HPE Field Trip

On November 13th, 2019, our RHS Girls Who Code club took a trip to Hewlett Packard Enterprises. HPE is only a fifteen minute drive from Rocklin High School, but that day we learned a lot about a growing industry and how to start working towards it. Mr. Werner, our club advisor, had spent a lot of time planning the trip, and was accompanied by a large number of us -- Emily, Shea, Carol, Nicole, Sunny, Sierra, Melody, and On November 13th, 2019, our RHS Girls Who Code club took a trip to Hewlett Packard Enterprises. HPE is only a fifteen minute drive from Rocklin High School, but that day we learned a lot about a growing industry and how to start working towards it. All of us -- Emily, Shea, Carol, Nicole, Sunny, Sierra, Melody, and Dhriti -- were accompanied by our club advisor Mr. Werner.

Led by Andrew Crabtree we explored the HPE building, beginning with the hardware lab (a very loud room FYI). It was fascinating to see just how intricate how the set up, and just how many prototypes were being tested and developed. We then shuffled into a conference room where Mr. Crabtree introduced women HPE engineers and computer scientists, who shared their experiences in a STEM career. Many of them broke down their process, beginning with high school, college majors, internships, and even being a manager. Their journeys were very insightful and gave a lot more context to the technology industry as a whole, as well as what they required.

We even had the chance to meet HPE intern _______, a current UCLA student and former Rocklin student. Her experience in RHS computer science classes as well as CodeWars gave us (mostly freshmen and sophomores) a detailed set-up to the classes and extracurriculars we could take.

The HPE field-trip was a great place for many of us to start thinking about our future careers, and the process it would take to get there. We learned from people who make HPE, a giant player in the tech world, all possible. Thanks to the club, we were able to see a work-place environment, and not just the insides of classrooms. Even their cafeteria food was great!

On February 9th, we were invited back to HPE by Mr. McAdams, where we started hands-on coding with Python. We’d learned a few basics before that, but this workshop was essential to reinforcing some how-to’s with Visual Studio Code, and taking away some of the mystery of coding. We walked through sample CodeWars problems, and key steps like analyzing the question, pseudocode, or debugging started to become a lot clearer.

Needless to say, HPE was the destination for many RHS Girls Who Code firsts!