Em is a senior at Georgia Tech studying Computer Science with concentrations in Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction. She was a part of Google’s Computer Science Summer Institute in 2015, worked as an Android Developer at a student-led startup, and interned as both a Product Manager and Software Engineer at Microsoft over the course of three summers. On campus, Em helped found Girls Who Code at Georgia Tech and works with HackGT, organizing the largest hackathon in the southeast and hosting STEAM exposure events for underserved high schoolers in the Atlanta area.
“When I first started college, I knew very little about my background. I remember sitting down with a friend who also grew up being one of the few Filipinxs in their community. We bonded over the fact that we couldn’t speak Tagalog, that we felt alienated from our culture, that our parents were inconceivably strong for immigrating here, and that we had an insatiable desire to learn more about who we were. It wasn’t until I met first-generation Filipinx-Americans in college that I began to really explore my history.
The Filipinx-American experience is a confusing one. We battle with understanding our place in the American tapestry of heritages, and even our own culture, which is already a melting pot of cultural influences from our Indigenous tribes to Spanish colonists to various other migrants from Southeast Asia. We lack representation in spaces like tech and Hollywood and we never learn about our history in school, despite heavy and intricate Filipinx involvement in American history — from being the first Asian immigrants to the States through Morro Bay to the Philippines being an American colony to our signifcant contributions to the American labor movement of the 1960’s. Despite our erasure, we bind together as a community, finding comfort in our history and identity.”
