Not many people get a full-ride scholarship to attend university — and Anita Nambuuza is not wasting hers.
Nambuuza already has big goals, just a few weeks into the first semester of her computer science degree at UBCO.
By the time Nambuuza moved to Burnaby from Uganda at 16, she had already developed her skills in teaching coding to kids — her passion for computers was ignited at an early age and she said her mother encouraged her to turn this passion into an advocating force bigger than herself.
Nonetheless, Nambuuza also saves time to engage with other things. She’s also learning to crochet and loves to sing and dance.
When Nambuuza was dreaming up her grade 12 capstone project, founding a school club held down by STEM and students with the goal of bridging passion with education while sharing her journey with others considering a career in STEM was the result of an almost inevitable chain of events.
“I founded [a club] called Stem Wave, where I gathered a bunch of my friends and we mobilized STEM enthusiasts and people who didn't have an idea what STEM was, just to make an open space for young people,” said Nambuuza.
The initiative quickly garnered the support of Canada Learning Code’s teen ambassador program to provide resources and help Nambuuza and her team connect to people in the field — and by connecting to others in computer science and STEM more broadly, demonstrating that there isn’t actually a face of the field.
STEM has been known to be plagued with various stereotypes perpetuating the kind of personalities that should be engaging in STEM — and these notions usually don’t favour women.
“I want to represent the kind of person who invites people to explore things beyond just you have to have a feel for [STEM] to know what it's about,” said Nambuuza. “Because you might find that there's so many things within STEM, within the arts, that you just need a little bit of learning to love.”
Nambuuza said her mother pushed her to challenge Ugandan cultural norms about technology not being suitable for girls to ensure she could satiate her love for technology and creativity.
The lack of women in STEM careers shows up in Canada in a similar way — according to a statistic from the University of Waterloo, in 2022, women held only 22.8 per cent of university-level computer science degrees.
“I feel like there's so much potential within young women like me or there's so many other young women that I feel have the same enthusiasm, but have been suppressed by various factors … It's a big piece to the puzzle that makes the development of the world in general,” Nambuuza said.
Looking toward her time at UBCO, Nambuuza is excited to connect with more people and learn more about what youth empowerment entails and how to represent and serve various communities.
“Giving [young] people a little push … is so powerful because people start to be excited about [STEM], and they want to learn more and that's rewarding to me,” Nambuuza said. “I've seen the power in advocating for STEM and how people are actually genuinely curious.”
Nambuuza is not a fan of the idea that we all must stick to one path to be professionally fulfilled. She predicts that many of the stereotypes perpetuated in STEM may foster a fear of experimenting with other career paths.
“We think we are supposed to have this one path and this one pursuit and this one goal, and that's what a typical good life looks like,” Nambuuza put it. “But I think a life that is committed to continuously learning about self — it's okay to have one passion today and another passion tomorrow.”
Nambuuza said it best herself — we should all be students of life, embracing any opportunities to learn something new regardless of the barriers involved.
“We should wear our values on our sleeves, and opportunities will be able to find us for who we are. And we should learn to love learning.”
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