It’s Never Too Late to Get an Education • Dr. Patricia Ordóñez Franco

(Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras || Puerto Rico)

“I’m a child of immigrants — my parents are Colombian. In high school I was interested in programming, so I applied to college at Johns Hopkins in Electrical Engineering — in 1984 Computer Science wasn’t a recognized major yet. I didn’t know anything about computers. In my first mini-computers class, I asked a question and the professor looked at me and said, ‘You should know that by now.’ I felt so behind, so I switched to Math and Pre-Med — my family were all doctors. My senior year I interned in Internal Medicine — I realized medicine was not for me. After graduation I taught high school Math and Spanish for about six years. But I wanted something more challenging — to go back to school for computing, my original plan. I couldn’t afford graduate school, so I did technical support for a software company hoping they’d provide continuing education. I came to the age of 34 — I’d spent five years at this company — and told my boss I wanted to learn to program. He chuckled and said, ‘I don’t think you have the aptitude.’ I became disillusioned — I left to travel in South America for three months.

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Everywhere I went in South America, no matter how poor it was, I could find an Internet café. I became very aware of my privilege — for many people I met, the most they could do to travel was in these Internet cafés. That planted a seed — I wanted to do something about expanding computer and Internet access in Latin America. I was determined to learn how to program. An interest in applying computing to critical care in hospitals brought me back to school. Twelve years later, I was the first Latina to get a PhD in CS from the University of Maryland Baltimore. I applied for a faculty position at the University of Puerto Rico, where I’ve been for seven years, becoming the first woman to earn tenure in our department. I’ve worked to build a university data science program and create a CS education program for K-12 public schools — moving toward fulfilling that dream of increasing access to high quality computing education and healthcare in Latin America.”