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Pope John's Girls Who Code Club 'Code Like A Girl' in NYC

| 29 Apr 2016 | 03:55
    Members of Pope John XXIII’s Girls Who Code Club in New York City, from left: Annie Xu ’19, Arianna Ippolito ’17, Lea Manniello ’18, Elizabeth Wiltshire ’19, Elora Borja ’17, Rebecca Wiltshire ’17, and Jacqueline Thorward ’19.
    Members of Pope John XXIII’s Girls Who Code Club in New York City, from left: Annie Xu ’19, Arianna Ippolito ’17, Lea Manniello ’18, Elizabeth Wiltshire ’19, Elora Borja ’17, Rebecca Wiltshire ’17, and Jacqueline Thorward ’19.

SPARTA — On Saturday, April 16, members of the Pope John XXIII Regional High School’s Girls Who Code Club attended the first annual Dalton School, Manhattan, Code Like A Girl event.
Keynote speakers featured executives and engineers from companies such as IBM, Google, and Facebook. Breakout sessions for the attendees included panel discussions covering such topics as the intersection of computers and arts, computer science in college, and career opportunities in computer science. In addition, each student had the opportunity to connect on a more personal level with the presenters during small-group lunch sessions.
Pope John’s Girls Who Code were exhilarated by the experience. Freshman Elizabeth Wiltshire of Sparta said, "I think it was cool that we got to talk to women about their jobs. I had lunch with a woman who worked for Facebook and a woman who had her own startup technology company."
Junior Elora Borja of Hackettstown said, "I had the opportunity to have lunch with three mentors ranging from college students to entrepreneurs to industry veterans, have a conversation with them, and they even gave us their email addresses."
This type of interaction between young women and professionals is encouraged by the Girls Who Code organization, a non-profit that works to educate, inspire, and equip high school girls with the skills and resources to pursue opportunities in computing fields. Pope John's Girls Who Code Club was founded in 2015 to promote gender balance in all STEM related fields.