ada lovelace day!

Just one long ago,
Placed correctly... yes, just so!
Makes all the diff'rence.


Today is Ada Lovelace Day!  That means that this blog post is to be dedicated to my tech heroine.

And who's that?

It's gotta be Sarah Loos.

When I got to college, I was floundering around with no particular plan in mind: try some of this, try some of that... throw enough spaghetti and one strand's bound to stick.  Anyway, I guess I accidentally wound up sticking to her.  She's also a mathematics and CS major (though she started in math and branched to CS, while I went the other way), and she's super involved in all the things that I found myself getting involved in, too: Women In Computing, Math Club, peer tutoring, etc., etc.

I mean, I'm always one to "hang with the boys" or whatever, but I don't know what I would've done if Sarah hadn't moved out to California to work at Google when I did.  It was helpful to have a familiar and supportive face out in the sea of random, scary Canadians (hi, guys).  She introduced me to a number of professors who wound up being influential during my stay at IU, and she convinced me to more or less follow in her footsteps through IU in several respects.  Really in almost any IUCS activity I can think of she was there to introduce me to people and provide backup socialisation if I had a hard time connecting with anyone.

She powered through all that sort of stuff without me, though.  We've talked about how she had (next to) no girls in her classes after the introductory level of CS, and she seems to have turned out alright.  She was part of the pilot of an all-female peer tutoring programme for the introductory CS course at IU.  Making women in tech visible and empowered is definitely deep in her psyche somewhere.

And now she's doing a PhD in CS at Carnegie Mellon University.  If that doesn't mean much to you, I'll just say that it's damn impressive.  Yay, Sarah.  :)