I wanted to talk to you today about why I think technology is such a great field to enter. But, first, I think I need to tell you a bit about who I am and how I got here.

Geek^3

Fifteen years ago, when I was fourteen, my mother sat me down for a “chat.” She told me I had to take one programming class before I graduated high school.

Now, for some people, it’s surprising that it was my mother – and not, say, my father – who would require me to learn to code. But the truth is that I’m far from the first woman in my family to be “geeky.”

In fact, it started with my grandmother. My grandmother was the first woman at John Hopkins University in engineering. This was in the 1940s of course – a time when few women even went to college, let alone take something as “serious” as engineering.

My grandmother later transferred to Cornell with my grandfather, where they wouldn’t let women enroll in engineering. So instead, she did a math major, but decided to sit in on — and do the coursework for — my grandfather’s engineering courses. I can only imagine how well that went over with my grandfather’s buddies, to have his wife in their classes. And kicking their butts.

When she graduated, she and my grandfather started a successful engineering firm together – a company that they ran for the rest of their lives.

My grandmother lived in a world where the rules actually barred her from doing what she wanted – but she found a way to do it anyway. Her attitude was “rules be dammed. I’m going to do what I want.”

My grandmother must have set a good example, because three of her four daughters chose engineering majors. My mother, of course, was one of them.

I once asked my mom why she majored in electrical engineering. Her response: “Because it was the hardest.” Well, okay then.

By the late 1960s, when my mother was in college, the rules had slightly relaxed from my grandmother’s time – women were now actually permitted to major in engineering. Of course, that didn’t stop her professors from actively discouraging her from pursuing the sciences.

Her freshman year, her physics professor asked all the students who got As on the midterm to stay after class. My mother, one of the A students, listened as the professor explained why they should all strongly consider engineering. He explained that it was a difficult exam, and by getting an A, they have  demonstrated that they have quantitative skills and ambition to excel in such a rigorous field.

After his speech, the students got up to leave. The professor then pulled my mother aside: “Oh, Kathy, obviously I didn’t mean you…”

My mother went on to not only major in electrical engineering, but also to get her PhD in it – while working full time. She’s now launching her fourth medical device company.

So, you see, when my mother told me that I was required to take a programming class, there would be no whining about it being too hard, or there not being enough girls in it, or it being too nerdy or geeky or whatever. If my mother could do it, and her mother – not to mention my aunts too  – with actual real obstacles in the way, the least I could do was give it a shot.

I wasn’t too happy about the situation, but what choice did I have? So, I figured I’d take computer science my freshman year of high school and get it out of the way.

Becoming an Inventor

Unfortunately, then, something terrible happened: my mother was actually right about something. Which is weird, really, because when are parents ever right about anything? But, the sad truth was… I loved programming.

Programming was different than anything else I’d done before. I’ve always enjoy math and science, but this was more like… grown up legos.

I was the kind of little girl who, when she got a barbie, was like, “but what does it actually do?” I never really understood what other girls like about Barbies. I mean, rearranging Barbie’s limbs to make Mutant Barbie and then setting its hair on fire was fun and all, but then what do you do with it? Booooooooring.

I much preferred legos. I loved legos as a little kid. I loved how you could turn these tiny little bricks – that, really, were stupid and useless on their own – into houses, cars, stores, and so on. Programming was just like that. Building some really cool thing from these basic little parts.

Actually, programming was more like super-charged grown up legos, because you could do so much more with it. In my first two months of programming, I was already writing games – in fact, some of the same games I remember growing up. Except this time, I was writing the games. So they went by my rules.

And that’s what’s so remarkable about technology – it gives you the ability to create.

Most of my non-techie friends are in what I would call analytical roles. Some sit at their desks and analyze financial reports. Others analyze market data and make recommendations. That’s great – hey, the world needs those people too. But, interestingly, so many of them say, “darn, I wish I’d gotten an engineering degree.”

Because that’s what’s so empowering about technology. You’re not studying what’s already there, or analyzing a bunch of information. You’re not piling through mountains of numbers to make vague projections about the future. You’re actually creating something new. You are an inventor, and you can invent anything you want. You have immense power.

College Opportunities

So I stuck with Computer Science for the rest of high school, and throughout college. Now, I’ll be honest. It’s not always fun. Some aspects are less enjoyable than others, and there are great teachers and less than great teachers in every subject. Plus, it can be really challenging sometimes.

What got me through these courses – the reason that I stuck with it – is that I found a side of it that I loved. I loved the part where I was actually building software. And I knew, that if I stuck with it, I would not only love what I did, but I would get some incredible opportunities.

