1. Introduce yourself, who are you what do you do? My name is Kimberly Lane Clark. I support teachers, staff, and students in a K-12 school district of 7500 students. I provide support in blended learning strategies, Google tools, oversee the district’s credit recovery online program, On Ramp Dual Credit 1:1 program, Early College STEM High school 1:1, and oversee the district’s Google Education Suite. I also oversee the district’s 1:1 initiative (Integrate 2 Inspire). Our school district is about 85% 1:1 with Chromebooks. 2. How did you arrive at this career (or point in your life/work)? Was it always something you knew you wanted to do? I always knew that I wanted to be an educator. I was always the techno girl in school. I majored in Computer Science and Educational Technology. 3. What about your job makes you jump out of bed in the morning, especially on those cold, dark mornings? Being able to work with students, staff, and parents. I love when teachers get the light bulb moment when they have worked on a project that involves technology. 4. What is your personal cure for stress or how do you raise your spirits in times of doubt? Can you share a Story? Believe it or not… I love working in my garden. I love planting flowers and watching them grow. This is definitely a stress reliever. 5. Who is your role model? If no one, any thoughts on this? My role models are Michelle Obama and my mother. They both exemplify the definition of excellence. 6. What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back in time? This too shall pass. Everything will be okay. Live every day without worrying about the next. 7. Top 3 tips for girls starting out in STEM? If there is a no seat at the table create one. Never allow to tell you that you can’t do anything. Where there is a will there is a way. You have a talent and never let someone get in the way.  8. How do you measure your success? By how successful others are. I strive in helping others and if they are not successful then I feel like I am not. 9. Where can we find out more about your work? www.askatechnogirl.com 10. Are you social? Will you share your Twitter handle, or LinkedIn profile, or Facebook so that young women can connect with you? Yes, I am very social. I love networking. Twitter: @askatechnogirl  LinkedIn: Kimberly Lane Clark Instagram: @askatechnogirl Facebook: Ask A Technogirl

1. Introduce yourself, who are you what do you do? I’m Katharine Beaumont. I am a software developer turned Machine Learning / AI expert. At the moment I’m on extended maternity leave so I’m freelancing part time. I’m actually working on an interesting side project which is how to make a global tech conference carbon neutral, short of blindly offsetting carbon. I am the program lead for the Devoxx UK conference, and I’m on the program committee for a few other conferences. I used to speak at international conferences but I’m semi-retired because babies don’t travel well. Eventually I hope to pick back up on my graduate studies! 2. How did you arrive at this career (or point in your life/work)? Was it always something you knew you wanted to do? I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I wanted to be an author, doctor, pilot, mathematician, prime minister, lawyer… Really I wanted to change the world somehow. I studied maths and Natural Sciences at Durham, then law. I was thinking about life and how much debt I wanted to get into (I graduated at the start of the recession) when I saw an advert for “software engineer, no experience required”. I got the job, and it (the company) was horrendous. But the coding was fun, so I stuck at it and went from there (... and got a job at a better company). 3. What about your job makes you jump out of bed in the morning, especially on those cold, dark mornings? I have a one year old and a puppy so unfortunately if I don’t jump out of bed I get harassed. 4. What is your personal cure for stress or how do you raise your spirits in times of doubt? Can you share a Story? I’ve had my fair share of stress. At university, from being an overweight unfit child, I embraced running. When I couldn’t run anymore due to injuries I cycled and swam. I started bouldering and mountain climbing, and over the years, having the adventures I thought I was too old for, which is stupid. Now I try everything - I don’t want to suddenly get to a certain age and think - I always wanted to do that and never did. I have nurtured my friendships. I’m careful to say things to people that I think they should know about themselves - how wonderful they are. And I’ve let people nurture me. Take care of yourself. Start small. Do something that the girl you daydream about being would do. Hold on to positive friendships, be wary of intense ones. And be kind to yourself, you deserve it. 5. Who is your role model? If no one, any thoughts on this? Captain Janeway (Star Trek Voyager), Captain Picard (Enterprise), Gandalf, my Grandad, more of my female colleagues in tech than I’d have time to list like Ana-Maria Mihalceanu and Siren Hofvander. 6. What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back in time? Be patient, be kind, you’re doing a good job. 7. Top 3 tips for girls starting out in STEM? Don’t compare yourself to other people Carve your own path Do it anyway. You deserve your place at the table/ the lab/ the laptop. 8. How do you measure your success? This used to really bother me - there is always more you can be doing. I used to obsess about what job I should have. Having children really did change the way I thought about everything. Now I think - am I happy? Is there anything I’m not doing that I’ll regret? Will my children appreciate my decisions? Am I leaving them a healthy world? 9. Where can we find out more about your work? Eventually I’ll make a portfolio and put it on Twitter… eventually. For now you could look up “Katharine Beaumont Neural Networks: Walkthrough” on the Devoxx Youtube channel. 10. Are you social? Will you share your Twitter handle, or LinkedIn profile, or Facebook so that young women can connect with you? Yes of course. @katharinecodes is my Twitter. https://www.linkedin.com/in/katharine-beaumont-28a0919b/ I’m very happy to talk and I will make time for you.

