Transcript - Episode 10 - Victoria Lestari
Kiki (K): Hello everyone, welcome back to Kartini Teknologi with Kiki and Galuh as usual. And, today, we have another guest who is pretty active on Quora as well, and if you’re a Quora user maybe you know her already. Without further ado, let’s welcome Victoria Lestari. Hello, Victoria.
Victoria (V): Hello, thank you so much Kiki and Galuh for inviting me to the podcast. This is the first time I’ve been invited to a podcast, so I feel really honored, and a bit nervous, but hopefully everything will go well.
K: Amen. Would you like to introduce yourself for a bit and maybe tell us what you’re passionate about?
V: Hi everyone, I’m Victoria, you can call me Vic. In Indonesia I live near Jakarta, more specifically in South Tangerang. I got my bachelor’s degree from Universitas Indonesia, in the Faculty of Computer Science, in 2011. And then I continued to obtain my master’s degree in University of Texas Austin, United States, in 2016. I taught at Universitas Indonesia for a while, and then I had to work in Google London, so now I’m in London. What I’m passionate about is, outside of technology, I really like art and creative media. So I was very happy when I got invited by Kartini Teknologi because this is what I really like—issues about women, technology, mixed with media. That’s why I said yes straight away.
K: Okay, maybe we’ll start with the basic questions. How did you get interested and eventually get into tech?
V: Okay, so actually I’ve liked computers since when I was in kindergarten. My dad happened to work using a laptop and I really loved it when I saw computers, and I got introduced to PCs pretty early. I’ve used PCs a lot but I’ve never programmed actually, so I used PCs to type, or even to use Photoshop. When I was a teenager I loved reading novels, so I considered to major in English Literature, but my parents recommended me to major in Computer Science instead, because it’s the science of the future, it has good job prospects, and I happen to like mathematics as well. Maths will be very useful in the computer science field, so since I have the skills, why not? So I continued to be in tech, I like it as well, and I continued to obtain my master’s degree, until now that I work in Google.
K: What is the tech stack that you use daily? What programming languages or tools?
V: So when I was in college, I really liked Python best. My background was more like academic research. During my master’s degree I used Python, but now in Google since I’m part of the Android team, I returned to Java. In college I also learned Java first. For the tech stack, when I was doing research I used basic Python, but now I’m using a tech stack that belongs to Google, so it’s specific to Google’s environment.
K: You graduated from University of Texas, right, what did you learn there? Maybe you can tell us what your thesis about?
V: In University of Texas, or UT Austin, the computer science department is general, so you have to take every course. What general means is that, in some universities in the US they have a machine learning department, or a computational linguistic department, but in UT Austin it’s general computer science, I have to take every class. For the classes, there are three fields, so first we have the theoretical classes, such as algorithms, or systems such as operating systems, distributed systems… at that time I took the dependable computing system course where I learned about security… not security, but more like, how to make it so that whenever a system fails, it is backed up by others. But if you have too many backups, that’s also wasteful, so it has to be efficient but secure. For theoretical classes, I took parallel algorithm, so if you studied computer science maybe you’ve had a class called algorithm design and analysis, this is the continuation of it. The third field is applied, so this is the one closest to my specialization. It’s also the most broad and the one with the most classes. For example there is AI—artificial intelligence, machine learning, or databases. Because my specialization is in NLP, natural language processing, it counts as a class in the applied field. So those are what I learned at UT. My thesis is about coreference resolution, have you heard about it?
G: I have, but it’s OK, tell us about it.
