Alma Secerbegovic, assistant professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Tuzla has started the "GirlTHing" story, and all for purpose of encouraging female students and women in general to be more active in IT sector. Through her experience in the education process, professor Alma has noticed that female students are quieter than their male colleagues.
As an initiative GirlTHing started its work in the end of 2018. In the year 2019, we have become a branch of Student Council of Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Tuzla, within which we operate for the next 20 months. After winning the competition "Women in Tech", 17th of September 2020, we begin to operate as an Association of young women "GirlTHing", and thus we enable all young people, especially girls, regardless of whether they study at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering or not, to become members of GirlTHing.
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As an initiative we began our work 28th of December 2018, and since that day we count our successes. We measure them with the number of children and young people we managed to include in out activities, projects, and also with the number of current members.
We don't forget about our former members who were the part of GirlTHing story. Each one of them left her signature and indelible mark since the beggining. And how GirlTHing helped them, find out below.
GirlTHing showed me that there is no room for limitations and obstacles, and that we can do everything we want if we work hard for it. Let's take advantage of the opportunities offered to us to gain practical knowledge! I am currently employed in company Virgin Pules as a Software Engineer II.
It was within this organisation that I worked with various programming languages and used softwares that meant a lot to me, first when I was doing mini-practice at Ericsson Nikola Tesla in Zagreb, and today it means a lot to me in my master's studies, where students are expected to have good prior knowledge in programming and that they know how to use various tools. I am currently enrolled in my master studies at Technical University of Vienna, Department of Telecommunications and an electrical engineer at Siemens Mobility.
Besides socializing, sharing knowledge and experience with other girls, I had the opportunity to work on things that I did not encounter during my college, such as Arduino and development of Android applications. So, those are the things that I would single out as the most significant for me. In addition to participating in workshops, I had the opportunity to see how things are done "behind the scenes" and thus working on projects writing and their implementation. Currently I am a Software Engineer II at Virgin Pulse and I am a student of Master's degreee at Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Tuzla.
Girls, especially from Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Tuzla are lucky to have an association like this one. A place where they have the opportunities to learn a lot of things. Even those girls, whose interests are not quite related to IT have a lot of opportunities to work on themselves, in many different ways. For me, as an example, I had the opportunity to work on my communication skills, my self-confidence, teamwork and much more. It helped me to approach college and work from a different angle and understand how things actually work. The girls are there for each other, to back each other up, and to give you the wind in the back and in this way you have the opportunity to get the best of yourself and your maximum. I work as a QA Engineer at Marvelsoft and I am a student of Master's degreee at Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Tuzla.
An environment that gives us the opportunity to learn something new, not only in theory, but also practice. The projects are an imitation of real work environment (organisation, division of tasks, communication), which provides quite a good introduction for first employment. For me, the most significant project was the "E - attendance" project where I had my first contact with Python, that continued throughout my career as a Data Analyst at Virgin Pulse.
GirlTHing as an association gave me the chance to make my first steps towards ICT industry. Within GirlTHing I have learned how the applications are really made. I had the opportunity to work in a team, to present my ideas and to work on some new and interesting things. I think that my time in GirlTHing allowed me to make a lot of progress and it looked great on my CV while I was looking for a job. Currently, I work as an Android engineer at Endava.
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