Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Gina Trapani talks about Black Girls CODE with NYC Chapter Lead Onyi Nwosu

Postlight’s Director of Engineering Gina Trapani writes:

This past weekend here at Postlight, we had the chance to host an event for Black Girls CODE’s NYC chapter. The Black Futures STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Panel featured six young women of color sharing their experiences in science, technology, engineering, and math with an audience of middle- to high- school girls and their parents. Panelists included an eighth grader who loves hackathons and Pokémon, a high school freshman who worked on space apps at a NASA challenge, computer science and engineering majors at Spelman and City College of New York, and a biomed student at Howard University. The panel was moderated by a high school sophomore game designer. (One of her games is available in the App Store).

After the event, Gina sat down with NYC chapter lead Onyi Nwosu for an interview.

GT: At today’s STEM panel you had six young women who are in middle school, high school, and college talking about their work in STEM. Afterward, so many people were waiting in line to talk to them, and to get their daughter to talk to them. They were celebrities!

ON: Every year we try to do about two STEM panels. The STEM panel started out as a way for us to get the girls to see people who look like them, who are in fields that they are interested in. Usually we get programmers, or anybody who has already established a long career in tech, to be on the panel. When we were planning this year’s panel, we were brainstorming and thinking, hey, why don’t we put younger people who are closer to the age of the audience up on that panel? So the girls can see that there isn’t this long path of things they’ll be doing in 20 years — that there are things that they can do right now. There are people who look just like them doing awesome things right now.

You can learn more about BGC and read the rest of the interview here.