Hi, I’m Hannah! I’m a 22 year old recent graduate from Cambridge, with a degree in Biological Anthropology and Business. As you can probably tell from the rather unusual degree combination, I found it incredibly hard to choose one subject to study - fortunately for me Cambridge allowed me to study biology, evolution, psychology, behavioural economics, culture, finance and more.

I enjoy being active and taking on new challenges. Last summer I had the incredible opportunity of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. I’m generally at my happiest when by the mountains/sea. I also love baking, Nespresso, WIRED magazine and Google X.

This summer I have been undertaking a new challenge: learning to code! I’m a student at Makers Academy, a 12-week Web Dev bootcamp in Shoreditch and having the most brilliant time. This blog is dedicated to my journey from tech newbie to techie.

So how did I end up (or start up?) here?

The answer begins with education. I have been in formal education for essentially my whole life, and I have been hugely lucky to have benefitted from a supportive network of teachers, family and friends who encouraged me to love learning and to pursue that which interests me. Despite this, I have grown frustrated at several features of the UK education system, a system that has changed little since Victorian times. My first gripe lies with our exam-centric obsession (not only because it turns people into selfish, neurotic shells of their former selves - trust me on this one, or visit Cambridge during exam term to see for yourself). Those who can’t quite hack the memorisation and regurgiation needed to succeed in school exams are categorised as stupid, and many opportunities are closed off to them. I would tentatively suggest that one reason why educational disadvantage is such a huge problem in the UK is because we measure academic success purely in terms of exam success, which in turn is tightly coupled with teaching quality and support. During university I was a brand ambassador for the educational charity Teach First, which addresses educational disadvantage through bringing in inspiring teachers to the classroom. Whilst Teach First is doing fantastic work, I believe that the problem of educational disadvantage requires more than inspirational teachers in classrooms. It is going to require us to think deeply about how we measure educational success, as well as how and why we educate. This brings me on to my second gripe: the artificial categorisation of subjects at school. Not only are the interplay between subjects fascinating, but often you miss out on important insights by keeping the subjects so separate. For example, our culture, diet and behaviour have had real effects on our genetic makeup. Ignoring the interplay between biology and culture leaves us with a poorer understanding of both.

Thus, how can we improve our education model? A brilliant TED talk by Sugatra Mitra persuaded me of the importance of technology in facilitating improvements. Mitra’s ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiments (1999), in which local children in a New Delhi slum were teaching themselves complex biology and physics from internet-connected computers placed there, suggests that self-organised learning is a powerful phenomenon that should be developed. At the Silicon Valley Comes to the UK conference, I was further persuaded that the future of education lies in innovative, disruptive technology, which could facilitate flipped-classroom models of education, where students can benefit from both customised self-learning and group collaboration. I believe that by using technology in education, we can standardise high quality education across the world. Furthermore, by harnessing the power of the Internet and big data analytics, we can enhance our understanding of how different people learn and thus adopt a more personalised approach to education. What came across most strongly at this conference was that the people there were doers and were utterly determined to build tech solutions to many of the world’s most pressing problems. The magnitude of the problem did not phase them. It was there that I decided that this is the industry that I would love to be a part of.