After my freshman year of college, I landed one of the prestigious Microsoft internships and got flown out to live in Seattle for the summer. While most of my non-CS friends were working at restaurants, I was building real experience. That was amazing.

Opportunities like this are so much more common in engineering because the US is severely lacking in sufficient technical talents. Companies are literally throwing everything they can to recruit talented engineers. Huge paychecks. Free gourmet lunches and dinners. Free soft drinks. Onsite massages. Flexible hours. Bring your dog to work (cats are rarely permitted – sorry cat lovers). It’s literally perk overload.

What can you do with an engineering / computer science degree? Anything and everything.

But the true benefits of pursuing computer science are not just money and glitzy perks. It’s about this simple fact: you can swim farther and faster when the tide is in your favor.

So I wanted to speak to you all to tell you all to pursue technology and engineering careers.

Not just because we need more females (but we do).

Not just because we need more people in the field (but we really, really do).

But also for you — because I truly believe that it’s one of the best investments in yourselves that you can make. The possibilities are endless.

When I graduated from school, I took a role as a Software Engineer for Google. Now, many people think, “well, of course that’s what you do with a computer science degree. You go write code for some big company.” But the truth is that there is no standard career path.

• Some of my classmates chose to join a start-up instead and build software all day.
• Some went to start-ups to design, but not actually build, the software.
• Some went into marketing roles because a CS degree is really, really valuable there.
• A lot of people went to take on a role called Program or Product Management, where they help figure out what kind of software people wanted.
• And then a bunch of my friends went to work for banks on wall street. They love CS majors there, even for non-coding roles, because it’s like a giant stamp of approval that you’re smart, quantitative, and can work hard.
• And still others went to launch their own businesses.
• One good friend of mine went to be an agent for stand-up comics in New York. And, yes, he was a computer science major too.
• A few went on to get their masters and PhD degrees, and are working towards becoming a professor or a researcher.
• Still others went on to become lawyers. In fact, some types of law require an engineering degree.

Many are still doing what they started off as – though much more senior – while others have switched careers. The fact is that it’s easy to switch careers and to move up quickly and to do anything you want when you have a skill that is desperately in demand.

For me, I graduated college and went to work at Google as a software engineer. A few years later, I sort of accidentally launched a company and I’m now some bizarre mix of an engineer, an author, and an entrepreneur.

And I can tell you, without a doubt, it would be a whole lot harder to be any of those things – let alone all of them, or be successful in all of them – without a technical degree. It just wouldn’t be possible.

As I said before, you can swim farther and faster when the tide is in your favor.

The Future

What I’m most excited for though is the future. My future. Your futures. Everyone’s future.

Technology is increasingly the backbone of the world. You connect with your friends through your iPhone. You record the events of your life in digital pictures and then you upload them to Facebook and Flickr. You can do almost all your research for school work online. You can decide that you want a song or book or movie and be reading or listening or watching within seconds. You might buy so much stuff online that you may forget that actual, physical stores exist.

But what’s happening today goes so, so far beyond that.

• Self-driving cars are being developed as we speak. This doesn’t just make your parents’ morning commute a little less stressful. It’ll also give freedom to disabled people who may currently depend on other people for getting around .
• Foreign language translation is not just about dodging learning French and Spanish in school. It also will connect people in non-English speaking countries, giving them access to critical agricultural and healthcare information.
• Video conferencing is helping grandparents watch their children grow up. It’s enabling soldiers to say hi to their children on their birthdays. But it’s also enabling patients in developing countries or rural areas to speak with a doctor.
• Robotic devices help Amazon ship your purchases to you cheaply and efficiently. But they also help find survivors after earthquakes and tsunamis.
• Even things as seemingly frivolous as YouTube, or Twitter, or Facebook is helping launch revolutions around the world. And even within the US, it’s enabling kids who are victims of gay bullying to connect with people who will support them and tell them hey, it gets better. This stuff is so, so important and technology is enabling it.

So technology is not just about making our lives easier and more convenient. It’s also about saving our lives. It’s about connecting with friends, family, and even strangers around the world. It’s about learning and growing. And sometimes, it’s just about making our lives a little less hard and a little more fun.

Where do we go from here?

In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. That was a pretty cool thing at the time – light bulbs basically eliminated the need for candles. But to say that that – eliminating candles – was the entirety of his impact would be doing a great disservice to Mr. Edison. After all, I don’t think you can build a computer monitor with hundreds of mini-candles. So no light bulb means no computers, no smart phones, and virtually none of the technology we depend on today.