1. Introduce yourself, who are you what do you do? Hi, I’m Stéphanie. I’m a foodie and tea lover who enjoys video games and bike rides in the city of Luxembourg (this is also where I live). I’m also a Lead UX (User eXperience) Designer for a consultant company. Which means that I got to different clients to help them build their design and UX strategy. I’ve worked with big corporate companies, start-ups, banks in many different industries. I also have a blog ( https://stephaniewalter.design/blog/ ) where I share my thoughts and some curated UX and Front-End links and resources. I speak at different tech events (conferences, meetups) and teach mobile UX. 2. How did you arrive at this career (or point in your life/work)? Was it always something you knew you wanted to do? Maybe this is a good time to say that I was born and used to live in France, for context. I’ve always been a creative child, I drew a lot, especially during class. I started playing around with computers when I was 10. My teacher had a bunch of those old computers that required 8-inch floppy disks to work and we were allowed to “go to the computer” when we had good grades. This, in retrospect, feels unfair to children with bad grades who never got to play with those old school computers. To be clear, those were already old-school when I was 10 but our teacher liked those vintage machines. A friend of the family was a computer engineer. She brought a computer she built with old pieces of computers that were thrown away at work. And here was little Stéphanie, with Windows 3.1. This was 1998 or 1999 (the year of Matrix), Windows 3.1 was already outdated. But again, little Stéphanie, daughter of a farmer was happy with that. Then I got upgraded to Windows 98 and I was super happy. I started creating digital images, “photoshoping” the head of one character on the body of another one with paint and other non-Photoshop software. I didn’t have internet at home before my 18th birthday, but I used public library and my friend’s internet connexion to build my first blog. It was mostly about sharing pictures with your friends at that time. I wanted to become an art teacher. But I changed my mind when I discovered that there was a master’s degree that offered a mix between website creation and foreign languages. You could say a mix between programming languages and actual languages. To enter this master, I needed a specific foreign language bachelor, so I decided to go through the 3 years of bachelor to enter the master afterwards. I went to the University in France and got an internet connexion in my room. My blog became quite restrictive. I wanted to change colours and everything but couldn’t. I could have rainbow gradients on the text but that was it. So, I changed blogging platform. On the new platform I decided I wanted to have the sidebar on the left. I checked the forums and read that I needed to add “.sidebar-left” here in the code. This is how I discovered HTML and CSS. Meanwhile, I took extra classes to “prepare” myself for the master’s degree. So, I took a Photoshop class on top of my language classes during the 1st year of my Bachelor. I kept on playing with the tool and after 6 months I decided that I wanted more, I wanted total control over the design of my blog. Thanks to blogs and forums, I taught myself HTML and CSS. Eventually, I installed a WordPress, started playing around with a little bit of PHP loops and was able to bring my designs to life. I finished the bachelor with a semester in Germany where I also took some extra classes like SEO, in German, that was fun. Then I entered the master’s degree. There were more design lessons but also usability lessons. This is where I discovered user testing and user interviews. My teachers didn’t call this “UX Design”, but it was pretty close. I worked in Germany for my internship. I finished what I was supposed to do after 3 months of my 6 months internship. The company was building a lot of mobile products on Blackberry and iOS (and a little bit of Android). So, I taught myself mobile design and mobile usability thanks to books, and again, the amazing blogs I could find. I ended up doing product design for mobile. I went back to France after that. I worked for a small web agency and kept on trying to get better at design, usability. I tried to build user centric approach in every new project I was working on. But let’s be honest: in a small agency clients don’t really care about that. I decided to leave France for Luxembourg and work as a research assistant in the Human Computer Interaction team. It was super fun, we did research to create learning spaces for students and worked on different tools for them. This is also where I got stronger in user research methods and more rigorous. I’m currently working for a consulting agency and go to different clients to help them with their design and UX strategy. I’m mostly self-taught and learned a lot in books, through conferences and discussions with other people in my industry. Designing user centric products was not something I knew I wanted to do when I was younger, mostly because I’m not sure if there were that many schools teaching this. But this feels like the natural path for a geeky little girl who also liked to draw on a computer. Author: Geoffrey Crofte 3. What about your job makes you jump out of bed in the morning, especially on those cold, dark mornings? Haa mornings are starting to get quite