My biggest advice to women starting out their careers in tech is to be confident. Often times, I feel that women are discouraged from pursuing highly technical careers because of male dominance or the lack of confidence in their ability to make it happen. One thing that I've realized is that men are not better at women inherently at programming. Removing humility for a moment, I'm probably better than the majority of men in my program at software development. This is because of the confidence that my family and mentors have instilled in me along the way that has allowed me to push through the difficult situations, including failing classes, internship/scholarship/fellowship rejections, and the general abuse that is almost unavoidable as a woman in this field, while developing my skills to a professional level. My other big piece of advice is to understand that tech is difficult for the majority of people, and to find a community of supporters in your early days. When I first began programming academically 10 years ago, it was nothing like I had ever done before - I had a little experience with web programming and computer architecture, but let me tell you, that introductory C programming course made me cry on several occasions. I actually vowed at one point to never program again. However, I had a community of women around me in computer science and other engineering fields, and they really built me up, helping me learn the concepts in ways that made sense to me, reviewing my problem sets for bugs that I wouldn't have noticed, and giving me confidence that I probably had no business having with my skill level at the time. I wouldn't have had the balls to take some of the risks that I did without the confidence they instilled in me.;It is so important to find a community, and they do exist outside of academia. For example, baddies in tech is a community I'm part of that is provides to support, recruitment and mentorship for black women in their early tech careers.