This is where we are with technology. With the internet, computers, and mobile devices, we’ve only just scratched at the surface of what we can do. This isn’t going away; in fact, the pace is accelerating. We can barely even guess at where things will go from here. We just know that it’s going to be really exciting.

Technology is a wave that’s moving very fast, and it’s growing in size. It stands to change everything in its path.

So get on board.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell is author of two books, Cracking the Coding Interview and The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company. While Cracking the Coding Interview is a deep-dive into coding interviews, The Google Resume is a comprehensive book covering a person’s full career path. It starts from how someone should be thinking about college courses, majors, and other topics, up through resume, cover letters, interviews, offers, and graduate schools. It’s the perfect book to help guide yours or your child’s career. [Click here to purchase it on Amazon.com.]

I’ve come up with these five skills that, I believe, virtually guarantee success in life.

1. Writing

This doesn’t mean you need to write beautiful, eloquent prose; in fact, if misused, that’s often a negative. Good writing means that you can communicate your point clearly and concisely. You need to be able to structure your thoughts and understand what information is and isn’t essential. And, of course, you need to be able to write with correct grammar and spelling.

2. Communication Skills

By communication, I am including not only public speaking, but also one-on-one or small group interactions. Like written communication skills, you need to be able to structure your thoughts and understand what’s important. You also need the confidence to not get nervous in front of large crowds. Many people struggle with the last one, but fortunately, practice will largely solve this.

3. Confidence

Confident people do better in life. You don’t need to think you’re better than everyone else; you just need to believe that you are good enough to achieve what you want. Confidence will help you push for your goals and to ask for what you want in life.

4. Quantitative Skills

Being able to sort through information and make data-driven decisions will help you make better decisions. It will also set you apart from the crowd, as far too many people are intimidated by numbers.

5. Programming

This isn’t essential, but it is a skill that, if you have it, will help you tremendously. The U.S. has a severe shortage of qualified programmers. If you’re smart and can code, you’re basically guaranteed a great job out of college.  But if you don’t want to dedicate your life to coding (and even most Computer Science graduates don’t), knowing how to write code will still be a very valuable skill. Businesses are increasingly built on technology. If you can understand computers at a deep level, you will open yourself up to fantastic jobs at tech companies — and many, many jobs elsewhere.

What do you think? What skills do you consider to be the most valuable?

From what the people we met told us, the impact of Millennium Villages has been striking. The impact of One Laptop Per Child, which aims to put an ultra-cheap ($165 + training and maintenance costs) laptop in the hands of each child (not family, and not school), has been a bit more questionable. This is particularly true when you look at its per-dollar impact.

The School

It was around noon on a Tuesday when we arrived at the rural school. Today was a half day, which they do twice a week to keep costs low. The morning students were returning home as the afternoon students were arriving to take their places. Each kid was carrying his or her papers or books. No one had their laptop. Where were these $165 laptops? Left at home. Even if they wanted to use their laptops, they couldn’t do much with them. As is common in this town, the internet hadn’t been working for several days.

The teacher who showed us around was proud to show off the gadgets. Apparently the kids love taking pictures of themselves with the built-in camera. That was as far as the “impact” he mentioned went.

The school lunch program, however, he praised. By giving otherwise hungry students free lunch at school, attendance had increased dramatically. You want kids to get an education? Feed them.

The Hospital

The true lost opportunity for OLPC funds really hits you when you go to the hospital. This town, as a beneficiary of Millennium Villages, was one of the lucky ones. They had adequately trained nurses. Refrigerators to store medicines. Equipment to test people for malaria and HIV, and the drugs to treat them. And, perhaps most significantly, birth control.

Our guide was nearly boastful about the family planning clinic, and he awkwardly  pushed us through the crowd of women awaiting treatment. He whipped out a packet of birth control pills and explained to us how they worked: “Green pills for three weeks. Pinks pills for one. Don’t get them confused. Is very bad.”

In just a few years, the usage of birth control pills had increased from non-existent to over 60%. When families have just two extra mouths to feed, instead of seven or eight, children have more food, more clean water, and more medicine.

Healthcare premiums are just $2 per person per year (true cost is $10 – $20), but most people still can’t afford that.

The Impact

No doubt, OLPC has added value to the students it has reached. The question though, is how much? Is this really the best use of limited resources?

Education is critical to reducing poverty, and certainly, technology is a means to access nearly infinite educational resources online. But if we give one laptop per family, or set up a computer lab in each school, we would touch far more people for far less money.

