I’ve definitely learned, through being a part of Girls Who Code and through having multiple jobs in tech companies, how to present myself and how to interview well and how to best represent myself.

Related was the challenge of trying to assert ourselves as two very capable females in tech who wanted to organize a hackathon. When we reached out to potential sponsors our capacity was overshadowed by the fact that we were high school students — they assumed we didn’t know what we were doing.

The reason I created def hacks() with my friend, Emily Redler, was because we wanted to create a hackathon environment that was specifically receptive to high-school students, because typically this group is overlooked when it comes to hackathons — college students are more welcome because they have more experience and they’re a little bit older. We wanted to target high school students because — at the time — we were high school students. Also this group is important because they are younger, which gives them more flexibility to learn.