I got a chance to sit with Amy Keitany, a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) from the Observability Team who is passionate about teaching young women in STEM code. The young engineer who works at Cellulant has been part of the volunteers for the Youth Technology Foundation Kenya team which is headquartered in Nigeria. She was recommended to speak at the kick-off event for the program with students and that is when her love for tech and seeing more women in STEM saw her wanting to give back.
In the Kenya team, she was part of a club dubbed “Codes Clubs” that she joined between September 2018 to June 2019. In her time there, she nurtured several young women, amongst them form 3 and form 4 students from Huruma Girls High School, who graduated after 9 months of training on Saturday’s on coding using an education approach, communication skills, and soft skills such as how to write a CV.
Amy is a “shy” but brilliant, young lady undoubtedly. You can tell this from the way she speaks about having young women having a seat at the table when it comes to decision making and participating in STEM subjects.
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At work, she mostly spends her time making sure that Observability principles are implemented, integrating monitoring and configure monitoring tools. She uses her tech skills to provide troubleshooting input through analysis and visualizations for our services, applications, and systems.
Over the weekends, mostly Saturday’s she would dedicate her time to ensuring young women get ahead by acquiring these soft skills.
“I find myself getting excited about initiatives around working with young future leaders.” She says with a big smile on her face. When I asked her what she learnt from the teaching experience, she sighs then responds by saying “Interesting question…. I got to understand a deeper level of gratitude that comes with offering someone a stepping stone or a push towards what they want to achieve. The idea of also learning from students, understanding their perspectives, and getting to know them was quite fulfilling. Surprisingly also the fact that I became a self-taught trainer gave me a new skill to work on sharpening.”
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At Cellulant we apply ourselves in how we do our jobs. We make it possible! Amy epitomizes the #makepossible spirit and doing transformational work in the community to ensure the girls have an upper hand by being able to use some of these soft skills.
On a lighter note, she concludes by laughing followed by saying, “I am however not biased, I can train either gender as long as they are young future leaders I am open to the training possibilities”
Story Narrated by; Regina Mwanza – Internal Experience Officer
