Twitter.
We’re looking forward to following their journey and wish them the best! If you’re interested in applying to the Makers Academy course then apply now!
