>> I'm Lisa Martin on the ground with The Cube. We're at Google for the sixth annual Top Women in Cloud Awards with CloudNOW. Very excited to be joined by one of their new partners from the Holberton School, Kristin Loyd. You are a scholarship recipient at Holberton. >> Yes, I am. >> Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. >> It's great to have you here. You have a really interesting background. I want to talk a little bit about the Holberton School, but tell us about your career path to getting into education and software engineering. Were you always a kid interested in technology or was this sort of a zigzaggy path to technology. >> Yeah, it was definitely a little bit more zigzaggy. Growing up, my dad was always into video games and I got to take apart VHSs, but I never really got into it. I just wanted to learn a little bit about everything. So because of that, I went to school to be a teacher, was a student teacher, decided, "Oh, this is a little bit "more than I expected," didn't know what to do. I fell into the financial industry as an assistant there. I was learning a ton, but it wasn't really my passion. I started hanging out with the IT guy there and asking him questions about how our systems worked and decided oh my gosh, maybe this is what I want to do. Fell into Holberton, and I've loved it, and I'm super advocate for it, and I'm very excited to be here. >> That's awesome. So you went and got a four-year degree and then said "You know what, not quite my passion," which is really ... Congratulations on feeling that and going "You know what, I'm going to make a change here." How did you hear about Holberton School? It's a pretty new school, right? >> Yes. >> With a pretty revolutionary approach to helping and assisting with tuition and that sort of thing. What was it about Holberton that attracted you? >> So me being a former future educator, I was really into the model of project and peer learning education, so there's no lectures, there's no formal books to read, but we have access to the internet and Google, and we have access to our library at the school, and we really just learn by doing projects and helping each other. One of my favorite parts about being at the school is, even within my own cohort, there's different levels of knowledge, so I'm always going to be able to help somebody, and somebody's always going to be able to help me. >> It sounds very collaborative ... >> Yes. >> Which it facilitates your learning because you're probably meeting different people that, like you said, are at different levels, and that's a really interesting ... Compare that to your four-year degree in terms of the collaboration. How similar or dissimilar is it? >> So in my four-year education, I still had a cohort model. Being an educator, there was some of use who wanted to do that, right? So we had a lot of classes together, but that was more about individualistic learning. You read the text, you go and you talk about it, and then like bing, bam, boom, okay you know how to teach children now. And that was great for what I was going to be doing. But I learn better as doing projects and having the context of what we're working with and why we're doing things a certain way. And that's really spurred me to want to continue learning in my entire career. >> So you just finished your first year? >> Kristin: Yes. >> So tell me about year two and what you're thinking long-term job wise. >> So first I get to go out and either get an internship or an entry-level position, so I'm looking into doing that now. And then year two, there is one of three tracks you can choose from, so there's low-level, web stack debugging, a couple other tracks are available to students, and so what that is is you go really in depth and have this specialization part. The first year is you can code now, you know C and Python. You can do debugging, right? But specialization years, you go very deep in these concepts and you're able to work in an even smaller cohort and just really dig deep and get that knowledge. >> This last question as we wrap up here, we're at the CloudNOW sixth annual Top Women in Cloud Award event. Tell me a little bit about CloudNOW and what maybe inspires you down the road as you launch you tech career as a female in technology. >> Something that really hit home for me today actually was the diversity and inclusion panel that happened today, and something that Rebecca W said was about being a change maker and being a change agent and having that positive energy going forward because the way you can combat some of these discriminatory remarks or slights is that being this person that can do it and just says, "Okay, well maybe you "think that, but I'm going to show you and prove you "that I'm here, and I'm going to do it," and I think that's the best kind of energy to bring into that, and I'm looking forward to doing that. And also something that was said today was being here at the event, we have a responsibility to represent and to mentor others, and I really take that to heart. So I'm excited to be able to bring maybe some of my knowledge I got here today back to my classmates. >> And continue that collaboration. >> Yes Well, I think you've got great energy, and I know someday you're going to a mentor to a lot of people. Kristen, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube, and we wish you the best of luck finishing out Holberton, and I'm sure we'll see you back on The Cube when you're a technology leader in the near future. >> I would love to. Thank you so much for having me. >> Absolutely. Thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin, on the ground with The Cube at Google. Stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)