Mentor Spotlight: Ozge Yeloglu

We sat down with amazing mentor Ozge Yeloglu of Halifax, Canada to hear about her mentorship story with her team The APPstronauts. Check out her story here:

Tell us about Girls Tech League in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. How did you become involved in Girls Tech and who do you serve?

Girls Tech League has started in Halifax as a program under CompCamp. I’ve known Rose Behar, co-founder of CompCamp, from the “Women in Technology” events and discussions. I always believed that we have to introduce girls to technology at an early age, before they decide that technology is not for them. So, the Girls Tech League idea was a perfect one for me to support.

Tell us more about you. What does your daily work life look like and why do you volunteer for programs such as Girls Tech League and Technovation?

I’m a PhD student in Computer Science and a first-time entrepreneur. I’ve been working on a start-up, TopLog, for the last 8 months. So, you can find me writing research papers, working on a pitch deck, emailing and meeting with advisors and investors and coding for our product in the same 24 hours.

I’ve been working with Dalhousie University’s Women in Technology Society (WiTS) for around 6 years now and have been volunteering in Halifax at many events/organizations, i.e. Girls Talk Tech, Techsploration, Ladies Learning Code, Girls Get WISE. Females are definitely in the minority in Computer Science and even a girl with a strong personality can feel lonely, unaccomplished and insecure in an environment like this. My biggest aim is to show girls (either elementary or university or business level) that they are not alone and they can do it when they believe in what they do.

How did you find out about Technovation and why did you decide to take on the Challenge?

I honestly did not know about Technovation until Rose told me about it. She wanted our teams to attend and I thought that was an amazing idea. You cannot believe how excited my team was when they heard that they could be competing with international teams.

We are so proud of your team for being one of the first middle school AND international teams in Technovation. Can you tell me more about the girls on your team APPstronauts? How did you get together to form the team?
We are very proud as well! It was an amazing experience. Rose sent out announcements to a few schools and the girls who were interested signed up. Karen Smyth (other mentor of our team) and I randomly selected one of the schools. Our team had six girls who are very energetic, fun and claiming that they are terrible at Math so Computer Science is possibly not a good choice for them. They were, however, into video games and design so that’s why they were very excited about this challenge.

How did you come up with the idea for your app and get it all done in 12 weeks?

Our team initially had two app ideas: a quiz app and a babysitter app. Basically their own pain points. We all know the best companies are generated while they are actually solving their own pain points. So, this was just an amazing start. The majority decided on the quiz app and then they started building it. They were super fast to grab the concepts of coding with MIT AppInventor. The biggest discussions were more about designing the interface, i.e. where to put which buttons, colour scheme and so on 🙂

Then, the next step was working on the business plan. We didn’t split our team into two, programming and business but they kept switching between programming and business so everybody could get a feeling of what they like more. I was honestly worried whether they could understand the concepts of a business plan and entrepreneurship, but they were definitely fast with that as well. Working on our pitch slides was probably the most fun and exciting part of that 12 weeks because now they were able to see how much they had accomplished in only 12 sessions.

You won a regional competition in Halifax for your app. Could you tell us more about what it felt like to be recognized for all your hard work?

First of all, it was amazing to see them standing in front of judges, presenting very professionally and answering all the questions perfectly. And during the announcement of the winner, I’ll admit I got watery eyes 🙂 They were super happy but more importantly shocked that they could win this competition. I know that was a huge self-confidence pump up for them, showing their parents, teachers, friends and more importantly to themselves that they can do technology if they want to. It just means a lot to me if we could change the futures of six bright girls for better.

Why would you recommend this program to other mentors and girls?

Well, why recommend this program to girls? I think it’s very obvious: I know any girl getting into this program will come out a more secure and confident individual who knows that she can do whatever she wants to do. They might not all turn into Computer Scientists but I’m confident they will definitely consider the option. They can at least tell the boys in their classes that they built an app, a business plan and a pitch when they are told that girls don’t understand computers/technology.

Why recommend this program to mentors?

We all know that we have been through a lot (even though we don’t usually say it out loud) just because we are females in technology. This is one way of changing the future so these girls can stand up to things we have never done because they will be more confident than we were. Because we are telling them they can be the best coder, video game developer, designer or start up their own technology companies and solve the problems they would like to solve. We might not be able to change our current environment easily but we can work on our future.

Anything else you would like to share?

We were told that we needed to create a video talking about our product. We didn’t know it was supposed to be our pitch video so the girls decided to make a cheesy commercial for that. They were all actors in that video (which was a very hard thing to do for some at the first couple of tries) but that was probably the most fun we had in half an hour.

Thank you, Ozge.

Check out the APPstronauts’ pitch here!