Gay Girl Geek

Yesterday, I picked up a new book at the science library. Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. I highly recommend it for anyone who's at all interested in getting girls into CS.

I'm only a few chapters in so far, but I'm really enjoying it. The book is really validating my experience as a girl geek, because it's based on surveys of girls in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon. For example, they asked girls why they chose computer science, and most of their answers were very similar to my own. They said they want their programming to be useful to society, and have a lasting effect rather than just generating more code and more software. They want technology to help people, and they're in CS because computing has applications everywhere. Guys, on the other hand, are generally interested in the code and the programming for its own sake.

As usual when it comes to gender issues like this, I'm on the fence. I like programming for programming's sake, sometimes. I like solving problems and working with minutia. But I don't want to be just a code monkey. When I finally get out there, I want to do something not only cool and fun, but also useful. I want my work to help society, if not as a whole than at least some subset that's not just geeks.

I think that's why I'm having such a hard time choosing an honors project. I went through a lot of past projects, and they were research, academia-focused projects. I don't want to do research, because there are plenty of people out there who are better at coming up with and testing new algorithms and programming languages than I am. I'm interested in applications. I'd love to do something for One Laptop Per Child, for example. I want to work with ComputersAgain if they ever get off the ground. And the first tech job that I heard about and was actually interested in was installing software for neonatal genetic testing with a small company based in Akron (damned if I can't remember their name, and Google only goes so far when I'm being forgetful).

I guess the fact that other girls want their computing to make a difference shouldn't surprise me. I've been looking into the CRA-W since I heard about it last year, and nearly all the projects focus on interdisciplinary applications. But the department doesn't push that. All of my classes are just about the programming. All of the classes, except for Liszka's, are terribly boring unless you enjoy programming for its own sake. In all honesty, I think if it hadn't been for her, I might've given up and switched majors like many of the girls they interviewed for the book. I hope the department realizes that hiring Liszka was the single best decision they've ever made.