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‘Don’t avoid technology’

Spandana Raj Babbula, who won scholarships from FB & Google, has advice for women

Hyderabad: Spandana Raj Babbula from Warangal, who won the prestigious Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship (Asia-Pacific) and Facebook’s 2014 Grace Hopper Scholarship recently, says that she has been interested in computers right from high school. And being the daughter of a mathematician helped. “My father Rajeshwar Babbula is a mathematics lecturer in a private college. He taught me what maths was and what a mathematician did. I liked logic problems, this probably drove me to computer science,” says Spandana.

About the Google Scholarship, which took her to the search giant’s office in Tokyo, the IIT-Madras student says, “When I topped my first year in college, my faculty and my seniors told me about this scholarship that was given to encourage women in computing and technology, and to become role models in the field of computers. I applied as I realised I could get it.”

Spandana was then chosen from a pool of female undergraduate and graduate students from across Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and India and awarded Rs 1 lakh. She is among the 27 Indians selected for the award.

Then there was the Facebook scholarship. “It was again on the basis of academic performance. This time, I have been selected from among 25 people from all over the world. I am flying to Phoenix, Arizona in the USA, to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing — one of the world’s largest gathering of women technologists — from October 6 to 11.”

Spandana, who has always been a top ranker, feels that more women need to embrace the field. “The percentage of computer science degrees earned by women is still 18 per cent. Women need to embrace technology instead of avoiding it. At the Google office in Tokyo, I met such amazing women technologists. I hope the share of women in the field goes up to 50 per cent,” says Spandana, who wants to join industry after completing college and later research in the field of data mining.

( Source : dc )
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