dark. I don’t really jump out of bed; mornings are quite hard for me actually. But I’m always eager to learn from the people around me at work, or around me in the community through social networks. That’s why I wake up in the morning: to learn from co-workers, from users to find ways to make the interfaces they use better 4. What is your personal cure for stress or how do you raise your spirits in times of doubt? Can you share a Story? I’m super bad at dealing with stress. I should be used to it by now, especially since I give conferences, but it never gets away. I get stressed before going on stage. And I also get stressed when I see that I have a LOT of things to do. Which is silly, challenge is what makes me wake up in the morning, but it’s also what scares me. For the stage stress, power poses (putting your arms on your hips like wonder woman) helps. Also seeing a friendly face in the front row of the audience helps a lot. I try to remember that the audience is rooting for me, they chose to be in the room, that I prepared my topic so everything will be fine. It’s not always easy to remember that. For the “too many things to do” stress, I often feel overwhelmed at work. Especially when I start working for a new client. There’s so many things to understand about their product, their specific domain. I feel like I need to master everything the first 2 weeks, which is silly. None expects me to do that. So, I have to try to remind myself that the first 3 weeks at a new job or new client are about getting to know the environment and it’s fine. When I have a lot of things to do, it’s like there’s this big mountain of things in front of me. So, I try to cut that down in small little pieces. And all of a sudden, it’s not a big mountain anymore. It’s just a few little piles of smaller things to do. And I can tackle each little pile on its own, step by step. 5. Who is your role model? If no one, any thoug hts on this? It might sound cliché, but it’s mostly my Mum. She’s a smart and brave woman. Life was hard on her, but she keeps fighting, every day. She has an optimism I will never have. I’m more of a grumpy person than her. My father is a farmer. She’s a “wife of a farmer” which means she spent most of my childhood helping at the farm without getting paid for that “work” (she still does). We didn’t have a lot of money when I grew up. But she always found ways so that me and my little brother could play music, travel a little bit (even if it was not far away), get access to culture and books and develop our imagination. She taught me loyalty and courage. She’s also a geek. My father has NO IDEA how to turn on a computer. She’s the one doing all the administration tasks of the farm using a tablet, taking care of the accounting. She has a blog, and an Instagram account. She’s the one reformatting the tablet when it stops working. Anytime someone is using the “Mum” persona as the “non tech friendly person” I really want to bite them. Because my Mum is more tech friendly than most people I know! 6. What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back in time? “You need more self-care, don’t neglect health, even if you are scared of most doctors, it’s important.” Also, it feels strange because at school I was bullied a lot for being the “uncool fat geek”. Today, talking at conferences and working as a designer is seen as “cool” by some people in my industry. I have colourful hair and a lot of piercings. So, it’s super strange for me that some people think I’m “one of the cool kids” today. I still remember someone telling me when I finished my master’s degree “you will need to remove your piercings and comply to society's expectations to find a job”. Well, I hold my beer as they say? So, I would tell myself something like “ you are stronger than you think you ever will be, it will get better, don’t listen to the haters”. And then I would of course not listen to myself. 7. Top 3 tips for girls starting out in STEM? Find a sisterhood, a group of women to support you. You will need that kind of backchannels and safe spaces if you want to survive. I have a slack with 5 friends. We have channels like “#complaining” to post about ugly stuff, but also “#inspiration” and “#gratefulness” to post about our accomplishments in life, or just self-love. To know that you have a few women you can rely on and share with helps a lot. Selfcare first: you might want to change the world (so do I), but you can’t if you lie in your bed and are totally exhausted. It’s okay to pick your battles. You don’t want to burn out at 25/30 like so many amazing women I saw. Maybe you will need some “me time”, maybe you need some music, maybe you need a book, a warm meal, anything that makes you feel good. There’s no shame in taking care of yourself first. When I was a teenager I hated “girly stuff”. Mostly because “girly” meant being superficial in the eyes of the society. This is bullshit. I’m in my 30’s and start to embrace girly stuff like spas and a comfy night on my couch with Netflix. Maybe it’s because society changed a little bit and those are now considered as “self care” and not “girly stuff”. Or maybe again, I was just silly. Read feministfightclub.com , a nice book that list different strategies to survive sexist workplaces 8. How do you measure your success? I don’t measure it. I don’t really care. As long as I get a roof, food, friends and I can travel, I think it’s a success. If I can have fun at work while doing all of that and learn new things in the process, it’s even better. 9. Where can we find out more about your work? You can check my portfolio https://stephaniewalter.design/ and my blog  https://stephaniewalter.design/blog/ I also have a dribbble where I post more illustrations and drawings at the moment  https://dribbble.com/stephaniewalter 10. Are you social? Will you share your Twitter handle, or LinkedIn profile, or Facebook so that young women can connect with you? Twitter:  https://twitter.com/walterstephanie LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniewalterpro/ Mastodon:  https://mastodon.design/@stephaniewalter

