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...
When Sheila Gujrathi ’92, ’96 MD was a student at the Feinberg School of Medicine, she took a year off between her second and third years to live in an ashram in the south of India. Her mother, a pediatrician, was so worried about Gujrathi that she called the ashram and asked them to send her daughter home to finish school, but Gujrathi wanted to lead a more centered life.
Northwestern alumna Karen DeCrow led the National Organization for Women in the mid-1970s, when she campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, defended Title IX and ran the first Take Back the Night march.
After overcoming adversity in her own life, Jade Maze ’08 MMus is mentoring promising musicians at the Merit School of Music, a community music school in Chicago that serves talented youth in its tuition-free college-prep conservatory.
Reader Responses
No one has commented on this page yet.
Submit a Response