Telling our stories – Mia Bjørndal
Each year we meet incredible women at womENcourage™ celebrations. We ask womENcourage participants to tell their stories in blog posts. We continue 2023 with Mia Bjørndal, who is a bachelor’s degree student in informatics at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway and is fully invested in the gender equality problem.
My name is Mia Bjørndal, and I am a bachelor’s degree student in informatics at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. I am in my third and last year of my bachelor’s degree.
The first time I was introduced to ACM Women was in January 2022. At the beginning, I thought it was really hard to understand exactly what ACM Women was. I am fully invested in the gender equality problem, and thought it was really cool, even though I didn’t understand the whole thing. When we were at the conference, I really understood that ACM WomENcourage is to celebrate women in Computer Science, and to encourage women to stay and continue their way in it. This is a really important theme and a really important celebration.
Under WomENcourage 2022 in Cyprus, I participated in the Hackathon. This was a new, but a very exciting event. We were supposed to make something, to connect art with science. The task was very wide, but this made it even better to work with, since you had the possibility to be creative. It was really intense to work with the project for 8 hours, since we wanted to get as far as possible. We had come far when the time was over, and it is really fun to see how long you can get on a project in just 8 hours.
The most inspiring activity was the panel discussion. There were 5 women telling about their experience in different situations, and they had been in a lot of situations. This was inspiring, because it made me think about how little some men are thinking about what they say to women. It is really important to talk about gender equality, and this showed us that there is a long way before we are where we want to be. We should all keep working together for gender equality.
Next year, WomENcourage 2023 will be in Trondheim, and I am really looking forward to celebrating Women in Computer Science in Trondheim, and to let more people know about it.