Picture this. You were born in the year 1997, and as you were growing up in the early 2000s, Santa would gift you the newest set of Barbie dolls for Christmas, with their silky blond hair and shiny synthetic clothes. As a girl, pink was the color of the ridiculously expensive pencil case you would force your Mom to invest in, with the excuse of the start of a new school year. You still remember the painful time in primary school when you learned the word “engineer” — those e’s, and n’s, and g’s, which would somehow never fall into the right place when you’d sit the much-dreaded spelling test. Besides the oddly placed vowels and consonants, that word would also give you chills because of the meaning it carried: a math-heavy, dry, and dull profession, the one that was “for men”, as your Mom used to tell you (not anymore though! You’d get really mad at her if she did that now…). Does this sound even a tad familiar?
As a sponge, you gradually absorbed the social norms dominating your environment when you were a child — slowly but surely, your subconscious began to sort people’s appearances, objects, and even professions in two imaginary categories — the “for-girls” and “for-boys” boxes (respectively baby pink and Tiffany blue…). Suddenly, a time machine catapulted you into the future: one day, you wake up in the morning, only to realize that you are now in the present. What a journey it’s been! You still like girly clothes, not much has changed. Except — almost two decades have passed, and you still know absolutely nothing about what, for instance, software engineers do: you do get the software part (that’s what you’re always trying to download for free), but when you hear the word Python, the first thought that comes to mind is confined to the reptiles you see in the news, making their ways undisturbed into the homes of terrorized residents in Australia. A day comes when you are staring at the internship advertisements on the Careers website of your Uni: you’re an adult (on paper, at least), next year you will be graduating, and it is high time to do something productive with your summer. You come across this Business & Marketing position at a tiny tech startup in Sweden. As soon as you see the word “tech”, you are about to act like Ariana Grande — say “Thank you, next”, yet something stops your instinctive reaction to click onto the next ad. You begin to wonder — why is it that I feel so nervous about this word?
That is where my tech story begins. When I first applied to imagiLabs for a summer internship in Business Development & Marketing, let’s be honest, I did not think I would be successful. Even though the position was business-oriented, I did not think I would be considered suitable to work in a tech environment, being a Political Science major who had never written a single line of code in her life. Yet, upon submitting my CV, I received an interview invitation, likely thanks to my strong prior social media marketing experience and immaculate academic record. In that moment, I began to unpack my anxieties regarding tech, and think rationally about the irrationality of being afraid of something I didn’t even have much knowledge about (of course, besides the stereotypes I grew up with). The best for last. I actually became excited about the idea of kicking those fears right where it hurts. The mission of imagiLabs was one I could easily identify with: “After all”, I thought to myself, “I support fostering gender equality in STEM disciplines starting from a young age. Who knows, I might be a programmer myself if I had been given the tools (and the courage) to discover coding earlier”. Long story short, after a successful interview, I took a huge leap out of my comfort zone.