V: So coreference resolution is one of the subtasks in NLP, where a sentence… so we have a paragraph with, what do we call it, pronouns. What does this pronoun refer to? For example, “I go to the Google office every day. The place there is very comfortable.” The word “place” refers to the Google office. That’s a coreference. Resolution creates a system that allows us to connect these two words because they refer to the same object. Actually there are a lot of researches on coreference resolution in the NLP field already, especially for Coref there are lots from Standford University. But for my thesis, I took a reference from a researcher in University of Washington, Seattle, whom I think is now working at Google as well as a researcher, but I forget which Google office, perhaps it’s Google Seattle. So the difference is in the methodology. One of the methodology was rule-based, so it was… handcrafted by the researches. But my thesis, which referenced the work of the researcher from UW Seattle, is purely machine learning.
G: Does it work for Indonesian as well, or is it specific to Indonesian, or can you generalize it to many other languages?
V: I have never tried it, the dataset itself was in English, I haven’t tried it on other languages, but maybe if you want to train it on Indonesian dataset you can. But the problem is we don’t have the dataset yet. So we’re still lacking Indonesian corpora, which is one of the obstacles in Indonesian NLP research. Maybe the methodology can be generalized to Indonesian, there’s no research on that yet, you can do it if you’re interested.
G: So maybe if our listeners are looking for a topic to do their thesis on, maybe you can do this one. So before you worked in Google you also applied in Quora. What made you want to work in Quora?
V: So I applied to Quora in 2017. I applied for internships because I had yet to graduate, I graduated in 2018. So for internship I reached the onsite stage, but I didn’t make it then, the full story is in Quora. So why was I interested? In 2017 from what I remember there was no Indonesian Quora yet, so before there was Indonesian Quora I often browsed the English version of Quora, reading about people’s experiences, and there are actually quite a lot of professors who write there, and I also learned feminism from there. So when I was in the English version of Quora I was more of like a silent reader, I just upvoted things, I didn’t comment much. But I love the site because it gives us so much knowledge. It’s especially helpful when I was applying for master’s. So although I graduated from UI, I was quite confused when I had to choose universities that fit me, how to convert the grades to the system in the US, which universities match my qualification, should I set my bar high, am I setting my bar too low, so I looked for the information in Quora. So I was interested in Quora because I like the product. Second, there are a lot of writings in Quora, languages, texts. My background in NLP would most likely be useful in Quora, but since I didn’t get the chance, I don’t know how it feels like to work there. At that time I applied as a software engineer, general.
K: We also chatted with Veni from Quora, and she told us that when she was studying in the US, she expected people to wanting to work at huge places like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and such. But it turns out there was a tendency to work at mid-sized companies like Quora and that’s why she got interested in Quora. So I was thinking maybe you were interested because of that, but it turns out it’s because of the product. Okay. So, about your current work, maybe this is a question that has been asked a million times, but can you share a bit about your journey to Google? Maybe the application process or how the interview process is like?
V: When I graduated from the US, I was thinking whether I want to continue PhD or work. But after many considerations, I thought I should try working in the industry first. So I applied to Google and several other companies. At that time the interview stage was quite intense. But since tech companies have similar selection processes, their interviews must include a tech interview, my coding preparation can be used for all companies. The application process was pretty standard, I opened the website career.gogoel.com, chose the role that I wanted to apply to which is software engineer, and after getting through the resume screening, the HR person from Google called me back. So I only applied, sent a CV, and that’s it. Maybe Google kind of looked at the almamater, so UT Austin is one of the best universities for computer science in the US, it’s one of the top 10. I got a call from Google’s HR, got interviewed, and I got a coding test, coding sample, so it’s like online coding in my laptop but not real-time, so I was given a certain amount of time and I had to send it afterward. Actually I was supposed to go through a few stages, from what I remember the typical process at Google is first interview, and it could be two or three phone interviews—tech interviews, and then onsite. But I don’t know at that time maybe they thought my qualification fits what they need there, so I was called to do the onsite interview directly. The schedule of the onsite interview itself was determined by me, because they wanted me to perform at my best, so it’s up to you how long do you need your preparation to be, that’s what they said. If I’m not mistaken, I interviewed onsite in October 2018. I applied in September so that’s a month, I graduated in May, os I was