The choice comes down to this: do you give a family with six children six laptops? Or do you give them one laptop to share, and then cover the healthcare premiums of another 500 children?

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard argument on a case where a 13 year old girl – an honor student who had never been in trouble – was strip searched at school because she was suspected of having ibuprofen. Now, if that doesn’t infuriate you already, listen to the facts of the case:

Redding says she was then asked to strip down to her underwear and stood there while the nurse and secretary inspected her clothes and shoes.

“Then, you know, I thought they were going to let me put my clothes back on, but instead they asked me to pull out my bra and shake it, and the crotch on my underwear, too,” Redding says.

Redding says her whole body was visible to the school administrators. She kept her head down so the nurse and the secretary couldn’t see her fighting back tears.

And all this for what is basically Advil. Ugh.

This was more than a strip search. This was assault:

1. A young girl was forced to show her private parts.
2. The school did not search the girl’s locker or desk, but they did search the girl’s crotch.
3. The harm in traumatizing a girl far outweighs the harm of a couple of students from taking ibuprofen.

When you look at these facts, you see that the school’s search was not conducted in a way to find the ibuprofen (since they didn’t search the girl’s locker or desk), nor did they balance the harm of an invasive search against the risks of mild pain killers. Thus, it seems that the administrators were on a powertrip that ended in assaulting a girl.

I hope that the Supreme Court makes the right decision. While there is a time and place to do strip searches (eg, in jail), school officials are not trained to do so. If you think a student poses that much of a danger that an invasive search is required, then call the cops. Strip searches should never be conducted by school officials.

The authorities will be able to track San Antonio students with a history of skipping school using ankle bracelets with Global Positioning System monitoring. Linda Penn, a justice of the peace, said she expected that some 50 students would wear the devices in a six-month pilot program. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the plan, but Ms. Penn linked truancy with later criminal activity. “We can teach them now or run the risk of possible incarceration later on life,” she said. “I don’t want to see the latter.”

You’re going to give kids ankle bracelets? To do what, exactly? It’s not like you don’t know if they skip school – the morning roll call already does that. It will, however, ensure that they’re treated like criminals.

Let’s look at how the Ivy League – the group of schools America loves to hate – fared in the newest contest:

College	US News	Forbes
Princeton	#1	#1
Harvard	#2	#3
Yale	#3	#9
Columbia	#9	#10
Brown	#14	#27
Penn	#5	#61
Cornell	#12	#121
Dartmouth	#11	#127

Yes, that’s right – Wabash College (#12) and Centre College (#13) are all better than half of the Ivy League.

While I firmly believe that one can get a great education anywhere, something is just not right about these rankings.

It becomes quite apparent when you look at Forbes’ methodology:

(1) Listing of Alumni in the 2008 Who’s Who in America (25%)

Ironically, Forbes’ itself wrote an article (“The Hall of Lame“) criticizing that it “appears to contain a lot of relatively unaccomplished people who simply nominated themselves…” Apparently, the majority of those who apply are selected. Anyone want to be in Who’s Who? Think of how you’ll help your college!

(2) Student Evaluations of Professors from RateMyProfessors.com (25%)

Students’ input about professors to RateMyProfessors is limited to four criteria: Clarity, Easiness, Helpfulness and Hotness. Nowhere in there do the students provide information about how much they learned. And this accounts for a whopping 25% of Forbes’ rankings? At least Forbes decided not to include “hotness” as a criteria.

(3) Four- Year Graduation Rates (16 2/3%)

This criteria appears a tad more fair. But still, what about a school which has a large number of students pursuing double majors, simultaneous masters degrees, etc? Some school encourage these sorts of academic challenges which would drop their four year graduation rate, while other schools effectively prohibit it.

(4) Enrollment-adjusted numbers of students and faculty receiving nationally competitive awards (16 2/3%)

For once, I have no complaint about this criteria. Ok, ok, maybe just one: is the sample statistically size fair?

(5) Average four year accumulated student debt of those borrowing money (16 2/3%)

For the 64% of students who do borrow money for school, leave it to them to decide if going into debt is worth it.

This is like ranking cars based on the average debt of its owners.

Forbes should be embarrassed by their list. 50% of the rankings are derived from extremely unreliable sources, and another 16.6% is a financial consideration that is best left up to each individual student. If you took their list seriously, you would be led to believe that a small, liberal college is the only place to get a solid education in this country.

What’s really shocking about this list is that no one at Forbes took a glance at this list and said, “Hey, guys, did we really mean to put Hampden-Sydney College over 250 spots above NYU?”

Shame on Forbes. I’d expect better statistics from such a source.