“I have a valuable skill that could help in the future,” says Ayla Maria Inggs, a UP information science graduate who has her sights set on innovation.

“Women no longer have an ‘if I can mindset’ – now it’s more about ‘how I can’,” says Ayla Maria Inggs of the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology (EBIT). She has a Bachelor of Information Science in Multimedia, an honours in the same subject and is doing her master’s in it.

“I am doing a reading programme for this, which will involve a year of finding articles and researching topics that are of interest to me,” she explains. “That will inform my main research question. I am working on escape rooms and storytelling, and I am determining how I can combine them to create something of interest. I’m interested in escape rooms and storytelling as I learned about it during my honours degree, and I want to explore the topic further.”.

This year, Inggs got the opportunity to work with a leading car manufacturer, developing a virtual reality (VR) application for the company to see how VR could be used to visualise data relating to a car to facilitate easier communication of that data.

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she says. “They took very good care of us and even flew us to their headquarters overseas to see the car components and to workshop our application to achieve the best outcome.” 

As an assistant lecturer at UP, Inggs says she has also been delighted to work as the project manager for this year’s honours student project. She says that working as a lecturer has allowed her to explore her creativity, adding that her. degree has equipped her with both creative and technical skills such as web development, graphic creation, programme creation, VR development, and 3-D modelling. 

“Being an assistant lecturer has been so fun and insightful,” Inggs says. “I am very lucky to work with people who inspire me, especially my package coordinator, Annique Smith, and my best friend, Kiara Jaimungal, who is also an assistant lecturer. Teaching has been an eye-opening experience: I have gained a deeper understanding of what our degree is truly meant to achieve and why it is such a valuable degree.”

Inggs recognises that tech-related degrees are usually male-dominated, and that to create a more diverse and inclusive tech world, women need to be inspired and empowered to pursue and develop a career in technology and become innovators, leaders and entrepreneurs. 

“Young women can bring a lot of unique skills to the field that can add value to projects and events,” she says. “The women in my field are so inspiring. I would love to see more women reach their full potential in this field. I speak for myself here, but as a girl growing up, I felt that playing with mechanical parts or tech-related objects was not encouraged enough”.”

Her advice to women is to try because the worst thing is to never try at all.

 “I really believe that girls/women should try new things and gain new experiences whenever they get the opportunity to, even if it’s scary at first,” Inggs says. “I never thought I would be developing VR applications, but I tried, and now I have a valuable skill that could help in the future.”

She sees herself working as a project lead or scrum master of a team for a tech company – and will certainly be working on exciting technologies that influence how people use and see data as it relates to everyday items such as cars and appliances.