The history of the engineer-radiophysics, who decided to watch
Hello! My name is Nastya. By March 8, I was asked to talk about how girls work and live in IT. The fact is that I would not say that I am a bright representative of a girl in IT. I am not a programmer, a sysadmin, I do not tinker with iron and the like, which first of all comes to the mind of a man in the street. I am a marketer. On this, in theory, the story could have been completed, but I assure you, my story is not entirely simple.
Now I work in a department that is responsible for the development and implementation of innovative Microsoft (DX) projects. Perhaps a little is understandable, but I will try to explain. When new products or solutions are launched in a corporation, few people at first understand how to work with them. We try to explain to our customers how it works and what needs to be done to make it work for them. For example, Machine Learning is an absolutely burning topic, which is discussed in all IT shny lobby. Everyone wants ML, but not everyone knows how to get it. We offer our assistance in comprehending this, examining the needs of the company and trying to solve the tasks together. I came to this department a little more than six months ago, because I decided that it was time to look for new horizons and inspiration. Before that, I worked as a marketer for 4 years and was responsible for the audience of medium and large businesses in the Central Federal District. Here you can remember how it all began.
I graduated from MGTU MIREA (now it is called something completely differently) at the faculty of radio engineering systems and became an engineer-radio physicist. Usually, from this point on, it becomes a little strange for people - and why is a girl and a radio physics engineer. It's simple. My father is a physicist, all childhood throughout the apartment was scattered fiber, transistors with platinum contacts and the like, as he worked on a fiber laser. Even then I knew some things that girls should not know.
')
At the institute, I did not differ in academic performance, to be honest. I attended classes only when the teacher spoke interestingly and wanted to sit and listen to him for hours. Everything else can be read in the textbooks - which I, in fact, did on the eve of the sessions. Most of all I liked the subject "Microprocessors", where we first started programming. Each project was allocated for the semester. As I remember, I had electronic scales. Is it a joke - to program electronic scales on an assembler when you don’t understand anything about it? I sat all couples, came after couples, tormented teacher. Never before could I have thought that I might like it.
In our group there were 20 people and only 2 of them girls. It was strange to watch the teachers, who, having caught us for cheating, thought you wrote off from a group mate, although in fact it was just the opposite. Once I gave the subject to one grandmother, and she said before the exam - I don’t put the girls of the troika. After, apparently, I was too arrogant and obviously prompted answers to my group mates a couple of times - they gave me a troika on the pretext that I skipped lectures. But in general, they tried to take care of the girls and not to upset them much. The most interesting thing was waiting for me ahead - my diploma. Anyone who was older told me that a diploma is nonsense. That you can always download it, write it off somewhere, ask to write someone. But not in my case.
I was assigned to the basic department at IOFRAN (Institute of General Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences), to the department of plasma physics. A remarkable woman, Nina Nikolaevna Skvortsova, became my diploma leader. Life in all sorts of RAS, especially the technical and low-funded ones, resembles the worlds of the Strugatsky Brothers. Old men drinking tea with donuts, young technicians, often hiding from the army, and we, the younger generation of graduates, who know everything in theory and nothing in practice. At that time, all the forces of this department were focused on obtaining plasma on the L-2M stellaratore. A stellarator is a toroidal magnetic trap for holding a hot plasma, in which a system of closed magnetic surfaces is created by currents located outside the plasma volume. Plasma was supposed to be obtained as early as 1920, but there were problems that the Soviet Union could not cope with, and in the 2000s all funding was discontinued, only occasionally allocated budgets for the purchase of liquid nitrogen and at best 1 time in half a year and started the installation. Just imagine - getting an inexhaustible source of energy, controlled thermonuclear fusion! Sounds like madness, but it really inspired me then.
My diploma was built on the analysis of data obtained from the stellarator, and it was necessary to make a C ++ program that would consider the plasma density, based on the data obtained from the probes inside the installation. This is now GitHub and, in general, the Internet, which allows you to find a solution in minutes. Then there was the Internet too, but there was no information, much less ready-made calculations. As a result, I honestly and frankly made my diploma a total of a year. The program was written on 13 sheets, graphs are drawn, calculations are made. But, you will not believe, no results. None, KARL! Year of work and calculations, a huge amount of data and no results. What does it mean? From a scientific point of view - those measurements at those distances and those probes are not correct. I was just in shock, very upset and disappointed. So much work to get any result ??? To which my diploma supervisor said a very wise thing that I remembered once and for all: “ Sometimes, Nastya, it happens in life. But the lack of a result is also a result . ” With this spirit, I went and defended my diploma perfectly well, which I was very happy about and received an invitation to graduate school.