1. Introduce yourself, who are you what do you do? Chanel Johnson, Program Specialist. I support K-12 Math , Science, Instructional tech and coaching, by writing lessons for our district, working directly with different stakeholders in the schools for personalized support and district initiatives 2. How did you arrive at this career (or point in your life/work)? Was it always something you knew you wanted to do? I will always be a teacher at heart! focusing on content, instructional implications and resources in the area of STEM can empower our students to pursue STEM careers, we want to catch them early 3. What about your job makes you jump out of bed in the morning, especially on those cold, dark mornings? I support at least 18 schools! Being a leader of learn the teachers and students in these schools get me up! Knowing that I play a part in providing the best standards aligned resources for them gets me up. 4. What is your personal cure for stress or how do you raise your spirits in times of doubt? Can you share a Story? My cure for stress is: Journal, Listen to Music and Disconnect from my computer! Sometimes the work can be overloading and the work is never done, realizing I am only one person, the work will be there. When times of stress rises, I select random on my playlist and write my feelings down in my journal. A stressful time for me happened when my dad passed away unexpectedly while I was pregnant with my twins. I felt so low to the ground that they only place I could look was “up”. from there I began to listen to music and journal. this has been a part of my practices and routines for 6 years. 5. Who is your role model? If no one, any thoughts on this? My role Model is Patricia Brown “Msedtechie” she is a mom of twins, an advocate for equity in STEM and an educator all in one. She is one of the nicest people I have ever met while making amazing change in the education area of STEM. She is always trying and learning new things. 6. What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back in time? Imposter Syndrome is Real, You deserve to be where you are! 7. Top 3 tips for girls starting out in STEM? You belong in STEM, don’t let them tell you otherwise Your voice matters, don’t let them shut you down STEM is within you, Bring it out! 8. How do you measure your success? I measure my success by my growth. While I am not the STEM career you may be thinking of, I am in the field that opens the door for our girls. I feel successful when I am seeing more Girls and minorities that I have interacted with in our district or just in life pursuing STEM 9. Where can we find out more about your work? Follow me on twitter DC_STEMtastic my journey and work can be found there. Conferences and Keynotes I have done can be found there. 10. Are you social? Will you share your Twitter handle, or LinkedIn profile, or Facebook so that young women can connect with you? Twitter: Dc_stemtastic Instagram:  Dc_stemtastic

1. Introduce yourself, who are you what do you do? I am a Lead UI Engineer at Amobee, the world's leading independent advertising platform based in Silicon Valley. I have 20 years of overall experience and have leveraged my full-stack software engineering career over a wide range of industries including Cyber Security, Health Tech, Online Dating, Social Media, Higher Ed, and Government. As a Coding Evangelist and the Founder of Gurl Code Academy, I believe that teaching Women to code helps them leverage the skill to enter the field of technology. I think it is a crucial component to filling the many coding based jobs that will open up now and into the future. More specifically, I focus on Black Women because achieving a tech career puts them on a path to help close the income and wealth gap experienced by the Black Community. I’m currently pursuing my Master’s Degree in Computer Science with a Specialization in Artificial Intelligence at Georgia Tech. 2. How did you arrive at this career (or point in your life/work)? Was it always something you knew you wanted to do? I was exposed to programming at an early age due to my Step-father being a Programmer-Analyst at Readers Digest in the 90s. Having Computers around the house was the norm and by the time I was a teenager I had gotten my first computer of my own and began to take it apart and inspect the operating system. My parents also enrolled me in Marist College’s CSTEP (Computer Science Technology and Enrichment Program) which I attended as a high school student. I also had picked up a few of my dad’s programming books and began teaching myself HTML and CSS. This spurred my interest in majoring in Computer Science in College. 