In addition to my personal interest in listening to people discuss how they incorporate computer science in interesting/ unconventional ways into their work, I was especially excited to hear from women speakers in general. As a woman of color, it can be discouraging and sometimes mentally taxing being in a space that is hyper-maxuline and not diverse. In many situations, it sometimes feels like women, people of color, those that identify as LGBTQIA+ are hard to come by or even don’t exist in this field. So, in addition to the insightful discussions about open source data, it is nice to hear from these types of people. I hope in the future when other guest speakers come in, we can continue having this kind of representation (and more) throughout the semester.

I found Vicky’s work in the American Natural History Museum (ANHM) prior to her becoming a librarian especially interesting. As someone who actively goes to museums often, I never considered programmers to be of use in this space. After hearing Vicky briefly discuss her background and my personal research on the residency program mentioned in her bio, I began looking into finding jobs or internships in these spaces to potentially clean, modify, and organize data for museums.