The WA Young Australian of the Year Shares Her Piece of Advice for Year 12's

“You only need to decide what’s right for right now.” 

At only 22 years old, self-identified country girl Kate Kirwin founded She Codes Australia because there wasn’t a community for herself and other women.

Eight years later, the Karratha-born founder nabbed herself the gong of West Australian’s Young Australian of the Year for 2023.

Kate spoke to us about her win, the journey to the awards and any advice she would give to students.

Coding = creativity.

For some people, creativity and tech are two words that may not go together.

But for Kate those words are one and the same. “Tech for me is something creative, it’s problem solving. It’s sometimes visually beautiful being able to build a website or a game,” she explained to us.

And although she’s working with coding communities in Australia, this was not where she thought she’d end up. When she started working at Spacecubed as an Events Coordinator, she quickly became curious about the people in the community who were building apps and websites.

“And then I went along to an Hour of Code presentation that a guy called Marcus Holmes was running and I just found it so fascinating,” Kate said.

“I’m really driven by this idea of creating something and I think that tech for me is like creating something. It’s so fun seeing something come from nothing.”

How She Codes Australia was born.

 

 

 

 

 

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She Codes Australia is now pretty ‘uge, but there wasn’t just one moment of clarity for Kate when it came to starting the company.

She ran her own ‘learn to code’ meetup herself before discovering beginner coding communities for women didn’t exist. 

She began to feel frustrated going into these spaces and finding there were no women.

Eventually, she and Marcus began to work together and brought in other committee members to foster and grow these spaces for women. Eventually, other committee members began to move overseas or interstate, but Kate was determined keep it going.

“It was around that time that our demand was crazy, we were getting hundreds of people on a waitlist to come to a one day workshop. I had a corporate send me a cold, out of the blue, email asking ‘how do we get involved’,” she told us.

“The community wants this, there’s a problem that needs solving and it feels silly to kind of walk away just because the rest of the committee isn’t there.

“Let’s try and figure out a sustainable model which is when we brought it under Spacecubed.”

Her advice for school leavers/uni students.

Although she’s been named WA’s Young Australian of the Year, she remembers finishing high school and thinking a lot about what she wanted to study.

She ended up going outside the normal pathway and took a year off to make sure she was making the right decision.

“I knew that fitting things around my life was going to be really important, and having that flexibility, was something I took into consideration as well,” she said.

In hindsight, her piece of advice for Year 12’s is to not feel like they have to make all these decisions straight away.

“There’s a lot of pressure that you’ve got to decide the rest of your life and you don’t. You only need to decide what’s right for right now,” Kate told us.

“And that can change. There’s more and more short courses that’s online, there’s boot camps, there’s less and less reliance on having to do a university degree or to do anything in any particular order.”

What’s next for She Codes Australia.

Since She Codes Australia began they’ve taught nearly 7000 women across Australia and expanded to a six month programme. They’ve also had 200 women in jobs post-programme.

Their big goal is to inspire 100,000 people by 2025.

Although that’s a really big number, she said “we need those kind of big, hairy, audacious goals to work towards.”

The National Australian of the Year awards will be announced on 26 January 2024.

Header Image: supplied.