3. What about your job makes you jump out of bed in the morning, especially on those cold, dark mornings? Well, it’s easy to jump out of my bed in the morning these days because I work from home. But there are some days where I simply stay in bed and do what I love from the comfort of fluffy pillows. Those are the benefits of working remotely! But it wasn't always that way, when I worked in the office, solving complex and challenging problems were enough to get me to show up and show out! 4. What is your personal cure for stress or how do you raise your spirits in times of doubt? Can you share a Story? To be completely transparent my cure for stress was therapy. Over my career, I found that office politics and pressure to perform sometimes got me down and I needed an outlet to release that tension to ensure that my mental health was good. 5. Who is your role model? If no one, any thoughts on this? Even though she is in a totally separate field, Oprah is my role model. Simply for the fact that she made her own lane, called her own shots, and built a legacy that she can stand on for generations, and did so unapologetically. 6. What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back in time? If there was one piece of advice I could give myself, it would be to look inward for your value. Do not define yourself by other people’s standards and perspectives. What other people think about you is none of your business! 7. Top 3 tips for girls starting out in STEM? Find a way to work on your own independent projects and build a portfolio before you graduate from college and enter the job market. Never let your curiosity die and become a lifelong learner Don’t let your work, amongst other things, define you. Figure out who you are without the education, without the degree, without the career, etc. 8. How do you measure your success? I measure my success by how fulfilled and happy I am. There is no job and no amount of money that can keep me if I’m not fulfilled. I have to be walking in my purpose and feel like I am on vison and on a mission. 9. Where can we find out more about your work? You can visit me at http://www.blackgurl.tech or you can watch me talk about my experiences as a Black Woman in Tech on my YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/c/blackgurltech 10. Are you social? Will you share your Twitter handle, or LinkedIn profile, or Facebook so that young women can connect with you? Instagram: @blackgurltech Twitter: @blackgurltech Facebook: @blackgurltech Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/toniciakelly

You’ve probably heard about LinkedIn being a social network for professionals but, unlike Facebook, getting to grips with using it isn’t as easy as posting some holiday snaps for likes. With so much information out there, it can be difficult to know where to start, and many beginners get bogged down trying to primp their profile to perfection. George Khalife of Sampford Advisors recently posted his top tips for students looking to use LinkedIn to kick-start an early career, and the post generated quite a great conversation. In this article, we use  George's advice to give you go-getter geeky girls the rundown on how you can take your first steps towards snagging that all-important first job, all through LinkedIn. 1. Build your brand, not your CV Fleshing out your CV with qualifications and skills is important, but save your search for internships for another day. At this stage, you need to focus on promoting who you are and what you stand for, so when you do apply for jobs, the people in your circle know you’re dedicated to their cause. You’re not just another face in the crowd; make sure everyone sees this. 2. You have a voice - use it! The internet is full of amazing content, but we’re willing to bet you have something even better to offer. It might be tempting to share an inspiring video or blog post, but anything that’s already out there is old news. George says  it’s time to ‘get creative and talk about what’s on your mind’: whether you draw upon events in your life or bounce off news articles to give a fresh perspective, your voice has power. 3. Variety is the spice of life Everyone loved your long-form blog last week, but they might not love the next 20 as much if that’s all you ever post. Get out of your comfort zone and experiment with video, voice recordings, and shorter attention-grabbing posts. 4. Be true to yourself It might be tempting to jump on the bandwagon and use trending topics to inspire the content you create. After all, if everyone’s doing it, it must be important, right? What’s more important is that you stay authentic and stand by what you believe in, so don’t be afraid to showcase your love for STEM and reach for success! 5. Students welcome Networking can be daunting when you’re reaching out to people with way more experience than you. Take heed and listen to great advice  from folks like George - he wants you to know that ‘everyone has a story, everyone has an interesting past’, meaning that your words have as much value as anyone else’s. Getting yourself out there on LinkedIn can lead to some really great gigs, whether that’s a proper job or a few days shadowing someone impressed by your presence. So what are you waiting for?  Oh, and when you join make sure to connect with us on LinkedIn !   ----o---- Geeky Girl Reality shares career tips to help young women kickstart their careers in STEM and relevant fields. Make sure to  view the available 'gigs"  on our site: internships, scholarships, and other entry-level opportunities.