It was the middle of her junior year in high school when Katharine Batista received a promotional email from the Syracuse iSchool about its pre-college summer programs for curious high school students. Surprised and interested, she applied for two; one in animation, and one called IT Girls, focused on women in technology– she got into both.
The two weeks on campus for the IT Girls program deeply resonated with Batista. Bringing with her only some bedding, base-level coding skills, and an abundance of positive energy, she drove up from New Jersey and found her future waiting for her in Syracuse. Reveling in the people she met, the environment she found herself immersed in, and the projects they had her working on, she was hooked on the idea of attending the iSchool when her turn came around.
Of the first folks she met when she arrived for the summer session of IT Girls, two of them were Laurie Ferger (Assistant Teaching Professor, Director of Undergraduate Programs, Academic Support for Grace Hopper Conference and IT Girls Advisor), and Lily Marie Coyle (Undergraduate Admissions Assistant, IT Girls Summer Program Teaching Assistant). Right off the bat, they were both incredibly welcoming and supportive, and have remained steadfastly in Batisita’s corner as she enrolled and began navigating the different pathways and unlimited potential of the iSchool education.
An applied data analytics major, with a plan for a web development concentration, Batista is also a Leadership Scholar in the honors program, and she still seems to have an insatiable curiosity and appetite to learn as many new things as she can. Just two weeks into her first semester, Ferger reached out to Batista about attending the Grace Hopper Conference, so she jumped at the opportunity and applied right away.
The seven and a half hour train ride to Philadelphia was well worth the trip and Batista found herself smack dab in the middle of one of the most impressive and inspiring collaborations of women leaders she could have ever imagined. Even though more and more women are pursuing their education and careers in information science and technology, they are still underrepresented in most of those classrooms and workplaces. “It’s kind of awesome to walk into a room of just women, who are doing exactly what you want to do. And, they actually want to talk about this field with you. It’s all about empowering women in technology and bringing them together for these important conversations.”, says Batista.
She was especially excited to attend as a freshman because her only role was to take it all in. There wasn’t as much on the line for her as there was for upperclassmen who were really trying to take advantage of the connections and job fairs built into the conference. Batista could participate in all aspects of the conference and didn’t feel a ton of pressure to sell herself to prospective employers, but did take opportunities to connect with them whenever possible. Her and four other underclassmen from the iSchool became good friends as they absorbed all that the conference had to offer. One of her biggest takeaways from her experience was, as she says, “there is power in numbers. I’ve never felt more inspired and seen in my entire life, than when I was there. Every person I talked to was smart and passionate and interested in innovation. Everyone here is proud of what they do and at this conference they are able to express that in front of people who know exactly what they mean.”
Batista sees herself in research roles down the road. She particularly loves the process of reading papers and scrubbing data in order to form an argument or a useful opinion based on consensus and empirical data. She finds discovering new things and learning new skills to be uniquely liberating. As an example she mentions how she decided to learn a little Python coding in high school just so that she could better visualize a specific data set in a computer science class. She is now enrolled in a Python class and is expanding on the knowledge she began exploring only a few years ago, but now with a better bird’s-eye-view of the vast potential of this power to code.
For as long as she can remember, Batista has been a plotter and a planner. When she graduated high school, she thought that she had her whole future mapped out, and she has been a little shocked at how much growth and change she has experienced in her short time in the iSchool. Instead of being intimidated by the rapid changes in speed and trajectory, she is embracing the ride and the new ideas about who she will be and how she will position herself in the world. The iSchool continues to encourage her to expand her own horizons and she has learned to not limit herself to her own predictions, but instead to keep an open mind and to continue to follow her passions and curiosities.