@WANS
Women and Non Binary in STEM
@WANS · 1:02

Special guest entrepeneur, engineer and CEO Sudha Varadarajan!

article image placeholderUploaded by @WANS
I have built the most amazing friendships and community on this app and so I absolutely jumped at the chance to get to meet one of its founders. So Hello Suda and welcome to The Wind Swell cast, I want to thank you so much for speaking for us today. So I wanted to start by asking you a little bit about your background. I wanted to know what got you interested in the Stem fields such as engineering and how did you go about becoming a software engineer

#software #engineer #womeninstem #tech

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@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 2:51

@WANS

So sometime in high school, or rather maybe just after high school, early first year of College, my father got me a PC at home. And I think that's when my entire passion exploded. So I was very clear from almost my 8th grade that all I wanted to do was computer science. I didn't care know what courses I did in computer science, but I wanted to be in this field. And it's been a wonderful journey since
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@WANS
Women and Non Binary in STEM
@WANS · 1:22

@sudha

And also, I guess this is a two part question, but what would you recommend to College students currently who are pursuing professions in software engineering and other computer related fields? For instance, would you recommend internships networking with professors? So any thoughts or suggestions would be wonderful
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@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 4:49

College environment and experience

Perhaps it's because I'm in a technical career, but over the two decades of my work experience, a lot of the knowledge that I took away from my College has served me and continues to serve me. So I'll give you a simple example. I'm a computer engineer. I have very little foundation in accounting. But as part of my MBA, we had to do an Accounting 101 kind of class. Right. And it was a very interesting class
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@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 3:52

@WANS - recommendations: project work and internships

And I WANs like, no, I am good at what I do, so I know that I will always find myself a job. It is just a matter of me figuring out what it is that I want to do. And I think that is so true for anybody in the field of engineering, because engineering is a field wherein the need for talented engineers is going to be there for eons to come. We keep building things. We keep building phenomenal things as human beings
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@Swell
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15

Welcome to Swell!

@WANS
Women and Non Binary in STEM
@WANS · 3:21

@sudha

Thank you so much Sudha, for that amazing sharing of your experience and the wealth of knowledge that you've already provided us with in this interview. I'm super grateful. I really like two things that you said in your last reply is really, really stuck out to me. All the information was really invaluable what I personally resonated with two things that you said. One was that grades aren't always the most important thing in school, and the most important thing is what knowledge do you come away with?
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Swell user mugshot
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