Her Story
About Anika
Anika Thakur is a sophomore pursuing a degree in computer science and math at the University of Maryland, with an expected graduation in 2028. She has been involved in robotics software engineering for six years, beginning in her freshman year of high school. Her areas of specialization include motion planning, software engineering for infrastructure at companies, and machine vision. She previously interned at Bloomberg focusing on infrastructure and is currently interning at Dover Corporation working with machine vision for pharmaceutical packaging. Anika won an award at the University of Maryland Hackathon in her junior year of high school for developing a Chrome extension to help people with ADHD. She is actively involved in campus activities including being the tech development head in a professional fraternity, working on quantitative development for the Smith Investment Fund, and serving on the tech team for Gate Camp hackathon. She belongs to Rewriting the Code and the Association for Women in Computing. Anika attributes her success to innate perseverance and values integrity, impact, and having fun in her work. She advises young women entering the field not to let differences hinder their success and emphasizes working with AI rather than fearing it.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Anika
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to an innate perseverance. Whenever conflict comes up and I see my friends giving up, I just keep going and try to bring them up with me. I don't like giving things up and just keep pushing at them. This helped me at the hackathon where I didn't let being the youngest person and one of the few girls in the room stop me, and instead I kept going and was able to hopefully encourage more people to attend.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I received from my manager at Bloomberg is to respect time, both your own and other people's time. This taught me never to show up late to meetings because even small 5-minute delays can impact someone's perception of you. It also taught me to respect my own time and not work during personal time when I could just work tomorrow, having more respect for everyone's schedule and every minute in general.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say don't let your differences hinder your success. I keep seeing girls not coming to club meetings because they are the only girls in a group of guys. We were both very scared to come to meetings as the only two girls in a group of 20 guys, but we still showed up and put in our 100%. The mindset of not letting our differences hinder our performance is really important, especially for girls in science or any male-dominated field.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest contemporary issue is AI. A lot of people fear that AI is going to replace their passions and are switching gears, like from web development, and companies are not hiring as many junior engineers which is hard on us. Instead of changing your field, just try to be the best at it. A different perspective needs to be taken where instead of fearing AI, work with it, which is an attitude change we need towards AI.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I really value integrity for all the work that I do. I want to be able to put my name on something and not be ashamed of it. Everything I do should be helping the well-being of everyone. I'd say mainly integrity and impact. Also, just having fun with whatever I do. There's no point in doing something if I'm not enjoying it.
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