still at the US, I went back home, and I have a relative there so I stayed with them. I practiced coding every day to prepare for the onsite interview. I also read a book that I think everyone in tech already knows about, which is Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakman. I did my onsite interview in Sunnyvale, not Mountain View. There are four interviews—two before lunch, and then lunch where a Google employee showed me around, and then two interviews after lunch. So there are four in total. Each interview lasted for 45 minutes and those were whiteboard interviews, I wrote algorithms and such on whiteboards using markers, and of course I couldn’t compile the code. So that’s 45 minutes each, I did feel tense but I had to maintain my chill so that I could think clearly. Most importantly, ask the interviews questions because they’re not trapping us. They won’t… if we get stuck, they’ll give us hints to help us and we have to follow their hints. So first of all, ask as many questions as possible about the problem statement. Sometimes the problem statements are ambiguous on purpose, because they wanted us to communicate with them. As software engineers we have to have good communication, as long as the stack and requirements are not clear yet, we have to keep asking. It’s better to ask first before coding in the whiteboard. However after I interviewed in October 2018, in November 2018 they told me that there is no position in Mountain View yet. Because there is no position int he US, I went back home. In December, I was asked again, do you still want to work at Google? I want to, I was offered London and Dublin because those are where the openings are. I thought it could be Singapore or other countries in Asia, or Australia. But I don’t ask for much, because it’s Google, my dream company. So… I started to practice again, but it turns out there was a team that needed me, which is my current team, Android Machine Learning. So they needed someone. My current manager is the manager who interviewed me back then, and fortunately I didn’t have to do the coding interviews anymore, so I was interviewed about data structure and algorithms, basic questions about data structures, and then I got accepted. But at that time I was already asked to teach at Fasilkom UI. It’s because while I was waiting for info from Google, I was applying to several companies in Indonesia because I wasn’t sure I could get Google. I didn’t know whether I still have to do tech interviews or not. That time my dean, Ms. Mirna, asked me to become a lecturer instead, although I applied as a teaching assistant. So I taught for a semester until June, and in June I departed to London. So I started working in June. It’s been about four months now.
K: That’s a long process. So you started the process in September, and then you started working the next year?
V: Yes. I applied September, interviewed in October, and started working in June. That’s because I asked for June, because I was teaching for a semester, of course I couldn’t leave in the middle of my teaching. Also the visa process took quite a while too. I was asked for my transcript. In the US, we don’t keep the transcript.
K: Oh really?
V: It’s not like in Indonesia. You have to order for the transcript. At that time my transcript got lost when they were sending it to me from the US to Indonesia, so I had to reorder. I started to get stressed. Processing the visa requires me to give my transcript, and the transcript has to be the hard copy one with the stamp from the university. So it took quite a while.
K: What did you teach at UI?
V: At UI I taught Basic Mathematics 1, it’s Calculus, but the class is a big one, so a senior lecturer was in charge of it, and I was working as the tutor. On Mondays the classes discussed the materials, and Wednesdays are tutorial days where students work on problems. I and four our five young lecturers handled tutorials. I also taught one of the international classes on Intelligence Systems or AI. My senior, Aruni, taught the first half of the semester, and I taught the next half of the semester. I was teaching machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, agent.
K: Galuh, did Victoria taught you?
G: I think no, I think I graduated before that. I’m curious, when you applied for the internship in Quora you didn’t make it, but when you applied for Google you succeeded. What were the differences between your preparation for Quora and Google? Were there more practice, more mock interviews, what made the preparations different?
V: More practice is important. Because in Quora it was… it was the first onsite that I had ever been through in a tech company. My background wasn’t in competitive programming. Competitive programming is quite helpful. I don’t have a background in competitive programming, though. And because I applied while I was still doing my study, I didn’t practice that well. When applying for Google, I had already graduated, so I had time to practice. Also it was no longer mock interviews but real interviews. I applied to Google while applying to other companies, so when I interviewed for other companies it was like practice for me. Actually I’m serious in every interview, but I succeeded in some, failed in some, so when I failed I evaluate myself. Also in Google the interviewers weren’t intimidating at all, they made the situation relaxing so that I could think clearly, that’s the most important thing. Also good communication is very important. So yeah it’s because I had more practice and experiences being interviewed in tech companies.
