Girls at CS (12/16/2025)

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Girls in CS Notes and Takeaways

Testament of Attendance

Takeaways

• There’s no single path into CS. People switched majors, started late, or discovered CS through hobbies like Legos, photography, or design. Reflection matters more than having everything figured out early.
• High school classes and ECs really do help. AP classes, CS courses, and clubs build time management, communication, and problem-solving skills that transfer directly to college.
• Breaking big problems into small steps is a huge skill. Everyone talked about using iteration, timelines, scrum/kanban boards, and focusing on one small piece at a time.
• Project ideas often come from real life. Notice problems around you, talk to users, do interviews, build a small MVP, and improve it based on feedback.
• Communication is just as important as coding. Being able to explain your code, write good comments, document your work, and focus on user impact matters a lot in teams.
• College essays don’t need to be super technical. Many focused on impact, curiosity, resilience, or community instead of just CS skills.
• PBL (project-based learning) is extremely valuable. It teaches initiative, collaboration, and how real-world software is built.
• Take advantage of opportunities early. Network, talk to people in industry, try new things, and don’t be afraid to put yourself out there.
• Final message: work hard, have fun with CS, and use school to build skills so you still have time to enjoy life outside of class.

Notes

• Panel: Michael Hayes, Tanisha Patel, Aadit Mathur, and Neha
• Question: What inspired me to choose my major?
• Answer (neha): Wanted to do pre-law - had inspiration that this wasn't for me - then decided to switch to CS since was close to tech - reflection before going into college.
• Answer (aadit): Did legos as a child - wanted to build things himself and very interested in tech even in middle school and taking Mortenson's class. Had lots of different interests that could be useful even if going to other fields like private equity,
• Answer (michael): interested in photography or filmmaking and enjoyed process of taking self initiative - with creative things had same satisfaction - CS's sense of accomplishment lead
• Question: What ECs and activities helped prepare?
• Answer (neha): AP classes built critical thinking and writing skills and communication (write reports) blah blah blah basic ahh answer
• Answer (aadit): Did cyberpatriot and helped him get comfortable with computers - useful for CS skills and classwork helped him with time management - later classes take less time and the rigor (courses and homework) helped him in college
• Answer (michael): Del norte does good job with communication skills - writing and deep analysis - did an internship at startup incubator at SDSDU - in meeting was trying to take complicated and translate to be understandable to a non-technical individual
• Answer (tanisha): Environment at del norte and CSSE, CSP, and CSA helped
• Question: How do you break problems into small steps?
• Answer (aggregate): Iteration helps, timelines, kanban boards, and moving to final product - learn how to apply in college. Aadit for instance had a scrum board - who is doing what issues what tickets - how deploying works had to do a fullstack project (frontend and backend). Michael had a PBL class and designed APIs before having written code (YAML style file to them use OpenAI schema to generate API for you) - taking it down to the smallest piece. LIke a watermelon to slice up into smaller and smaller pieces. Tanisha uses ML systems and had to breakdown problems into data, designing schema, creating scrum boards, timelines, etc. Overall, all use project management like agile and breakdown stuff.
• Question: How do you come up with project ideas?
• Answer (neha): Human computer interaction - focused on making a design - creating a solution for writers to help put their ideas on paper - did rounds and rounds of user research - putting users first.
• Answer (aadit): In internships is that they often tell you the task and you have to delineate and then work to finish that task. If an idea pops up that seems interesting as you walk or exist in every day life you should annotate and note it down as you do it.
• Answer (michael): When he made his resume he had his own project he used a modularizing code system using FastAPI and with project ideas like doing customer interviews and customer research. Suggests giving like an MVP and prototype/wireframe to users interact with it without any guidance or advice on the information can get new ideas from that and iterate from that as well
• Question: Did you write about CS/data science or whatnot in college essays? If so, how?
• Answer (neha): Not applicable to her as didn't apply as CS major. Choose to highlight personal experiences and ECs.
• Answer (aadit): Focused on nonprofit, impact, and community rather than focusing on academics and other stuff like that.
• Answer (michael): Talked about CSA program and ambassador program - focused on curiosity and talked about always looking to learn mroe and explore.
• Answer (tanisha): Big focus was being resilient and talked about getting a late start in CS then using that to grow.
• Question: What skills from high school helped you in college?
• Answer (neha): To do well with time management, communicate well with other people, collaborate on a big scale project.
• Answer (aadit): Talk him grit and being able to work hard - is used to stress and is prepared well for public speaking and did lots of presentations that helped him in classes. Is in a consulting club in college and his presentation skills help there.
• Answer (michael): Had less presentation in college and most importation skill he learned was being able to take initiative how do you plan the project - helped him answer interview questions about project breakdown and organization that he believes was developed at Del Norte.
• Answer (tanisha): Believed Mr. Mort's class helped a lot as she had no technical background and learned different ways to learn other than asking the teacher to help: stack overflow and chatGPT.
• Question: How helpful is it to talk through your code with others?
• Answer (neha): Need to have meaningful commit messages, should be able to verbally talk through code, need high quality comments and communication is the number one thing in any project as it required to be on the same page.
• Answer (aadit): Uses AI agents or LLMs to understand codebase and often had to make entity state diagrams.
• Answer (michael): Building a project that is meant to helped coordination and wrote documents about new thing sto learned and shared that with rest of the team to get whats in your brain to rest of team so they have documentation to refer to it later and see multiple times if not clear. When talking about projects focus on how the user is and talk about impact rather than focusing on technical details which enables better communication.
• Answer (tanisha): Same answer as above - no insight.
• Question: Have you worked with agile and scrum?
• Answer (neha): Didn't work on this stuff until this quarter (3rd year) and UCLA is very theoretical and low level programming until now hasn't really had chance to practice.
• Answer (rest): Same stuff
• Question: Last advice?
• Answer (neha): Stay up to date and learn news.
• Answer (aadit): Try your best in everything and have while doing it - learn new things - if it is up to you then you can achieve it whether it be creating your company, internship, etc.
• Answer (michael): One thing he wished did was to look closer at what courses actual offered at school look at PBL courses and lecture based courses - try to focus on PBL courses. Look at classes or things at university outside of your degree like he had a friend who did rowing after never rowing before.
• Answer (tanisha): Number one piece of advice would be to take advantage of the PBL based class opportunity you have in Mort's class. Make sure you have connections or at network events connect to people and then talk to amazing people in industry who are willing to help high schoolers/college students - put yourself out there to get contacts and information.
• Wrapup (mort): mort wants to have fun doing CS in class and start to figure out how CS can be fun - work really hard in class so you can have freetime outside of class.