WWCode’s Scholarship Success 2017

During the year Women Who Code partners with educational institutions to make learning opportunities available to our members. Through these initiatives hundreds of engineers have been able to level up in their careers, brush up on skills before returning to work, or prep for their next position.

To date, WWCode has given away more than $2M in scholarships and conference tickets. While that is an impressive number, the true impact is in the individual lives touched by these opportunities. These are stories of transformation and growth, of overcoming obstacles, and of achieving success through education and hard work.

How Scholarship Winner Natalie Miles landed a job at Credit Karma

Natalie Miles – Winner of a full scholarship to Hackbright Academy through WWCode. 

Wanting to learn Python, Natalie, who had previously known about Hackbright, heard about the scholarship application through Hackbright from the Women Who Code newsletter. “I read it all the time and saw that there was a scholarship opportunity. I had been through boot camps and that had always been the first thing on my mind.”
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Alumni Spotlight: Cyn Armistead

Cyn Armistead – Winner of a scholarship to RMOTR’s Introduction to Python programming course through WWCode.

“Other than adding CSS and getting into WordPress and other CMS’s, I didn’t go much farther for many years — it all seemed too intimidating, and I didn’t have a real need to know how to create anything with them. When I’m doing QA, not knowing how to program is an issue, so I’ve always wanted to try it. The explosion of resources for learning how to code over the last few years has made programming much less frightening, so I started thinking that perhaps I could actually do it. And this year, I finally got started!”
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Women Who Code and A Cloud Guru

This year Women Who Code announced a partnership with A Cloud Guru to provide tickets to attend ServerlessConf, as well as full and partial scholarships to their online cloud computing and AWS certification training. Read the announcement.
Tanya Ruth Selvog – Winner of a scholarship for A Cloud Guru’s Certified Solution Architect certification course through WWCode.

“A Cloud Guru sponsored a tech talk in partnership with Women Who Code Austin. All attendees of the event received a voucher to A Cloud Guru’s Certified Solutions Architect certification course. Since I’m new to programming, I went to the tech talk for the sole purpose of networking and I was uninterested in learning about cloud computing. (I believed that cloud computing was too advanced for me, so I assumed I wouldn’t understand anything the speakers were saying). As I listened to the talks and I chatted with some of the speakers afterward, I learned about Amazon Web Services, and I wanted to learn more about AWS and cloud computing.”
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WWCode and Capella University 

Louise Clark – Winner of a full-tuition scholarship to Capella University’s online BS in Information Technology, Software Development program.
"To be able to go back to school is a gift. It will provide me the intellectual foundation for what I’m doing at my job. And I love being a student; I love learning. I could learn forever! But financially, I wouldn’t have been able to go for a degree right now due to the years of being financially insecure."
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WWCode and Metis

Allison Hegel – Winner of a scholarship to Metis’ Live Online Intro to Data Science course.
“I had a blast applying what I learned in the Metis course to real data. I chose the Yelp Open Dataset to work with because I was interested in what kinds of attributes people value most in a business. I built a regression model to predict a business’ star rating using its attributes, like whether it caters or has bike parking.”
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We have been lucky enough to be a part of making hundreds of stories like this happen over the past year and we look forward to continuing that work in 2017. If you haven't already, please sign up for the CODE Review Newsletter so you can keep up to date with all of the great scholarship opportunities we have coming up, and if you can consider making a contribution to Women Who Code to help us continue our work of inspiring women to excel in their technology careers.