K: So you’re still working on the Android product, right? What’s the most fun part about working at Google?
V: My favorite is the office culture. So although Google is a big company, they keep their startup culture, so it’s flexible, I mean I can come at anytime, the most important thing is that I’m present in every meeting. So if someone wants to come at 9 am that’s fine, 10 am that’s okay, but you have to adjust when you’re leaving. If you arrive at the office later, then you’ll have to leave later as well. Also in the team, the atmosphere is very comfortable. I was new at the time, but they made me feel welcome. They’re also very diverse—I’m in a group of five people and everyone comes from different countries and ethnicities. So it’s truly an international company, and they’re willing to pay attention to each of their employee. I also have mentoring with my manager. And we have lunch with our teammates together every week. There’s no dress code, they said the most important thing is you’re wearing clothes. Whether I’m wearing a dress, shirt, t-shirt, it’s not a problem—most importantly I’m wearing clothes that’s all so I can express myself more. And the relationship between manager and teammate is not far apart. So… our manager does oversee us, but the relationship is close and that’s the kind of office culture that I really like. I also feel very happy—it’s like self actualization, because Google is a huge company right, so I feel like I’m contributing although it’s a very small contribution, but I’m glad to be a part of Google.
K: You mentioned that your teammates all come from different countries. Do they all stay in London or in other offices?
V: We all are staying in London. This is a small team, so it’s a small team that works on this Android product. We sit together side by side. So if we want to ask questions we can just ask each other. But we will also interact with other teams in London or other offices. But mostly in London.
K: What teams do you usually interact with?
V: Of course Android, sometimes with the machine learning team as well, because I’m part of the Android machine learning team. But I’m part of the Android team. The machine learning stuff will come from the machine learning team.
K: Okay. Can you tell us more specifically about the product you’re developing, what is it about? Is it like Android Now?
V: So this is a Google Pixel, my phone is a Google Pixel. This product is only available in Google Pixel. It’s more like the OS… so these right here are applications that are suggested by the system OS. So this could be an application that I open frequently or I have opened recently within the past few hours, those are the kind of applications that are suggested. So if you want to open the app, you can click it right here. This is the one I’m working on. Other people will be working on something else. For example in Pixel there’s a feature called Now Playing, so for example if I’m playing a song, I’m not sure if this feature exists in other phones or not, but the feature can tell us, what song is currently playing.
G: Did you have experience in Android prior to working at Google?
V: No, I don’t have a background in Android. My background is research, so most of the time I code for research, for example data processing, writing TensorFlow for machine learning, numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, more like tools for machine learning or NLP. For Android itself, I’m currently handling Java, so it’s no problem since I understand Java, that’s the most important thing. From what I’ve heard, Google’s technologies are different from other companies, but still I have to learn again at Google, so it’s not a problem for me. At the start of course I have to learn to catch up, but I did it. The most important thing is, I think if you want to work at Google it’s not about what technologies you’ve mastered, but more like how fast you can learn. Learning new technologies, reading documentations, reading other people’s similar codes, those experiences are more important, those skills are more important than mastering all the available tech stacks or technologies. Because it’s impossible that we master all tech stacks, because there are a lot. So it’s more like the learning skill that you have to have.
G: So either way you have to be able to adapt because technology moves at a very fast pace.
K: You’ve told us about the good things. What about the “dark side” of it?
