While she is now a seasoned product designer, Galaxia Wu says “as a kid, I wanted to be a computer programmer before I even knew what it meant. I loved video games and spent every waking minute on the family computer.” However, while in high school, she “switched gears and decided [her] calling was in fine arts.” Dedicating her high school years to working towards an illustration program, she saw herself going into a career of animating movies for Pixar or illustrating books. While it was disappointing when the program she had worked so hard for rejected her application, she says she is now thankful for the rejection because it led her to apply for an Interaction Design program that completely changed her career trajectory. Now, three years later, she says “I’ve managed to mix my passion for art and computers to find myself a career in product design.”

It’s an impressive career at that, already including internships at Intuit and Meta. And while product designers aren’t the largest major at hackathons, Galaxia says “the hacker community has changed my life in so many ways: it’s shaped both my professional career and personal life in more ways than I can articulate.” Despite describing herself as simply a designer who doesn’t know how to code, Galaxia has built herself an impressive resume at hackathons. She’s competed at several, such as DeltaHacks,SheHacks, and Hack the North, and, to top it off, she’s helped organize four hackathons herself, including Sheridan College’s, her own institution, flagship hackathon, Hackville.

Now an MLH Coach, Galaxia didn’t know much about hackathons in the months leading up to college. The first time she heard the word from a friend, she had mixed emotions, adding that, at the time, hacking to her “evoked images of something you might see in Mr. Robot: guys in black hoodies in a grungy basement doing illegal stuff.” However, after doing some research and finding out her school had a club that organized the college’s hackathon, she decided to reach out to join. After all, it was “new, relatively small, and definitely didn’t look illegal.” When she competed at her first hackathon, she was welcomed in by two software engineering students. Not only did they teach her the basics of hackathons, but Galaxia says “their support made the hackathon incredibly memorable for me, and I remember feeling so empowered and like I belonged.”

As someone with an arts background, Galaxia understands what it’s like to attend a hackathon as an outsider. However, she has used her own experience to give back to the hacker community significantly: her college has a high population of underrepresented students, so Galaxia has gone out of her way to make the hacker community more inclusive. Helping to run the Hackademics club at her college as well as organizing Hackville, she has given voices on her organizing team to international students and older students and has even held panels and events to give students the confidence to attend hackathons. In her new role as an MLH Coach, she hopes to have an even bigger impact on the community in the future.