Alexis Williams: Individuality
Alexis Williams (she/her) is currently a student at NYU, majoring in integrated digital media with a concentration in computer science and web development. Today on Humanizing Tech, Anusha and Ochuko share insights around Alexis’s rising career in tech, her experiences and how they relate, and how she uses digital content to inspire other young women in computer science. Alexis is known for her action-oriented solutions and multidisciplinary perspective, which she makes accessible through social media, her podcast, and her website. In this episode, our hosts reflect about how important it is for tech environments to hold the space for young women and BIPOC coders to thrive and encourage listeners to bring your individuality to the table, no matter what your differences are.
Find Alexis on TikTok @lelegenevieve. Listen and support her podcast, Clueless with Alexis. Take action on her website and resources, www.pb-resources.com/.
Transcript
Introduction:
Welcome to humanizing tech. We interview people to dig below the surface of their achievements and challenges showcasing the story behind the story. We believe that focusing on the person and humanizing their lived experiences will help us shape the future of tech.
Ochuko Akpovbovbo:
Welcome to Humanizing Tech Innovators. These short segments celebrate individuals from the past who have changed the world through technological innovations and young people today who are shaping the future of tech for all of us.
Hi everyone. It's Ochuko back here again, and I'm actually in a very good mood today. So I think I've mentioned before, but in this whole group between minutia and the non-techie, and in a lot of tech spaces, I'm a non-techie right? But I haven't got a job that puts me closer to tech, that's fair because I'm in college right now. I'm an econ major, but I got this amazing job at Envision Accelerator, which is the first student led virtual accelerator that really caters to women and BIPOC founders. And here I am suddenly working with all these tech companies and I'm happy and I feel like I'm more in myself. And so I'm having a really good time with that.
Anusha Neelam:
Yeah, no, I mean, I love to hear it. I knew that you got a new job and I wanted to, I wanted to hear more about it. So that's exciting.
Ochuko:
Thank you. Now it's like really, really great. And it really ties into what we do here in humanizing tech, innovators and stuff. And these are really young people, right. And they're minority founders and I'm just excited because they're going to create the next big thing. I know it. And they'll probably be on this podcast some day, so it's really good for us. I'm having a good time.
Anusha:
Yeah. That is awesome to hear. It's especially awesome. Cause I feel like for me right now, work has been super stressful. And it's just been taking up so much of my time that I love hearing about people who are able to get to explore different avenues of things that they're interested in. And I'm also very, very excited to take some time today to just dive in and talk about a young innovator. She's an amazing young woman doing a lot of good work, a lot of good social justice work. So I'm excited to dive into our segment today. So with that today we're going to be talking about Alexis Williams. She's an African-American and Latino coder committed to seeing change through action. Currently she's a student at the Tandon school of engineering at New York university.
She majors in integrated digital media with a concentration in computer science and web development. That was a mouthful. That is awesome. I love it. Alexis took an interest in STEM when she was in middle school, attending various camps and started getting excited about coding challenges that she was taking part in. When she entered high school, she started attending different coding programs through girls who code, Code with Klossy and black girls who code her excitement for a career in tech, started to grow. And she enrolled in an AP computer science course at her school. This exposure pushed her to start pursuing some of her own side projects, such as prototyping a prosthetic hand using Arduino. These side projects grew her passion for coding even further and motivated her to pursue this in college. When I was researching Alexis, one of the interesting things that she had mentioned, and this was on her podcast and she said that her early experiences with computer science never left her feeling limited due to her gender.
And in fact, she talked about how a lot of her experiences were more female centric. And I thought that was super interesting because we mostly hear the opposite in our industry and that tends to be the opposite a lot of the times. And she even mentioned a funny anecdote in her podcast where she attended the worldwide developers conference. And for those of you that don't know, it's pretty much this huge event that happens yearly, that Apple hosts. And when she got there, she started networking like you would, if you go to conferences you know, that you pretty much, that's what you spend a lot of your time doing. And she started talking to someone there for a good, like 10 to 15 minutes, and she didn't even realize it until later that it was Tim Cook, who is the CEO of Apple.
And so that just goes to show you how she was never really exposed to, or really like it wasn't these influencers that we know of in tech that were the focal point of her experiences as a woman who was getting into STEM at the time. And of course she notes that this drastically changes after she had started going into the tech industry. And I took some time to actually reflect on this because I thought it was super interesting and a point worth noting. When I myself attended several different STEM camps when I was in middle school and high school. And I was thinking about what I felt when I was attending those camps and whether my experience resonated with hers. And I suppose in those camps, a lot of the time they bring in different women, engineers and scientists to talk to the group of young girls.
And that does give you the impression that STEM fields are, at least, have a good majority of women in them, but that tends to change as we go further in our careers, if we do pursue STEM. And that that's so interesting because when I was listening to Alexis and her interest in STEM, a lot of it was that she felt like she was around people of a similar background and of similar experiences. And that she says was really what accelerated her interest. And that's so important for us to remember, these moments, these experiences we have, that's what changes how we view what we want to do for a living. And that's a big thing. So anyway, just something that I felt like I needed to share. Cause it's super important to make note of that.