V: It’s not actually a dark side. But working at Google, you can say that it’s the number one IT company in the world, of course the work is demanding. We’re asked to always be productive, to focus on our work. We also have to be independent. Independent because it doesn’t mean everyone can help us—although we have mentors, managers, but sometimes they can’t solve our problems, so we have to find ways to solve it on our own. So it’s more like the soft skills. My background has been academic, so I listened to lecturers, received input from them, and then we would work in silos, and I would report to them again and again. But in Google, you can’t be like that, you have to be assertive and interactive. So I can say that our culture in Indonesia is like, we have to be very respectful of people older than us, more senior than us, seniority matters a lot. But in Google, we are pushed to be more assertive. If you don’t know something, ask your teammate. If your teammate cannot help you, ask other teams that have worked on that. Maybe that person has worked on feature A and I’m currently working on feature B, which is kind of similar to feature A. I’d then ask the person who made feature A. This person is not necessarily in my team. I have to take the initiative to ask, so yeah, be assertive. Because of the cultural difference, I have to be assertive, usually in Indonesia it’s more like “yes ma’am, yes sir”. You can’t do that here. So yeah, more like the soft skill and culture shock. Well not really culture shock, more like cultural difference. Also, living alone. So although I lived alone in the US for two years, but studying is different from working. This is my first real professional working experience—before that I was always in the academia, so this is really my first professional working life, more like “adulting is hard”, that’s what makes it hard. But again, because the atmosphere is good and the people are supportive, I feel supported and I can handle it.
K: You mentioned that adulting is hard, I’m curious, usually in Saturdays or Sundays, in the weekend, what do you do in London?
V: I work on my other projects. Usually in Saturdays or Sundays… I actually want to launch a YouTube channel that happens to have similar content as Kartini Teknologi, so we’ll talk about women who are not in technology, more like STEM—science, technology, engineering, mathematics. So, I started working on that, preparing… it will be done by my brother as well, but it will take a long time. Also I’m usually taking a rest, grocery shopping, cleaning my house, and because I meet a lot of people on the weekdays, I want to have Saturdays and Sundays for my me time. Also since I’ve just released my first novel, I’m promoting my novels, I have to prepare for the contents, that’s what I also do.
K: The name is Jakarta Vigilante, right? Can you tell us more about the story?
V: In short, it’s a female Batman in Jakarta. Why Batman, not Batwoman, because the character itself is more similar to Batman. She’s rich, she acts like she wants, arrogant, but at the end she changes because she wants to help the people she cares about. I wrote it when I was in the US, when I was doing my master’s degree. I’ve liked writing since a long time ago, and I even wanted to major in English Literature because I like writing. I didn’t write for quite a long time, when I went to Fasilkom UI I didn’t write at all. I started to write again when I was doing my master’s, I had quite a bit of free time because I only had 9 credits per semester so I just decided to write. At that time, I was very into series like Marvel Cinematic Universe, or DC’s TV series like Arrow or The Flash. And Indonesia doesn’t have hero stories, well it does but it’s been a long time and they’re just reviving it just now. When I started writing it hadn’t really started yet, so I just wrote my book. I connected it with problems that exist in Jakarta. So the setting is really Indonesia, and it is also tied to problems in Jakarta.
G: It’s interesting because, I really like writing as well, and it’s similar to Victoria, before I went to college I still wrote some fiction, but once I went to Fasilkom UI I didn’t write again because I didn’t have time to. So I can totally relate, like spending four years without writing, and even until now I haven’t written anything as well. So I really respect Victoria who eventually got to publish her work. I’m curious, is any part of the story itself or the character is inspired by tech?
V: Yes. One of the characters is a female hacker. She’s the best friend of the main character, she’s called Lita. So Lita herself is inspired by my life in Fasilkom. There’s a part of her character that I took from my friend too. She cannot fight but she’s the one behind the scenes helping out Tiara—the main character’s name is Tiara—and her friends who are in the field. Lita is the one behind the scenes helping them. The story of the character is actually inspired from—if you know Arrow, I took the inspiration from Felicity Smoak. And I like it because hackers are usually depicted as guys, and here I purposefully created a female hacker.
