L Wang

//(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”); } }