Hiranya Peiris
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I remember applying to so many different jobs and I accumulated the rejection letters in a binder.
I still have that somewhere to remind me that rejection is OK.
Eventually, I got into a scheme called the Ear in Industry at Nuclear Electric, which ran the UK's nuclear reactors at the time.
And I was placed in a team which was monitoring the turbo generator system for cracks and
There was not a woman in sight.
And I was a young woman of color.
But I was placed in this team which treated me no different.
I was just told, this is what you have to do.
And I taught myself to code in C++.
I learned Unix.
That's correct.
What helped me is this feeling that once you've done something hard once, you can do it innumerable other times.
I could learn to do anything.
Again, I didn't really connect to the way of learning in lectures and so on.
That's right.
Yeah.
So I used to fall asleep in lectures.
But in my second year, I was accepted into a summer research internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
And that was a real turning point in my life.
That was a wonderful occasion.