Ochuko:
Yeah. And adding to what you said Anusha, it's interesting because through Alexis you see something that we're talking about a lot about how it's really not an interest issue or an inherent women just not being interested in STEM issue, it's so much a pipeline and environment issue because you can just see her progress here. She'd started, she's really into STEM because it's allowed and she sees other people like her doing STEM. And just think if she wasn't as passionate about what she was doing as she went on in her career, or if she wasn't as confident in her abilities that she went on and career, would she still be where she is today? And so I think it's something that our society is definitely starting to realize, but it has to do more work to really make that change that we're trying to see.
Anusha:
Yeah, absolutely absolutely agreed.
Ochuko:
I'm glad for all our sakes that she stayed in the game though.
Anusha:
Yeah, exactly. Cause I think that's what's going, ultimately, these are the people that have these experiences who are going to start changing the future generations of young women that are going to want to get into STEM fields.
Ochuko:
Yeah.
After her experience at the worldwide developers conference, she started to notice the gender gap in tech a lot more. She said in her interview with NYU news, there is some wavering belief within some people that women are by nature, less than when it comes to STEM fields, which has never made sense to me. So for this reason, teachers would laugh at me for being so passionate about joining high level courses in high school. And I just had an overall difficult time feeling included when there's still such a boys club. It's also tough as you get older and enter more adult spaces as a woman within a STEM field, things got really inappropriate really quickly, and it's hard to have to go through that on a nearly daily basis. This makes me so sad. This makes me really sad because I guess it's just speaking to what we just talked about. Right?
It's really an issue of people's ideas about what women still should do and shouldn't do. And in our society, we love to talk about how progressive we are and how we've moved past these gender roles. But reading stories like this make you realize that that's not really true. We want more women in STEM fields, but do we really? And you know, how do we make it easier for them to do so? And something interesting it speaks to is the type of woman that can succeed in STEM fields, given what this happens. She talks about how she was discouraged. She talks about how she heard these inappropriate comments and I'm assuming Alexis is this amazing strong person. And she was able to get through that.
And I bet a lot of women who are in STEM went through similar things. And so probably happened to be incredibly strong-willed as well. But, and then you see these really dorky tech bros, right? Just who just have to be in their rooms, coding all day and they do so well. And so even though we still, yes, have women in STEM fields, this kind of environment makes it so that certain women really can thrive there, because it's a lot. And we applaud people a lot at the time for being strong and getting through it. But we really want to get to a place where you don't really have to be strong right? To be in the STEM field. That's not one of the coding requirements, I'm sure. So that's something we really do need to think about.
Anusha:
Yeah. I think it is that we normalize the idea of women having to have a thick skin to survive in STEM fields where that should never really be a prerequisite for anybody doing any job really. And she talks about how she had a professor at NYU in her first semester, that really was way harsher on female students than he was on male students. And she just talks about just how hard she was about it all. And that really made her question for a minute whether she was in the right place and whether this is something that she really wanted to do. And that again reminded me of my own experiences. When I first started college, I was also a computer science major. I had later switched to a business with a computer science concentration degree. But early on when I was just in a purely computer science track I had an advisor who was pretty much on a regular basis when I was meeting with her, trying to get me to rethink whether this was for me or not. And I wasn't even doing poorly in my classes. I didn't understand why that conversation ever came up. And I think that's something that’s not the way that it should be - that's for sure.
Ochuko:
And I think what's standing out to me, Anusha, is that that professor was a woman. Like, can we talk about that? [laughs] I think the word I'd use is gatekeeping. And it's a very, very interesting thing that happens pretty often. People who are like you, who are supposed to be encouraging you actually telling you you're not good enough. Do you have any idea why that is the case? Why is that something that we see so often in the tech space?
Anusha:
Yeah. I don't know. I do think about that incident on a regular basis because you're right, I think it's interesting that it was coming from a woman. And it makes you wonder whether this is something that is just so built in systemically that it's just this belief that women are, as Alexis had said, less than when it comes to fields and STEM for whatever reason. And it's important for us to be talking about and having conversations like this, because that's what really drives the change slowly. So but anyway and according to Alexis, it was hard for her growing up in a predominantly white town and she'd face microaggressions and discrimination all the time. And she said, it felt very isolating and lonely. So she turned to coding after a professor told her that coding gives you the ability to look at any problem and find a solution. And that's what really stuck with her.
Ochuko:
That's really cool. I cannot code. I tried once and it was really hard, so I respect all of you, but you say we love professors like this. That's so encouraging. And as people who are becoming more developed in these fields, we're going to have someone look up to us at some point. And those things that you say will really stick with people. I bet whoever this professor is, might not have known that that would be the phrase that'll stick with her and really propel her to get through all these other things in the future. And so I just thought that was really beautiful. Thank you for whoever that professor was.
Anusha:
Yeah, absolutely. We need allies like that for sure.
