Mayuri is a first-year mentor with Bold Idea’s Coding Clubs program. A technology consultant at Pariveda, she serves weekly at the Club hosted at Charles Rice Learning Center in South Dallas.

What have you learned or gained from being a Bold Idea mentor?

It's just been great to hang out with the kids. They are so curious about learning and are constantly surprising me with what they can do. Letting them loose on Scratch during the first few sessions actually taught me a lot. I feel like when you're an adult you have certain rules in your head about the steps and methods you should use to learn something new, but the kids don't have those mental restrictions at all. By going wild and exploring the Scratch pages however they wanted, they were able to discover things about Scratch that even I didn't know (like how to record their own voice clips to use in their animations).

What is your most memorable mentoring moment so far?

I recently helped one student out with a debugging exercise where you had to make the Scratch cat spin around, and the way his face lit up when he was able to do it made my day. That satisfaction when you finally squash a bug as a programmer is unmatched :)

How did you originally become interested in technology and programming?

I attended a computer science summer camp at UT Austin the summer of my junior year in high school. My group made a Stranger Things themed light show for our final project, which helped me see how programming could be used to make creative projects and art.

What did you study in college?

I studied computer science in college. The college I went to really prioritized giving students hands-on coding experience, and that really served me when I started my career.

Is there anything you wish you could tell your younger self about coding?

Ask for help when you don’t know things. I have wasted countless hours of my life on code issues that could have been resolved in minutes if I had just swallowed my pride and asked someone for help. It's also a great way to make friends. Sometimes everyone else is having trouble too…best way to bond is over shared struggles!

What is it about Bold Idea's mission that really connects with you?

Learn by doing! Technology is such a vast discipline that it's impossible to learn every language, framework, cloud infrastructure, etc. The only way to keep up is by jumping into the unknown and trying things out!