Polly is a winner of the Portland Affiliate NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing, our award recognizing outstanding high school women for their computing aspirations and achievements. Below she describes receiving her award at a ceremony during NCWIT's Portland, Oregon, Summit on Women and IT last week, and her thoughts on the award's impact.

Hi everyone, we look forward to seeing you at the NCWIT Summit on Women and IT in Portland, Oregon next week!

We’ll be releasing several new and updated resources at the Summit, and we thought we’d give you a preview here.  You’ll find more new resources at our website, here.

If the world was a perfect place, every girl would have a mentor like Yoky Matsuoka. On April 15th, I was lucky enough to shadow Yoky at the University of Washington in Seattle through the Barbie I Can Be mentor program. The program matched ten girls across the country to ten mentors in varying fields in the hopes of inspiring young girls to pursue their dreams. I was nominated through NCWIT and was ecstatic when I found out that I would be able to participate.

There was a terrific profile this week on Texas State University’s implementation of ACTiVATE, the UMBC program (and EA member) that encourages women to start tech businesses by providing them with entrepreneurship training, mentoring, and skills. What a great example of how an entrepreneurship program brings together local technologies and local talent to nurture innovation and business.