Geek Girl : A Young Entrepreneur is Building The Go-To Platform for Career Exploration
“When students don’t have exposure to different potential career paths, they end up funneled into roles that their parents or society decide is right for them. Finding a career they enjoy becomes the No. 1 source of stress for adults in their late 20s.” Today’s woman dreamer, Sandhya Iyer is the CEO of Geek Girl Careers. What started as a passion project of her father, who observed the need for a platform like this, Sandhya, now a college graduate, is taking the lead, helping young professionals and students figure out the right career for them. Sandhya shares her expertise for women breaking into tech from a non-coding background, vision for the platform, and the female role-models in her life.
1) Geek Girl is a wonderful venture, helping women find their dream career in technology. Tell us about the platform? How does it work, and what was the need you saw?
Geek Girl Careers is a career exploration platform for women in tech. On our platform we have a personality assessment, network of industry experts and skill development tools to help our users find careers that align with their passions and personality.
GGC was started as a passion project for my dad, Sundar Vanchinathan, when he saw me struggling to figure out what major I wanted to pursue in college and what I wanted to do as a career. We realized that so many of my friends were also experiencing the same struggle, and as a result, Geek Girl Careers was born. After graduating from Syracuse University in May 2020, I decided to lead GGC full-time.
When students don’t have exposure to different potential career paths, they end up funneled into roles that their parents or society decide is right for them. So much so that finding a career they enjoy becomes the No. 1 source of stress for adults in their late 20s. We’re trying to solve that problem early on, by helping high school and college students realize the breadth of careers that exist within the tech industry.
2) Many women think that you have to know how to code to work in technology, but there are so many roles outside of this, product management, marketing, development, and business roles. How does your platform address this? What are your thoughts on getting into tech with the 'non-traditional background'
This is an integral part of Geek Girl Careers’ mission! We believe that almost all of Gen Z will end up working in or with tech at some point in their careers — that’s just the direction in which the world is moving. But tech is so much more than coding and engineering, so whether you’re interested in design, business, communications, policy or anything in between, you can still find a career in tech.
Our personality assessment pulls from almost 30 different careers in tech, and more than 75% of those are non-technical roles. Through our educational content, blogs and events, we also emphasize how interdisciplinary tech is. This is something that’s especially important to me, because as a public relations and marketing student in college, I didn’t realize for the longest time that I could work in tech. And now I’m leading a startup that aims to solve that very problem.
3) Tell us your story. Who are your role-models, and thoughts on women empowerment as a young female founder?
Other than my mother and grandmothers, who will always be my role models, I really admire Kamala Harris, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Emily Weiss and Lindsay Peoples Wagner (among many other incredible, powerful women). I also have many friends I look up to in different ways — I don’t think role models have to be people who are older or more experienced than you!
I’m lucky to work with an incredible team of women on Geek Girl Careers, and we all collectively lift each other up. But imposter syndrome is a real thing — I’m a woman of color who doesn’t have a “traditional” entrepreneur background or an Ivy League pedigree, and sometimes I don’t feel strong or capable enough to run a company. But by putting in 10x more effort and leaning on friends and family for support, I’m working through it.
The work we’re doing at GGC empowers women, and the organizations we partner with empower women. But there’s so much you can do everyday to empower the women in your life, whether that’s by sharing a post about a friend’s project, buying something from a small business, telling people how proud you are of them and providing a boost of confidence and reassurance when they need it most.
4) As #Dreamcatchers, we have to ask, what is your next big dream?
With Geek Girl Careers, I hope to become the go-t0 career exploration platform for all students, eventually moving beyond tech and tackling gender diversity (or a lack thereof) in other industries. I want to empower young women to find and succeed in careers that align with what they enjoy and what they’re passionate about. Throughout my career, I want to take on roles and projects that will allow me to continue empowering women and giving back to society in different ways.
And I’m hoping to move to New York City sometime at the end of this year or early 2022 — fingers crossed!
Bio: Sandhya Iyer is a 2020 Syracuse University graduate and CEO of Geek Girl Careers, a startup that helps young women discover their dream careers in tech. She's originally from San Jose, CA. Other than women empowerment and bringing diversity into tech, Sandhya is passionate about sustainability, equal access to education and helping those in need. When she's not working on GGC, you can find Sandhya experimenting in the kitchen, reading or walking her dog, Einstein.