K: How long did it take for you to write it?
V: A year. So from early 2017 to 2018. I published it on Wattpad. Late 2018, around September or October, a publisher offered me to publish my book. So the publisher contacted me through Wattpad. Actually they initially wanted to publish my other story that won a Wattys, so Wattys is an award in Wattpad. But I told them that the book is a sequel of this one (Jakarta Vigilante), can you publish this one first? So my editor said yes it’s possible. So they published this one first. But hopefully the sequel will also be published.
K: Great, so there’s a continuation of the story. Also, do you think it’s important to have a representation of women in STEM in fictions, and why?
V: I think it’s important. Fictional characters as part of our pop culture are already well integrated to our lives. Movies, songs, whatever it is, series, they’re part of our lives, people’s lives, especially teenage girls, well actually any teenager, they usually need someone to look up to. And they usually look at characters in media like these movies rather than someone in the real world because they’re cooler, like Iron Man, he can fly like whoosh like that. For female characters, they usually see female characters portrayed as the hero’s girlfriend or hero’s sidekick and I think it’s important to have female representation in tech so that they can see, oh I can be a hacker as well. Hackers are not just guys, hackers can be girls too. I just got the fact that for there is a small number of girls in the US who took computer science as their major. Even in Fasilkom UI it’s just about a third which is not so bad. In the US it’s very few. In Google itself if I’m not mistaken the representation is still quite small for female engineers. I don’t remember exactly how much, is it a third or what, but still very few. So it’s necessary to inspire teenagers so they can see that oh tech is not just the guys’ field, girls can get into tech as well, and they don’t need to be afraid that their friends are guys, especially the stereotype that girls are emotional, guys are logical, it’s not correct, it depends on the individual. I have female friends who are logical, male friends who are emotional, although maybe it’s not the majority, but it can happen. Especially that you can train yourself to be more logical too. So… yeah, it’s important, we need it.
K: Can I say that your novel is one of your efforts to introduce tech to more women?
V: Hmm… it can be, it’s more about women empowerment on a whole, not just in tech. The lead character herself, the Jakarta Vigilante, is a woman, and I want to show that women can be heroines and hackers. So it’s not like, if we see Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, there’s only one movie whose lead character is a woman. Black Widow doesn’t even have her own movie, in DC EU there’s only one, Wonder Woman, whereas there are five guys in Justice League… the woman is just Wonder Woman. We need more women, at least with the same ratio, maybe three:three, not just five:one or whatever. That’s what I want to promote. In Jakarta Vigilante there are guys as well. It doesn’t mean that the guys become weak guys, no, it doesn’t mean that the roles of the girls and guys are reversed where the girls become the strong ones and the guys are the weak ones, they help each other, so more about equality.
K: So you said you’re very into superheroes as well. Any superhero character that becomes your role model?
V: There is, ironically it’s a guy. Iron Man. Because Iron Man is great at tech, he has a power because he’s smart, not because he got injected by a serum, he’s an alien, he gets thrown by a rock that makes him strong or something, no, it’s because he’s smart. And he uses his genius to strengthen himself. And his character which is kind of like… doing whatecer he wants, it’s interesting for me. Doesn’t mean that I’m that kind of person but more like, hmm, okay, it’s not boring like other heroes who are always nice like Superman or Captain America. It’s OK to be eccentric sometimes. I want to see women who are more like Iron Man, not his counterpart, but really like a female version of Iron Man. That’s what I want to see.
K: You have lots of interests, right? Like you’re active on Quora, you write a novel, can you let us know how do you see your career and how do you manage your time to be able to commit to your day job while at the same time you keep on writing and active on Quora?
