Women Who Reign: Shuya Gong

“Don’t hate what you don’t understand.”
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Tell us about yourself along with a fun fact!
I was born in Beijing and moved to Chicago when I was five, where I started settling into American culture and life. I spent a lot of my time in school reading novels under the table and being curious and excitable about everything, but made sure to get all of my official work done because #tigerparents. I played percussion with the Percussion Scholarship Group of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and curiously it was this creative outlet that taught me the most discipline and mental perseverance–yet the abstract and artistic nature of it drives my innovative side. Fast forward to college, I’m studying mechanical engineering because I fell in love with fabrication and machinery in a computer aided design class, and started working for IDEO coLabs–as a venture designer. Which, fun fact, is basically taking ideas and making them real. As a result, I spend my days looking at emergent technologies and switch between the abstract and concrete to try and make things that are unseeable, and have a high impact on humans.

What # would define your life journey?
#makeotherssuccessful

Favorite website / app:
Is saying Google’s main search engine page cheating? Pretty big fan of Google Tilt…