By Gwendolyn Schanker

Sarah Chou, Sreeya Sai, and Tina Lee, second-year computer science (CS) majors, find that spending time with a group of like-minded women is always a great motivator.

During the second weekend in February, Lee, Sai, and Chou flew to North Carolina to work with other girls who want to “hack the glass ceiling.” They attended Pearl Hacks, an all female hackathon where students spend 24 hours honing their skills in web and mobile app development.

“It’s great to go to an event where you can be inspired by people who’ve been through similar things as you,” said Chou, who has a combined major in CS and cognitive psychology. “Being surrounded by women is so important to my own success.”

Pearl Hacks is an annual event that took place this year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to collaborative spaces where attendees can plan, program, and chat, there are workshops in areas like virtual reality and Java.

Air mattresses and snacks are provided for the several hundred participants, who generally don’t get more than a couple of hours of sleep as they work to finish their projects. They then present to a group of judges and compete for categories like “Most Creative Hack” and “Best Social Good Hack.”

Chou, Sai, and Lee worked as a team to create an app called P.U.S.H., or Preventing Unwanted Social Harassment. P.U.S.H. is an android app that allows a person to quickly notify a select group of friends that they are in danger. Once the app is activated, a notification is added to the phone’s home page, and the user only has to press this button when they are in trouble.

P.U.S.H. was chosen from more than 40 other submissions for “Best Mobile App” and “Most Innovative Hack for Calling and Texting Using Bandwidth API.” The girls were excited and honored by their prizes, but said that by far the best part of their Pearl Hacks experience was the community of people they met. This included fellow students as well as mentors from schools in the area and companies like Google that helped sponsor the event. The mentors were on call to answer questions or help participants when they got stuck.

“The community there was incredible,” said Lee, who has a minor in psychology and was attending her fifth hackathon. “This blew all my other experiences out of the water.”

Lee comes from a family of computer scientists, but says that until coming to Northeastern, she has found the field to be largely male-dominated.

“In high school I was around a lot of guys and there was a lot of unconscious bias,” she said. “At Northeastern, people are very welcoming.”

This welcoming environment comes from networks like the Northeastern University Women in Technology (NUWIT) group, which hosts weekly tech talks and community workshops for women in CCIS, as well as from personal networks like her friendship with Sai and Chou.

“The community of women in CS is so close-knit,” said Sai, who originally applied to college as a biology major but “fell in love with CS” when she was introduced to basic programming in MATLAB.

Like Sai, Chou was originally interested in studying biology, but was intrigued by the different sort of challenge offered by Northeastern’s CS curriculum.

“The classes are hard, but after you complete a project or assignment, you feel so good,” said Chou, who is always on the lookout for experiences to build her skills. She found out about Pearl Hacks in a Facebook group called “Hackathon Hackers.”

The girls hope to bring the sense of community they found at Pearl Hacks into their day-to-day lives in classes and on co-op, despite the fact that the field is still dominated by members of the opposite gender.

“Sometimes it’s intimidating to be one of the few girls in a technical position in a male-dominated field,” said Sai, who is currently on co-op at IBM. “This experience inspires me to keep doing what I love and to inspire other girls.”

They also hope to plan their own all female hackathon at Northeastern someday, and plan to help contribute to the college’s goal of reaching a 50/50 ratio of women to men in CS.

“CS is gonna change the world,” Sai said.

“It already has,” Chou chimed in.