How I Started in STEM with Envoy Director of Product Amy Yin

Amy Yin is now the Director of Product at Envoy. She was the founder of her former company, Office Together, before it was acquired by the workplace platform. She is extremely passionate about getting more girls into STEM and is excited to see more women as leaders in technology.

How I Started In STEM with Amy Yin

So from a young age, the first thing my dad used to do is we'd go in the basement and he would set out these bowling pins and he would have me like, roll a ball and knock them down. And that's how I learned how to do addition and subtraction. And I was probably like three or four years old. And so my dad really inspired a lifelong learning of mathematics for me at a young age. When I went to Harvard for college, my college boyfriend decided as a sophomore to take CS 50, the intro to computer science class. And I was like, oh you know, this seems like a fun thing to do. Everyone's doing it. Let me take this class with him. Long story short, he and I broke up, but I fell in love with STEM and I just really took to engineering and coding and I've been in this long term hopefully lifetime relationship with it ever since then.

What passion still drives you in STEM?

There are many times being in that intro class where I felt deeply outnumbered. And as my coursework got more and more advanced, I would often be in the single digits among women in the classroom full of men. And I definitely felt a lot of imposter syndrome. There were folks who have been coding since they were middle school and high school, and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm 19 and just started coding, which sounds really funny to me now looking back because I was like, oh, I felt so ahead of the curve. But back then I felt deeply like, man, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to catch up.

Am I good enough? Do I belong here? And so I started this community called the Harvard Women in Computer Science, where these other women who wanted to share this identity of being technical and really just build things with our own bare hands. And that community has given me so much strength over the years and really kept me in it. So when I think about who I want to build products for, a lot of times I think of those women, right? I wanna build products for women by women. And if we don't have enough women in this field, we don't get to have the ideas represented by 50% of the population. So it's really the woman in technology and this, the woman in STEM that really keep me feeling like this is such a thing that the women in stem, women in computer science, they really make me feel that STEM is home for me and that there's like a real need for me to be a part of this field.

Best advice you received for your career in STEM

Some of the best advice I've ever received in my career is to be your own best self-advocate. To be your own best self-advocate, you have to believe that you are worth it. I had to believe that I am worth it, and that means that I ask for what I need to be successful unapologetically. And that's really, really hard to do. I go back to sometimes feeling like I have imposter syndrome. Do I belong? Do I deserve all these resources? And constantly reassuring myself and telling myself I am worth it. I am valuable and I belong. I deserve a seat at the table. I think that when I feel that way, I feel super empowered. And so that's the advice I would pass on to other folks is just, remember, you are valuable. You are worth it. You deserve to be in this industry if you wanna have a seat at the table, and there's no one that can deny you a mission. And at the same time, there's no one who could grant you admission except for yourself. You get into this industry by showing up, learning and building things.

Importance of representation and diversity in STEM

I really believe in products built by women. For women. A lot of what we do is we build things to solve our own problems. And so if we only have one group of people building solutions for themselves, that means the rest of the world isn't getting solutions meant for them.

If you wanna see awesome products meant for women, then we have to have women building them. You know, less than 7%, I can't remember the exact percentage, but I think it's something less than single digit amounts of Venture capital funding goes to female founders, and that's a huge travesty that I personally want to help address because the funding is coming from venture capitalists who are 7% or less women. They're making decisions on what they should back based off of their own needs. And so they have a set of biases. So then women get actually fewer dollars than men to start companies, and then they're actually building products that aren't, that there's fewer products being built by women founders. And so there's this whole cycle that we can disrupt by getting more women into these tech positions, building companies, building products that are meant for women.

What is the hardest part about working in STEM?

Some of the hardest parts about working in STEM are also the things that give me the most joy. You have to really be committed to learning because the things move so quickly, whether it's AI or crypto or ML or big data, the trends are always changing. And so what you learned five years ago, even maybe a year ago, is gonna go stale. And so being in this industry, means wanting to have a career at the same velocity of this industry, which is fast, light speed. The second is that I still deal with issues of identity, which is why I'm so happy that Built By Girls exists. I think that I have an expression, you have to see it to be it. And so being able to see other women that like look, feel, and are technical leaders makes me feel like I can also be a technical leader.

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