FCS News

When Leah Brown began her Computer Science degree at Dalhousie University, she said she was worried she was entering “a man’s world.”  Of the 100 students in her first year class, only three were female.

Times have changed.  When the fourth year student completes her degree in December, she’ll be packing her bags and moving to Redmond, Washington to work for Microsoft Corporation.  She said she’s in good company.

“Although most of my team at Microsoft was male, I got to meet a lot of female interns from other teams and divisions of Microsoft,” said Brown.  “It was awesome to see such a great female to male ratio.”

Brown is now hoping to encourage more women to pursue careers in IT.

“So many companies are trying to recruit students.  Your possibilities are endless,” she said.  “There are far more opportunities in computer science than I thought there would be.  I never thought I’d end up at Microsoft.”

The 22-year old landed the gig after completing a recent summer internship with the company.

The internship was a 12-week program designed to expose university students to software development through hands on training.

For Brown, it was an opportunity to showcase her skills and wow an organization who hires thousands of interns each year.

“I was pretty stunned when I got the internship,” said Brown.  “While I was there, I wanted to do really well on my project with the hope that I’d get to come back to Microsoft after I graduate.”

Brown was placed on a web development project within the company’s Enterprise Commerce IT Group; an organization that maintains all of the software systems Microsoft uses for product licensing.   

As a Software Development Engineer, her project involved building a user interface to write licensing rule sets for a pre-existing business rules engine.   

“I wasn’t familiar with Microsoft technologies and I had no experience in development work,” she said.  “But the core skills I’d learned in school gave me the background knowledge I needed to take my project from scratch and turn it into a finished product.”

Her mission was a success.  When her internship ended in July, she retuned to Halifax with new friends, new connections and most importantly a new job.

“There are so many opportunities in IT careers,” said Brown.  “The current demand for Computer Science graduates far exceeds the number of people actually graduating.”

Brown said there are a couple of reasons why women may shy away from the tech world.   Some may not understand the full potential of a Computer Science degree.  The other reason:

“They see Computer Science as just a bunch of nerdy guys.  That’s a stereotype,” Brown said.  “There are people from all different types of backgrounds working in the industry.”

Brown said she entered her degree knowing very little about computers, programming or anything related to the industry.   She’ll be leaving Dalhousie in December to work for one of the largest IT companies in the world.