Emily Harburg built Brave Initiatives, a program to help girls develop confidence in coding. By Monika Wnuk
While working at Walt Disney Imagineering as a behavioral sciences researcher, Emily Harburg didn’t always feel comfortable speaking up.
“Every day I’d be in meetings where I was the only woman in the room,” she says. “It took a while to get over the feeling that I didn’t belong in that space.”
Experiences like that one inspired Harburg ’18 PhD to team up with Anna Bethune ’19 MA and Jen Kamins to build Brave Initiatives, a series of workshops and camps for girls designed to promote self-efficacy and develop confidence in coding. To date, more than 700 girls have participated in Brave programs around the world, and nearly 90% continue to code.
After receiving encouragement from a female mentor to get her doctorate, Harburg came to Northwestern to learn how to design technology that supports learning in the Technology & Social Behavior doctoral program.
As a test of her learning, Harburg developed a mobile app called Pairachute that pairs newcomers with mentors in the tech industry. The app is used today by Brave Initiatives, and Harburg updates it frequently by adding mentors she meets through networking to support aspiring female coders.
“For me, the most important thing you can do as a leader is to lift up others,” she says.
Harburg, who lives in Boston, currently manages a team of programmers as director of emerging technology and innovation at EF Education First, an international education company. She is working with her team to design technology to support learning, connection and exploration as students travel the world with EF.
“Designing technology that helps people better connect with the world and look out rather than down, these types of projects — the ones that can totally change our relationship with learning — are the ones I’m most passionate about and why I decided to do the work that I do,” she says.
This fall marks 150 years since women could enroll as Northwestern undergraduate students.
Read more of our 150 Years of Women alumni profiles.
To learn about Northwestern’s 150 years of women and remarkable individuals like Emily Harburg — present and past — who’ve left their mark on the University and the world, visit the 150 Years of Women website.
Check out these related stories...
Growing up in a housing project in Milwaukee, Patty Loew didn’t meet many other Native American people. Loew is a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, and throughout her career she has written books on the Native people of Wisconsin. Today, Loew is a journalism professor at Medill, often leading trips to reservations so that her students learn how to cover stories about tribal sovereignty.
Northwestern celebrates the remarkable alumnae, faculty, staff and students who have faced obstacles, broken barriers and forged ahead to make a difference in the University community and the world at large.
Jody Gerson ’83, the first woman to be named CEO of a major music publishing company, wields enormous influence in the entertainment industry as chairman and CEO of Universal Music Publishing Group. She has transformed UPMG into a billion-dollar–plus company.
Reader Responses
No one has commented on this page yet.
Submit a Response