V: This is one of the things that I like from Google, which is Live work at work. So, once you finished your work, you don’t have to keep on work overtime. You can work overtime but it’s not a requirement. And that’s what I like because I can’t do it when I was a student. Because as a student, we can’t Live study at campus, it’s impossible. You should work on your assignments even after you went home. As a computer science student, you would probably know that. We should work on our assignments even on the weekend, except you want to sacrifice your grade, which I can’t. So, here, I have the opportunity to do my hobby. Actually, I started when I was doing my post-graduate study. I started to write on Wattpad when I was doing my post-graduate study so I have some free-time. Now I actually haven’t write anything else on Wattpad because I’m still adjusting myself here and caught up with other stuff, so I write on Quora. Writing on Quora is easier because it’s my life experience. Fiction is harder because we have to do deep to think about the characters, plot, and stuff. But in Quora, I just need to re-share from what I’ve experienced, or from what I’ve learned and it’s refreshing so it’s not a problem for me. On managing time, in Quora I was more active when I was a lecturer in UI. I usually write during the night after I got back from work, and wasn’t able to do any other heavy-thinking activities. But now I’m not really active anymore on Quora, because I’m more focused on preparing my other projects like the youtube channel and also promoting my novel. So in short, whenever I have free time, I do my hobby.
K: Ok. So, besides Quora and writing, you also like Korean stuff and fashion, right? Although I would say that those 2 things are not so commonly mentioned in people on Tech. How do you see those hobbies and who do you usually discuss them with?
V: I think there’s a misunderstanding that we have to clarify. As far as I know, in Fasilkom UI, there are lots of them who likes Korean, especially women. I have lots of friends who likes to watch girlband or Korean drama when we are waiting for the next class. Although I’m not a Korean drama addict, myself. Now I’m more into KPOP. Indeed, I don’t discuss it with my Tech peers, and it’s just not proper to talk about it in the office, right? So I have my own community to discuss about it. And coincidentally, some people on my Wattpad readers community also likes Korean so I can talk about it with them. I also have a younger sister, so I can discuss it with her.
K: What about fashion? How would you describe your style and maybe do you have any brands that you like the most?
V: On fashion.. I would say that it’s a combination. Sometimes if I like a Korean style, I can follow it. I also look up to Disney from their movies as well. On brands, I don’t have any particular brand that I like. I usually buy anything that looks good, fit me, and has a reasonable price. Now I would like to do another hobby which is Disney-bounding which is Disney’s character cosplay but with everyday outfit. Because it’s a bit weird if we use the real, for example, Snow White costume, and it wouldn’t be used as often, right? So, it’s as simple as I can just use a blue blouse with yellow skirt, and read headband if I were to cosplay Snow White. For me, it’s just a way of refreshing and hone my creativity.
G: What about if the listener wants to buy your book? Where they can get or order it?
V: Maybe not in every Gramedia store, but some might have them. You can also buy it from online shop like Shopee, Tokopedia, Bukalapak. You can also ask my publisher at Aria Media Mandiri
K: So that’s how you can order Victoria’s book, ok? Last one! Do you have any last message for the listeners?
V: For the listeners, especially the women, you don’t have to be afraid to join tech or STEM industry. And for the general listener, dream big and work hard to achieve it! You don’t have to be afraid to dream big, or to say “ah, I couldn’t do it. It’s impossible”. That what I hate the most. I mean, you can do it. If you have the will, there will be good people that helps you along the way. So, dare to dream but don’t just dream! You should also remember to work hard to realize it. And once you’re on the top, don’t be a smug! Don’t forget about those people who helps us along the way. We should also contribute back to the society. Pay it forward! Help other people to be succeed like us. And last thing, don’t forget to take a break and take it slow. That’s more like a self-reminder, actually. I have lots of projects and sometimes I impose myself too hard so I get sick. So for people who are ambitious, please don’t forget to take a break!
K: That’s a very accurate message! Haha. Well, I think that’s all. So thank you so much Victoria for the discussion and for talking about your new book. I hope you to succeed! And so yeah, see you on the Internet!