To mark Computer Science Week CodePlus, held a CS Career event to provide an opportunity for female secondary school students to hear from women working in tech careers or studying computing courses at third level.
CodePlus is a collaboration between the School of Education University of Galway, School of Computer Science University of Limerick and the School of Computer Science & Statistics Trinity College Dublin.
On April 25th, over 200 girls from schools across Ireland attended the information event in the Synge Theatre in TCD. There were two groups of speakers and plenty of time for Q&A.
In the first conversation two senior women working in the sector, Caroline O’Reilly (Workday Ireland) and Áine Denn (entrepreneur) spoke about their career journey, the changing role of women in the tech industry, and the wide range of career options open to a graduate with a degree in computing. Both Áine and Caroline are graduates of Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin.
The second panel included women at an earlier stage in their careers. Rachel Healy (Salesforce), Kira Nikitina (Bank of America), and Rachel Ring (Studying Computing in TU Dublin and a Generation Google Scholar) spoke about why they are interested in pursuing careers in tech, the diversity of roles available within the tech sector.
All the speakers gave some advice to the young women in the audience on how to prepare for courses or careers in the tech sector. The girls in the audience had plenty of questions for both panels and went away excited about the possibilities discussed in the session.
CodePlus is supported by Google Ireland, Bank of America, and Lero/Science Foundation Ireland.