Katherine Wong

By the time she was in high school, Katherine knew that she wanted to pursue a career in tech. She also knew, based on experience, that many other women just like her had similar aspirations, a wide pool of potential to work with. So when a teacher said, “The field of technology is war. Women are not strong enough to face this,” Katherine took it upon herself to prove him wrong. Here, she was faced head on by an individual leveraging their status to reinforce stereotypes that Katherine has fought since that day. The importance of creating positive learning spaces for women in tech continues to be at the forefront of her mind as she takes on whatever challenge the field throws at her.

Katherine’s first move to combat gender discrimination in her area was to create a hackathon, a coding event to inspire young women like her to pursue computer science. And so as a high school junior, Katherine created Hack Like A Girl. You would think that someone with the initiative to start a hackathon would have been to at least one hackathon event previously, but Katherine set up Hack Like A Girl without having ever been to one. There was a need in her area, and that was enough for her to take on such a venture. Once she set her mind to it, she didn’t let herself back down. The event was a huge success, hosted at a local tech company where more women than Katherine could have imagined found a place for themselves. Teaching coding workshops to these passionate innovators was enough to prove to all attendees, including herself, that all of them could succeed in technology.

A hackathon veteran at this point, Katherine appreciates participating in a hackathon without having the added pressure of planning the entire event. One such instance was TreeHacks, where she and her partner Kelly created the Equitas app. It was both of their first times working on an iOS application, but the challenge was welcome and rewarding. The purpose of Equitas is to further promote the necessity of healthcare equality by leading users to free of insurance-covered STD testing centers for stress-free appointments. Katherine poured a lot of herself into this project that she felt so strongly about, in the hopes of saving lives and preserving the sexual health of all.

During her freshman year of college, similarly to how she approached her first go at starting a hackathon, Katherine dove into the MLH hackathon scene by herself. She traveled California hoping to create impactful software and to inspire other passionate hackers she met during her trips. The aspect of collaboration with students with entirely different ranges of lived experiences kept Katherine wanting more. Her peers taught her how to develop software solutions for the world, and also interpersonal solutions for remaining confident about her technology skills. At this point, she had more than proven herself, but it’s hard to avoid a dip in self-confidence every once in a while, especially because she was often discouraged by the discriminatory experiences she faced in high school that led her to believe that she wouldn’t have a place in technology. Thanks to her initiative with MLH, however, Katherine now had a community that accepted and uplifted her.

With a plethora of useful learned technologies under her belt, Katherine isn’t afraid to take on a new type of tech. One of the many valuable skills she’s picked up that she cites is learning how to learn. This is in large part due to the accepting community. Her dedication to attending hackathons alone without a safety net has allowed her to gain collaboration skills and work with all types of people that, ultimately, just want to help each other out. As the president of HackSC, Katherine knows how to lead, manage, and inspire a team in order to create a memorable and unforgettable hacker experience. HackSC began as nothing and became one of the top hackathons in the nation, with events that not only inspired hacker innovation but also gave hackers the opportunity to have fun, a crucial element to Katherine’s experience. Coming into the HackSC experience as a freshman organizer, Katherine really admired the e-board members. So when she became lead of Hacker Experience and a board member as a sophomore, it was a shock to hear that fellow hackers felt their voices were going unheard by the e-board.. Katherine took it upon herself to confront the team and propose a shift in the culture of HackSC, one that would create an inclusive space for hackers and organizers. She continued to face problems such as this when she took on the position of HR Head. This positive energy was an infectious change for the club.

For those attendees that saw Katherine’s origins of leading a hackathon with no prior event experience, the fact that she continues to inspire inclusion in the hacker community is no surprise. Every experience of hers has been compiled and compounded for the sake of positive internal change among her community. Her mission is to ensure that everyone feels safe, encouraged, and capable of participating in a hackathon, just as she wishes she could have been made to feel from the very beginning. This mission has only been strengthened, and the results speak for themselves.