CodePath Student Stories

I would walk into a classroom on the first day of school and I would just be shocked because I’m the only girl and also the only black girl. The ratio of women to male is 30% to 70%. I didn’t see other people who looked like me, females or even Asian-American.

I’m a first generation college student. There was no guidance. There was no laid out formula for you.

I would walk into a room and they were talking about things and I didn’t understand like the lingo they were using and I just felt behind like why am I even doing this? So that was very daunting for me and it took a lot. I cried a lot.

I grew up in Bangladesh, the main city called Dhaka. I remember when I was 2 years old, my grandfather bought a really small mini computer. I was so fascinated about it.

My brother he’s very techsavvy so he would build his own computers and I would always watch him and see what he’s doing not really understanding much but it intrigued me. My father was a software engineer. I loved watching him just code and every time that the TV broke my father would always call me down from my room in order to help revive it and that really sparked my interest in technology.

I grew up in Nigeria but then I moved to the United States and I was trying to you know pay for college and one of the ways to pay for college was through pitch competitions and I was good at that because you know I always love solving problems and then I realized that you know technology was very essential to kind of creative solving problems at skill. One of the biggest things that I was interested in was art drawing anything really creative but I always love puzzles and I always loved solving puzzles. It kind of led me into computer science and so in 11th grade I made that pivot.

I changed to computer science my sophomore year. I remember my first interview and I was like, "Oh my god, why did I sign up for this? I’m not good enough." Technology is just like a really vast ocean.

There’s so many things going on and you think you have to know everything. It’s really overwhelming. My parents are both non-English speakers.

So, it was about like balancing both school and also their work as well. Also, the pressure of like how can I make my parents American dream come true. CodePath was the first one to open the door for me.

I didn’t even know about CodePath until I met someone at my school. I found my tribe, I guess you could say. I found people who were beginners like me who kind of started a little bit later like me.

Codepart is a great support system. The friends you make at Kop and the mentors you make along the way are great support system to help you achieve the goal you have in mind. And I saw that they offered a variety of classes such as cyber security, technical interview prep, iOS development.

Do you see students that look like you who have the same dreams as you? I think the main difference between my college classes and this CodePath course that I took was the fact that I could learn a lot of new outside principles of what I need in careers rather than just the principles of the computer themselves. In the future, I want to become a cyber security engineer, maybe work for the CIA.

And by doing so, I think I’ll also be empowering women to pursue a career in tech. I would definitely take any opportunity I can get to help someone like me, someone who feels lost like I did. So, having that skills that I have, passing it down to more people, it’s not only going to benefit them, but also the world around us.

New products, new innovation, new technology, all these things are going to be created by our future generations. I think my mom is definitely proud of me. She tells me all the time