My first year journey
By: Andreea Giurgiu
Tags: Journey, Hackathons, AI, Youth, Motivation

Today is exactly one year after the moment that everything changed in my life. The moment at which I realised what my road will be, ,who I am and what my purpose in this world will be. This moment was the Girls In AI 2019 Hackathon from Bucharest by TeensInAI and Microsoft Romania. All in the space of two days I was taught about the true power and potential of AI and managed to win a global AI Hackathon. This one week changed my life. I went from having no direction and no passion, to presenting my idea and my mission in some of the biggest conference of AI such as CogX and Arm DevSummit, supporting amazing teens as a moderator in Teens in AI and help to organize 3 full hackathon and I have now been admitted to my dream AI University that in the past I had never dream that I would be able to join.

A month before the hackathon began,I received an email from Microsoft informing me about a new event that I would have taken in Bucharest. How did this email arrive at me? Well… I will never know because at that time I did not have even a microsoft account. But that was the start when one of the biggest challenges for me in that period came up: to get out of my comfort zone. To get through what people said and show everyone that I can achieve my dream…but first I needed to learn what AI really is and find out a solution for one of the challenges proposed by Teens In AI, a solution that could change something in this world. At first I thought that I could not complete this task… With how much I read it , I realised that I literally did not know anything about what AI could do and what exactly was included in this fast changing subject. But something was always clear to me… that if I start something I need to finish it, so I did not give up, I started doing my research and came up with an idea that brought me into competition.

The competition was absolutely amazing, I felt that I learnt more in 2 days then in a 10 year of school. I learnt to be confident in myself, that even if I am a woman I can do exactly what a man can do. If I want to build a house by myself, I can. I learned that tech is more than just an algorithm, how to search on google. Even this task seems easy, and is harder than I had imagined.

Then I went back home in Cluj, but i was not the same person that went just to find out if I liked AI or not, it became something more in me and the wish to change the world started to appear in my soul.

I was so shocked about what happened there, that I could not refuse the opportunity to join again in an online hackathon by TeensInAI.

Well… to be honest, I was on the brink of refusing, because I was so afraid that my English would not be good enough, my english teacher always told me that I would never be able to speak English sufficiently. .I was so afraid that I almost quit… but something happened when the pandemics started. I started to focus on myself, on what I truly wanted despite the fears and obstacles that threatened to hold me back . I changed all my food habits, tried new things such as running or doing exercises at home. I changed my whole mindset when I realised that now was my chance to work for my future , for my dreams and that

I cannot quit just because some person told me that I can not.

The competition started and I felt really overwhelmed about everything, for me trying to express my ideas in English seemed impossible. I tried to make my work so hard, but it was harder for me because I needed to translate everything first, and ask multiple times. It was exostit… even my family told me that I should quit because it seems that this competition is too much for me. But did I listen to them ? No … I started harder and harder to make everything to be done right, started practicing more, and tried to express my ideas in English even if I know that is not entirely understable , but I did not quit.

Then another wave came up in my life. I posted on social media about what app I worked with my team in the hope that somebody could help us… but then I just woke up with thousands of bad comments, that just told me that our app is horrible. At that point I just stopped. I was… ok even the world told me that I should quit…. I was really depressed about that because I could not understand the reason people were so upset about what we were trying to build. But Elena did not give up on us and started having talks with us about why this was not ok to build, she connected us with a lot of ethics to make us understand where negative comments were coming from. And I followed the next steps that Elena suggested , I started making connections on Twitter with big ethicists and understanding how to work hand by hand with possible customers and with low income. From a person that had never thought about ethics, to be honest I have never heard that word, I become a person that is really passionate about it and understands the importance of it in the tech industry because if you want to change the world you need to know to change it for good , not for bad.

After I won the competition I did not stop at that, I started presenting alongside my team our project and initiative at a lot of big conferences and even started working with TeensInAI because I wanted to start inspiring teens as I was inspired by them in the past.

Now I proved that everyone thought wrong about me. I proved my family that I can work at hard level and do what I want, to my computer science teacher that I really can create an app, to my english teacher that I can talk in english and talk literary with English, to all the people that told me that the tech industry is for men and that if I live in a village is hard to become a successful women in tech and in the end… to myself that I can be the person from my dreams, I just need to believe in myself.

I just want to thank each person that was behind me and supports me in what I do. I want to thank my parents for being near me and try to give me courage to go forward, to all people from TeensInAI that create this amazing opportunity to change my entire life, to all the mentors that I had, from all over the world that was near me in each second and try to make me to be in the right track, they just give their free time for me and my teams to become the future that will change the world, all the amazing speakers that I had the pleasure to listen and inspire and give me power and ambition to continue to work and mostly to Elena Sinel founder of TeensInAI that was always there for me, to give me a good motivational speaker, that give me the change to understand my mistake and learn from it, the chance to talk at international conference, the chance to work with TeensInAI and really make a little difference in children life, for just being there and encourage me to make all my dreams come true.

Thank you all for the best year of my life. I appreciate you all and you will always be in my mind.