Humphries has tech world’s ear
Student is Code.org panelist
PEARCY — Lake Hamilton senior Sarah Humphries last week took the stage with the likes of Bill Gates, Mira Murati, and other global tech giants when she served as a guest panelist at Code.org’s 10th Anniversary Gala held in San Francisco.
Humphries, a student ambassador for the national nonprofit organization that promotes computer accessibility and computer science education, participated in a “Young Women in
CS” panel, which discussed the gender gap in computer science participation.
Floresa Vaughn, 2022 Alameda County Teacher of the Year, moderated the panel discussion, with Harvard University student Fikir Teklemedhin and Navier (electric hydrofoiling boats) Founder and CEO Sampriti Bhattacharyya also participating.
Humphries was also able to engage in discussion with Gates, the philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, Code.org co-founders Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi, and Murati, who is the chief technology officer of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company that developed ChatGPT.
“Code.org is about to launch a female student ambassador program that’s focused on getting high schoolaged girls to take a computer science class,” she said. “So the first question was, ‘Why do we think we have this gap?’”
Humphries spoke about “impostor syndrome,” which, she notes, is a feeling that many girls in the field have in thinking that they have to be perfect all the time.
“I’ve heard it said before that most girls would rather have a completely blank sheet of code and say ‘I don’t know how to do it,’ than have an imperfect piece of code. Because this pressure has been built upon us, because we’re the minority gender, that we have to be perfect in order to be successful,” she said.
Computer science truly is the future, which is why it is so important for students to be educated, Humphries said.
“It’s not just why women need to be computer science educated, it’s why everybody needs to be computer science educated,” she said.
“Because in the next 10-15 years, it’s going to be completely everywhere.
“And if you want to be able to protect yourself from things like phishing and other cyberattacks, and to just be knowledgeable in the future, then you have to have some kind of computer science education,” she said.
In December 2021, Humphries spoke at the Governor’s Mansion during National Computer Science Education Week. Arkansas hosted the event, in which Hadi Partovi served as the keynote speaker.
“I was on a panel with three other students and I didn’t know that (Partovi) was in the room,” she said. “He came up and talked to me after, and he was like, ‘Sarah, we love you. You’ve been saying everything that we’ve been trying to get across for so long, and it’s so interesting to see it come from a student.’”
Humphries, who is also president of the Arkansas Technology Student Association, went on to start her own social media campaign promoting girls pursuing careers in computer science.
“I followed Code.org on that account and they followed me back. Then they reached out to me, and they were like, ‘We’re starting this new student ambassador program. We think you are a perfect fit to kind of get this thing started, and we want to, like, fly you out to San Francisco to speak at the 10th Anniversary Gala,’” she said.
Of her experience meeting and talking with Gates, she said she did not go in with the expectation of meeting him, due to the vast amount of security surrounding him at all times, but said she was hopeful.
“I was walking to my dressing room and he was in his dressing room, and there’s six bodyguards just standing out in front,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, Bill Gates is definitely in that room.’”
She and the other panelists would finally get the clearance OK to meet with him following his speech.
Humphries plans to attend Baylor University next fall and study computer science with a concentration in cybersecurity.