Ochuko:
And Alexis uses tik tok as a way to share her experiences as a young woman in computer science, by using humor and wit. Her videos have gained a lot of attention from her peers. Alexis said in an interview that her tik tok username, Leo Genevieve is an alias dhe created in 11th grade when trying to come up with a nickname for the CPR doll she was assigned at the school. On tik tok she posts daily and has amassed 165 K plus followers and 5 million plus likes making videos about being Black, pursuing STEM and everything in between. And as a fellow gen Z, I think this is maybe the coolest thing about her using tik tok to do good. And I wouldn't say past year with everything that happened with Black Lives Matter and COVID, you really saw a rise in social media activism on Instagram, on Twitter, on Tik TOK.
And in a lot of ways, we talk about the pros and cons of social media, but I think this is a huge pro just information, that amount of information and pretty much everything that's out there, people really stepping forward to use their voices. And what's also really cool about this is it kind of shows how given a platform almost anyone can become an influencer to have a voice. Before social media, who would be listening to Alexis talk when she's 17 years old or really young. So I love to talk personally. I think it's really cool. And I just love gen Z for always being able to find a way to make even the most ridiculous apps, you know, be meaningful and impactful. So I love her for this. It's amazing.
Anusha:
Yeah. I actually watched a couple of her Tik Tok videos and it's cool cause she takes kind of a humorous approach even to some of the more unfortunate circumstances that she comes across as a woman in computer science. And the situations that arise specifically with men in her classes. And just some of the more inappropriate things that shouldn't happen, but they do. And she vocalizes that and she was able to put her own twist on it. And it's really, really cool. Cause that sort of content being out there from someone who's dealing with it on a regular basis really brings a lot more attention to it.
Alexis’ work first came into the spotlight when she posted a tik tok about a website that she had created. And this was shortly after the unfortunate incident with George Floyd and it became a resource for anyone looking for a way to be a part of the social justice movement. The website pb-resources.com is a site full of action items you can take to fight white supremacy, including petitions, reading recommendations, go fund me links and information for lawmakers that you can reach out to that are local and so much more. My favorite part of this site is this email generator where it pretty much pre-writes the email and then you can customize it based on whatever it is that you want to say. And it can be filtered out of an inbox.
Ochuko:
Yeah, it's really amazing. And the fact that she did it in such a short time period, like what, she's so good at what she does and it's pretty as well. And so no Alexis is really such an awesome person. I'm so glad we're talking about her. And this was really a time where that period, we saw people really taking solutions into their own hands, really taking that whole thing of this is a problem, the government is doing what it's doing, institutions are doing what they're doing, I'm going to do what I can do. And we saw a huge rise in that in the last year. Like I said before, it was social media and harm making a website, everyone doing their own part. And I thought that was just really beautiful. I love people who are solution oriented. And I think that's something that we can definitely say about Alexis. She's great.
Anusha:
Yeah, absolutely. She definitely knows how to take the skills that she has and implement them in a way that makes this very powerful, ripple effect.
Ochuko:
And on her design style, Alexis says a part of what makes everything I build in computer science to me is that it looks like me. It's going to have my aesthetic and just kind of the way I look at things, because I know I come to computer science with an interesting and different perspective. So everything I build is not going to lose its femininity because of the fact that it's STEM-related and this makes me so happy. I think a lot of the time we look at different things as liabilities in STEM, femininity is one of them maybe having other interests, be one of them. But the fact that Alexis is so multi-disciplinary, she's a cheerleader as well for NYU. Did you know that? She's a cheerleader, which is like, I guess the most feminine ass thing you can think of.
And you know, she flaunts it as she's great at it and she loves fashion. I know she did a campaign with Karlie Kloss and Adidas last year. She's just got all these different things and you can see it in her work. It's coming from a very different perspective and it makes her work way more accessible to people, way more approachable to people and people love it. I would love to see the tech space sort of embrace people who bring their own individuality into their work because that's what really appeals to the rest of us non-techies right? And yeah, she's really cool.
Anusha:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I know even five, six years ago when I was in a similar position as her being a student, being a little bit more girly having girlier interests, I don't know what that would even mean, but whatever people thought of as being girly was viewed as being very negative. I felt like I had to hide some aspects of myself in order to fit in or blend in with people that were in my classes. And so the fact that she's able to say, this is just who I am, and this is what I'm going to do. And everything that I do is going to reflect who I am, and I don't necessarily feel the need to hide it. I think that's so, so important. And it's important for all of us to remember using who we are can really influence change in whatever our craft is.
And I don't think that we should ever feel like we need to hide that about ourselves. I think that if you really reflect on what it is that you're interested in, and we don't feel like we have to categorize ourselves into a single box and we can be all of these different things. I think that really opened up the gates for everybody's opinions and differences. And I think that that is something that I would love to challenge all of our listeners that are tuning in today to reflect on what it is that you can bring to the table, no matter what your differences are. All right. That's a wrap for today. Thank you, Alexis. And thanks listeners for tuning in.
Outro
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