Then everything was less prosaic - I decided that I'd rather be a marketer than a bad physicist. Romance is less there - but they pay more. Now the work of the marketer is also very closely related to IT. And, perhaps, some part of the duties may even go over to the program side. Analysis, distribution, advertising on the Internet, sample sites and a whole machine for receiving and tracking leads. Creativity is what is always needed and in demand, especially in the new world of bots, Data Science, ML and cognitive services.
Returning to the question of why I decided to look for new peaks, now I understand that, like in the fairy tale “Alice through the looking glass”: “ You have to run as fast just to stay in the same place, and to get to another place, you need to run twice as fast ". IT is no longer something distant and incomprehensible. This is something that captures more and more men and women around the world, just some people stubbornly don’t want to notice. Charming girls work with me who are much more than I understand in technology and programming.
Recently, I went to a meeting of Django Girls, where there were about 70 girls who themselves came on their day off to learn how to program in Python and make websites on Django. Men were there too, but as teachers. But they were also very surprised that girls master everything so quickly, do not ask stupid questions, but simply sit and code all day. It was funny to listen to the conversation of my neighbors - the next day they were going to go to a knitting workshop. Knitting and programming . In my opinion, they are the real advanced girls who are not afraid of the unknown, but just go and code. On the course in HSE in Data Science, half of the students are girls. And they, if not strange, behave more actively than young people. I recently made a bot in Telegram, which, by the picture, determines which hashtags you need to put on the Instagram post and published it on the Azure cloud. Half a year ago, I didn’t even know what it was and could I learn it so quickly?
Dear girls, the world is so multifaceted and interesting that you do not deny yourself the opportunity to taste it. Sew, cook, knit, program, analyze, read - for this you do not have to work in IT. An accountant, for example, would be useful to learn about the blockchain, and for an auditor and a marketer - about ML and Data Science. Thank you for reading my story, I'm sure that my journey in the world of programming is just beginning!
Written by Anastasia Sorokina, Department of Strategic Technologies, Microsoft Russia.
Now I work in a department that is responsible for the development and implementation of innovative Microsoft (DX) projects. Perhaps a little is understandable, but I will try to explain. When new products or solutions are launched in a corporation, few people at first understand how to work with them. We try to explain to our customers how it works and what needs to be done to make it work for them. For example, Machine Learning is an absolutely burning topic, which is discussed in all IT shny lobby. Everyone wants ML, but not everyone knows how to get it. We offer our assistance in comprehending this, examining the needs of the company and trying to solve the tasks together. I came to this department a little more than six months ago, because I decided that it was time to look for new horizons and inspiration. Before that, I worked as a marketer for 4 years and was responsible for the audience of medium and large businesses in the Central Federal District. Here you can remember how it all began.
I graduated from MGTU MIREA (now it is called something completely differently) at the faculty of radio engineering systems and became an engineer-radio physicist. Usually, from this point on, it becomes a little strange for people - and why is a girl and a radio physics engineer. It's simple. My father is a physicist, all childhood throughout the apartment was scattered fiber, transistors with platinum contacts and the like, as he worked on a fiber laser. Even then I knew some things that girls should not know.
')
At the institute, I did not differ in academic performance, to be honest. I attended classes only when the teacher spoke interestingly and wanted to sit and listen to him for hours. Everything else can be read in the textbooks - which I, in fact, did on the eve of the sessions. Most of all I liked the subject "Microprocessors", where we first started programming. Each project was allocated for the semester. As I remember, I had electronic scales. Is it a joke - to program electronic scales on an assembler when you don’t understand anything about it? I sat all couples, came after couples, tormented teacher. Never before could I have thought that I might like it.
