A couple of days ago we received a photo and a link from Freia.
To put it mildly we all felt very nice. And as I said on my whatsapp response, "Whoop. Whoop. Finally someone famous in the family".
I'll let you read the article.
Freia Lobo
When I stopped by NYU’s Leslie eLab be-fore
Tech@NYU’s executive board meeting one Tuesday, club Vice President
Freia Lobo took me in with open arms. She showed me around and
introduced me to her friends and colleagues like she owned the place.
And who knows, one day she just might. That’s the kind of limitless
potential Lobo, an economics and computer science major in the College
of Arts and Sciences, exudes.
Already a trailblazer for women in the tech industry, Lobo
was a self-proclaimed “gadgets-person” while growing up in Mumbai,
India, as her dad would bring home the latest in tech toys when he made
business trips into the states. Lobo was lucky enough to have access to
things like the first iPhone, which wasn’t the norm amongst her peers in
India.
“I had a lot of exposure to tech really early on,” Lobo
said. “I didn’t realize how much it was compared to my friends until
now.”
After making the trek from Mumbai to Manhattan to attend
NYU, Lobo broke into the tech world freshman year when she found the
technology collective Tech@NYU, which she kind-of-not-really joked has
now taken over her life. Lobo initially joined Freshman Circuit, going
on tours of tech companies ranging from the likes of Spotify and
Facebook to small startups with wide-eyed, sleep-deprived
twenty-somethings.
By the end of freshman year she was offered the role of
running the circuit, which prompted her to try her luck at the big
leagues: applying to a summer internship at Google.
“Spoiler alert: I got rejected,” Lobo laughed.
She instead spent the summer working as a TA in San
Francisco at Girls Who Code, a summer program for teaching high school
girls how to code.
Lobo said the great thing about programs like these is
that once they learn the basics of coding, it creates an opportunity for
these girls to create practical solutions to their own problems. It’s
Lobo’s belief that personal problem solving is a crucial piece of the
puzzle in improving diversity in tech — a battle her and others are
fighting constantly.
“When you teach people from different backgrounds to code,
they build things that are relevant to them, so if software engineers
are all white males, they’re solving the problems of only white males,”
Lobo said.
Lobo’s high school friend and current NYU student Shivam
Jumani says her strong presence and opinionated nature is impactful on
all those she meets.
“I respect that she’s not afraid of taking on new
challenges, and once she has set her mind on doing something, she will
make sure she achieves it,” Jumani said.
Though Lobo views herself as a feminist, the male-driven
nature of the field of technology doesn’t really faze her, having been
surrounded by many male friends while growing up. Though an imbalance is
apparent — she noted that in one of her computer science classes, she
loosely counted 30 women compared to a male contingent of roughly 70 —
she said it is essential is that women fit seamlessly.
Tech@NYU is actively trying to break the trend of a lack
of women in tech — the e-board is made up of smaller teams that take on
individual tasks, and one of these teams has five females to one male.
But for Lobo, it’s less about the actual numbers and more about the
climates in which those numbers can exist.
“We’re not celebrating that we have five women or that we
have one guy; we’re celebrating that we created an environment where
that could happen,” Lobo said.
With a host of new experiences under her belt, Lobo moved
beyond her past attempt at Google and is now headed into her second
straight summer there. The gender issues at Google alone are staggering —
just 22 percent of all leadership positions are held by women, so Lobo
would be in prime position to make a splash onto the scene there.
However, Lobo’s ambitions go far beyond the San
Francisco-based tech company. She’s always hashing out ways in her head
to improve circumstances in her homeland of India through technology and
propping up a small business.
Meanwhile, Lobo’s former computer science professor Sana
Odeh had nothing but kind words to say about Lobo. And when lumped
together with the tech industry’s elite, Odeh said that Lobo could more
than keep up with them.
“She is very sharp, she can get anything done,” said Odeh. “She’s going to go places.”
Few have their doubts that Lobo is going to do amazing
things in technology, but the tech world just might have to wait for her
to stop scrolling through Twitter first, something she freely admits to
doing too much. Who can blame her though, because it’s what she does
best — she’s just trying to connect with people the best she can, and
she’ll see where it goes from there.
