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DRAPER — The crowd chanted together, one woman starting them off with "once a tech mom," while the rest of the group finished with, "always a tech mom!"
The group included mothers, sisters, friends and, most recently, students. After a two-month coding course to dip their toes into the technology world, 40 women graduated from the Tech-Moms program on Saturday, ready to dive into coding, web developing, cyber security and more.
Tech-Moms is a nonprofit that focuses on getting moms of all kinds the beginnings of an education needed to succeed in the tech world. One of Saturday's graduating classes, at a ceremony held at the Pluralsight building in Draper, was a special cohort called Tech-Moms in Color — a group where all the students, teachers, teaching assistants and guest speakers were women of color.
"It's so nice to come to a space where there are other women who look like me, who are like me, who have very similar backgrounds and experiences, and we all come ready to learn and have this safe space for each other. That is something I think everybody is looking for, especially for women and for extra intersectionality of being BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) or part of marginalized communities," graduating student Miyamoto Jensen said.
Women from Kenya, India, Brazil and more took part in the program, seeking to gain skills that will help them with careers in which they already work — like genealogy for Jensen — and to kickstart a new career path.
Of the 75 women who graduated from the program this fall, 22 were part of the Tech-Moms in Color cohort.
"I had no clue that it was coding up until the first day of class, and then they were telling us to do coding, and 'this is how you're going to make a website and you're going to come up with this website project.' I was like, 'OK, great. I'm gonna quit in the middle of the class so I don't have to deal with all that,'" Seeseei Loane said.
Loane went on to graduate Saturday, and said she's glad she did. "In the class, we're taught it's OK to make mistakes. It's OK to fail — even as a mom I've failed, and it was still OK," she said.
Graduating students presented websites they coded for the class, showing food blogs, personal portfolios and business ideas. Each presenter shared what challenged them about the course, anything from struggling to code, to struggling to believe in themselves.
Each graduate said the support of the other women in the class helped them be successful. Some of the women said they came to the program facing challenges such as being single mothers, being sparsely educated, or battling cancer for years.
A prominent theme of the women's comments was to work through fear.
"If you're scared, but you want something, it's OK to be scared. Just do it scared," said Martyna Shallenberg, director of software engineering at Myriad Genetics.
Tech-Moms started in 2020, and has so far helped about 430 moms graduate from the program and get steps closer to more elevated careers.
To learn more about Tech-Moms, visit the nonprofit's website.
