Welcome to the Code Movie podcast, where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours.

I'm your host, Aron, and today we're talking about how to use code to build cross-cultural understanding with Laura Gutierrez-Funderberg, data science intern at Siberia's Colistow Project.

And also I think they're at a point where they're trying to motivate more people to learn the

art of basket reading. So we thought this would be a nice way to bring back that spark and that

excitement. Laura talks about how diving into projects and finding mentors helped push her

through her coding journey,

using Jupyter notebooks to create curriculums for teachers with the goal of cross-cultural understanding,

and why building tech with that mission in mind is important.

After this.

Thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me on today.

So tell us about how you got into coding.

I was working towards my bachelor's of mathematics at Simon First University.

And I was initially working as part of a calling center.

And this calling center, what we would do is we would raise funds for scholarships and bursaries.

And we reached out to the alumni.

So one of the questions we normally ask to the alumni was, what kind of advice would you provide to a student like myself? And a lot of the times the alumni wouldatmen I would say things like, well, try co-op,

do study abroad, talk to your professors, seek projects. And I thought these were really good

pieces of feedback. So I ended up doing all of those. Oh, nice. And so I decided I wanted to go to

Germany for a study abroad term and figured, well, I'll need some sort of funding to support expenses while I'm abroad.

So I applied for co-op.

And through co-op, I worked as a help desk IT support co-op student.

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