Women Who Reign: Archika Dogra

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” — Aldous Huxley

Tell us about yourself along with a fun fact!
Hi! My name is Archika Dogra and I am a Co-Founder of the EduSTEM Initiative along with my awesome friends Maya and Evelyn. We decided to start EduSTEM because we felt that for all of the STEM camps, classes, and workshops we attended, we had always felt out of place and frankly, isolated. My love for STEM came from taking audited online courses in middle school and high school, which really opened my eyes to how I felt oddly more comfortable with learning programming on my own rather than in a collaborative environment. It didn’t take long to figure out why! As a woman in STEM, asking questions, contributing ideas, and participating in group projects often put me in an uncomfortable, insecure, and subordinate position in relation to my male peers. At my own learning pace and with limitless resources at hand, online learning gave me the comfort and security I needed to find my passion in a field I previously found incredibly intimidating.

Despite these hardships coupled with my academic timidness, I fell in love with programming anything from small games to machine learning models, whether it be in my room or at universities such as Stanford. This inspired me to start EduSTEM because I wanted to create an inclusive…