stems, roses, & the things in between

//(I apologize for not using proper coding formatting, but it's difficult on web.)

public class Stem

{

public static void main(String[] args)

{

String gender = “woman”;

System.out.println(“I was the only ” + gender + “ in my 5th grade computer science class. A bunch, a band, a bundle of boys — they crumpled over sanitized desks with inside jokes everyone but I could understand.”);

System.out.println(“It’s here where my neck prickled with the sensation of chilled smoke, as if a ghost wandered through the classroom walls & pinned me as their sole target. I rested here, as ” + gender + “, for a whole, achingly-long year.”);

System.out.println(“When 5th grade bled into high school, and I began taking computer science

by choice rather than by force, I realized that being ” + gender + “ among men is common.”);

System.out.println(“Is to be expected, really.”);

int boy = Integer.MAX_VALUE;

int girl = 1;

while (girl < boy)

{

System.out.println(“GAME OVER”);

girl++;

}

Roses retry = new Roses();

retry.shareYourStory();

}

}

public class Roses

{

public Roses()

{

}

public String shareYourStory()

{

System.out.println(“A fact: women make up less than 30% of the STEM workforce.”);

System.out.println(“A fact: I am a woman.”);

System.out.println(“A fact: and I refuse to wallow.”);

System.out.println(“Here’s another fact for you: I am not alone. I never have been. & if you, a fellow minority-in-STEM, is reading this, then you are not alone either.”);

System.out.println(“July 2022. 9:00 AM. I logged onto my first-ever Women’s Technology Program class for mechanical engineering. The Women’s Technology Program MechE track brought together 19 girls from across the nation — different lives, different stories, the same willingness to learn — and dumped us into a Zoom class to explore engineering.”);

System.out.println(“Community is a strange thing when you’ve been deprived of it for so long. Yet, we bonded over our love for all-things-science/technology/engineering/math. We suffered over practice problems together, constructed marshmallow-spaghetti structures together. We cheered each other on during Rube Goldberg machine debugging, failed crochet nights, and burnt banana bread.”);

System.out.println(“People Like Us are out there, I have learned. I just haven’t been looking hard enough.”);

System.out.println(“& isn’t this a future worth imagining? That a child, no matter the gender, is supported through any career path they’d like to take? That a little girl, grade five, may have a friend in her computer science course?”);

System.out.println(“The generations before us have taken the mantle upon their backs to carve a place for Us in STEM.”);

System.out.println(“Now, it’s up to us. Would you join me?”);

System.out.println(“WINNER”);

}

}