In our group there were 20 people and only 2 of them girls. It was strange to watch the teachers, who, having caught us for cheating, thought you wrote off from a group mate, although in fact it was just the opposite. Once I gave the subject to one grandmother, and she said before the exam - I don’t put the girls of the troika. After, apparently, I was too arrogant and obviously prompted answers to my group mates a couple of times - they gave me a troika on the pretext that I skipped lectures. But in general, they tried to take care of the girls and not to upset them much. The most interesting thing was waiting for me ahead - my diploma. Anyone who was older told me that a diploma is nonsense. That you can always download it, write it off somewhere, ask to write someone. But not in my case.
I was assigned to the basic department at IOFRAN (Institute of General Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences), to the department of plasma physics. A remarkable woman, Nina Nikolaevna Skvortsova, became my diploma leader. Life in all sorts of RAS, especially the technical and low-funded ones, resembles the worlds of the Strugatsky Brothers. Old men drinking tea with donuts, young technicians, often hiding from the army, and we, the younger generation of graduates, who know everything in theory and nothing in practice. At that time, all the forces of this department were focused on obtaining plasma on the L-2M stellaratore. A stellarator is a toroidal magnetic trap for holding a hot plasma, in which a system of closed magnetic surfaces is created by currents located outside the plasma volume. Plasma was supposed to be obtained as early as 1920, but there were problems that the Soviet Union could not cope with, and in the 2000s all funding was discontinued, only occasionally allocated budgets for the purchase of liquid nitrogen and at best 1 time in half a year and started the installation. Just imagine - getting an inexhaustible source of energy, controlled thermonuclear fusion! Sounds like madness, but it really inspired me then.
My diploma was built on the analysis of data obtained from the stellarator, and it was necessary to make a C ++ program that would consider the plasma density, based on the data obtained from the probes inside the installation. This is now GitHub and, in general, the Internet, which allows you to find a solution in minutes. Then there was the Internet too, but there was no information, much less ready-made calculations. As a result, I honestly and frankly made my diploma a total of a year. The program was written on 13 sheets, graphs are drawn, calculations are made. But, you will not believe, no results. None, KARL! Year of work and calculations, a huge amount of data and no results. What does it mean? From a scientific point of view - those measurements at those distances and those probes are not correct. I was just in shock, very upset and disappointed. So much work to get any result ??? To which my diploma supervisor said a very wise thing that I remembered once and for all: “ Sometimes, Nastya, it happens in life. But the lack of a result is also a result . ” With this spirit, I went and defended my diploma perfectly well, which I was very happy about and received an invitation to graduate school.
Then everything was less prosaic - I decided that I'd rather be a marketer than a bad physicist. Romance is less there - but they pay more. Now the work of the marketer is also very closely related to IT. And, perhaps, some part of the duties may even go over to the program side. Analysis, distribution, advertising on the Internet, sample sites and a whole machine for receiving and tracking leads. Creativity is what is always needed and in demand, especially in the new world of bots, Data Science, ML and cognitive services.
Returning to the question of why I decided to look for new peaks, now I understand that, like in the fairy tale “Alice through the looking glass”: “ You have to run as fast just to stay in the same place, and to get to another place, you need to run twice as fast ". IT is no longer something distant and incomprehensible. This is something that captures more and more men and women around the world, just some people stubbornly don’t want to notice. Charming girls work with me who are much more than I understand in technology and programming.
Recently, I went to a meeting of Django Girls, where there were about 70 girls who themselves came on their day off to learn how to program in Python and make websites on Django. Men were there too, but as teachers. But they were also very surprised that girls master everything so quickly, do not ask stupid questions, but simply sit and code all day. It was funny to listen to the conversation of my neighbors - the next day they were going to go to a knitting workshop. Knitting and programming . In my opinion, they are the real advanced girls who are not afraid of the unknown, but just go and code. On the course in HSE in Data Science, half of the students are girls. And they, if not strange, behave more actively than young people. I recently made a bot in Telegram, which, by the picture, determines which hashtags you need to put on the Instagram post and published it on the Azure cloud. Half a year ago, I didn’t even know what it was and could I learn it so quickly?
Dear girls, the world is so multifaceted and interesting that you do not deny yourself the opportunity to taste it. Sew, cook, knit, program, analyze, read - for this you do not have to work in IT. An accountant, for example, would be useful to learn about the blockchain, and for an auditor and a marketer - about ML and Data Science. Thank you for reading my story, I'm sure that my journey in the world of programming is just beginning!
Written by Anastasia Sorokina, Department of Strategic Technologies, Microsoft Russia.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/323414/
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