FAIRMONT – It’s amazing, the technical vistas that can unfold – just by taking your dad’s TV remote and disassembling it when you’re a kid.
Or, say, causing the electronics to lock up in your mom’s cellphone when you’re a kid.
Kathryn Southall was one such kid.
“I did that,” she said grinning. “I always kept coming back to the technology. I was always interested.”
Over the past months, the senior at Clarksburg’s Robert C. Byrd High School garnered the interest of the National Center for Women and Information Technology, as an emerging computer talent in the Mountain State.
She was one of five students across the state to receive the center’s “Aspirations in Computing” award on Tuesday, which recognizes achievers who are likely going to make careers – and innovations, ideally – in the field.
Other honorees include Sreyan Das, of Morgantown High School; Kennedy Fisher, of Cabell Midland High in Cabell County; and Rylan Adams and Gavin O’Neal, both of Valley High in Wetzel County.
The firm Agile5 Technologies hosted the awards luncheon, which was at the Innovation Center, in the I-79 Technology Park, just past Fairmont in Marion County.
Kathryn, meanwhile, had a different academic journey well before she kept circling back to the cellphone and remote.
She competed in Washington, D.C., as a national History Day finalist during her freshman year and is on the National Honor Society at RCB. This fall, she’ll be an honors freshman at Fairmont State University, where she’ll study cybersecurity.
“Ideally, I’d like to work at the FBI,” she said, referring to the complex near her Clarksburg hometown.
“We’ve all had our journeys to get here,” said Lisa Fritsch, who co-founded Agile5 Technologies with her husband and a group of friends and now serves as the firm’s president and CEO.
“Journeys make it interesting,” she said. “I was a chemistry major. I wasn’t thinking about high-tech or owning a business.”
One Agile5 employee has a degree in French and another studied neuroscience in college and was planning on medical school when tech intervened.
Gay Stewart, West Virginia University professor and administrator who is nationally known for her work in STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – said she appreciates students like Kathryn and companies like Agile5 Technologies.
Stewart directs the WVU Center for Excellence in STEM Education and also made remarks at the luncheon.
The physicist by training had a tech-epiphany 30 years ago, she said.
“I looked around and said, ‘If I want to change the world, it’s not going to be by finding the particle I was looking for,’” she told the audience. “It’s gonna be about changing how people look at becoming an engineer or other type of scientist.”
