Tech Sisters hosted by Spark Hub

On November 21st, Tech Sisters’ Tartu third networking event took place in Spark Hub. We were glad to welcome around 50 participants (including many new ladies and one guy!) and for the first time in Tartu events, we held the panel discussion with four sparkling women: Elo Eilonen, Kristiine Naska, Elena Sügis and Jaana Metsamaa. Discussion was held and moderated by Aleksandra Varnaeva, Mobile Interaction Designer at MobiLab.

As this time, three panelists out of four had a formal IT education, an active discussion was around IT education, how to get the knowledge and new skills needed to work in different technical positions. In addition, personal stories, experiences were shared as well as a vivid debate was held about the gender diversity in the IT field. Of course, many questions from the audience were also answered to.

Below you can find a short summary about the panelists. You can find them on LinkedIn or Facebook if you’d like to ask any questions or suggestions from them!

• Elo Eilonen works as a Lead Tester in Celeg Hannas. She has been working as a software testing consultant in various different projects taking on different roles like software tester, QA manager and test automation engineer. Elo has a Bachelor's degree in IT from Tartu University, also attended the Rapid Software Testing courses by James Bach and Michael Bolton and done a lot of self-educating on the test automation topic.
• Kristiine Naska works as Product Owner in Mobi Lab and is also a Head of IT curricula (game design and development, software development and entrepreneurship, IT management and web technologies) in EUAS.
• Elena Sügis is the Data Scientist working at Quretec on projects related to brain ageing and immunology. She is alaso a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu. Besides science, Elena enjoys organizing IT events and is a competitive ballroom dancer.
• Jaana Metsamaa is the Product Manager with a background of being a developer and an engineering manager. She currently studies cyber security in Tallinn Technical University. Jaana enjoys a good challenge, making things better and coaching. Besides work she enjoys a good company, watches too many tv shows and plays tennis.

We’d like to say thanks to all panelists, participants and special thanks to SPARK HUB for hosting as in their excellent premises! And of course, big thanks to sTARTUp Day for visiting our event and giving us a surprise (an awesome discount code for the event valid until November 30th, for more info, please write to us tartu@techsisters.org).

Tech Sisters Tartu will take a break in December but will be back in January, so make sure to check our Facebook page so you wouldn't miss the next awesome event!

Stay tuned!