Yamini Polcum

Pieces of advice from this program that have stuck out to me are to constantly be taking risks and knowing that help is always closer than you think. Vidya spoke to us during week one about her upbringing into the person she is today and about what Glowtouch Technologies was founded upon, and something that she constantly did was take risks. She was in a rough financial situation and she was looking for a job and then one day she sees this flyer of someone looking for a computer programmer. So she taught herself how to code in a weekend and then took the job — and her major wasn’t even related to technology! But what she kept telling herself was “What’s the worst that could happen?”. She wanted the ability to support her family and help her brother, who was having some company troubles of his own, so this company was founded out of need. She told herself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” In Hidden Figures, when Mary wanted to be an engineer but she couldn’t because of the color of skin, she went to the courthouse to get her right to be the first African-American at an all white school. She was very persistent and took a risk — a risk that really paid off in the end.  Joshua Jacob also spoke to us during week one about his science fair project. Although I am not a big science enthusiast, Joshua said something that really resonated with me: “Help is always closer than you think.” I don’t ask for help that often because I believe that I can figure it out somehow and not “look like a fool”, but after seeing that Josh asked his mentors so many questions, that showed me that I don’t actually look like a fool when I ask for help. What I realized is that you succeed when you ask for help because now you know more than you did before.

After making a website from scratch with html and css, I have learned that I can be a little impatient. I have also learned that even the smallest adjustments and additions to my website excites me. When I hit roadblocks, I play around with it and then ask for help. I am really excited to see how my finished website looks but as of right now, it is far from finished. I learned how to do cool little hover animations which is also exciting.