Genius-in-Residence: Olfa Fdhila, ALU ‘15
by Lucia Uwalaka, ALU ‘15
“I have never liked school and the conventional educational system. I think it’s stupid. It does not accommodate everyone’s abilities and skills. There is no size that fits all.” -Olfa Fdhila
I consider Olfa to be one of our resident geniuses in the Electrical Engineering class of 2015, with a passion for software development, artificial intelligence, robotics and trending technologies. She’s one of those students who comes to class, does her own thing the entire time, but somehow aces every module and will still give you a run for your money when asked to explain concepts. She’s so on top of her game, she even has a portfolio of different projects she has worked on (outside of school), on her website.
Olfa is currently the project manager of the Switch Conference, a project she conceived when she noticed how few women were at the Google Developers Conference she attended in Kenya, and at tech meetups in Mauritius. Her concern led her to take action, and this gave birth to Switch, a conference aimed at increasing gender diversity in STEM fields. To better understand such a brilliant mind, I decided to interview her. This is Olfa’s story.
“It all started when I was four. I grew up in Tunisia, where children start school at six years old. However, my mum is a French teacher and not knowing where to put me when I turned four, enrolled me in the first year class. Effectively, my education began when I was four years old. I could read and write Arabic at four, I learned French at six, which is meant for nine year olds, and despite being years ahead of my peers, I still found school boring. Thankfully, my mum noticed this from the beginning, and decided to involve me in more learning at home, and this introduced me to personalised learning. She bought me a lot of children’s books, and I started reading and loved it. To further challenge me, she made me summarize the books I read into one paragraph, and gave me feedback each time. She also tasked me with coming up with creative ways to represent what I read. So I owe all my synthesizing and summarizing abilities to my mum. However, primary school was just a place for me to showcase my knowledge, chill and go home when I got bored. It was easy, I found it annoying, and it was just something I had to do, but I didn’t feel bad about it because my mum substituted a lot for my learning and I was doing very well and was constantly ahead of my peers.”
Olfa got into a selective high school and aced her first year, but in her second year, her performance dropped, and not only in literary subjects which she was already skilled in, but in the subject she loved the most, Math.
“I hated high school so much. It started my experience with structured learning, where you have to do specific tutorials just to pass an exam and attendance is mandatory, even if you can go through all the content on your own. High school was where I realized that things were more structured in life than I thought they were, and there is no personalized learning experience anymore.”
“I had a terrible Math teacher who used to do these tutorials and then, set the exams exactly like the tutorials. I was so offended, honestly. So, I told him I would sit the exam without doing any of his tutorials.”
“My brain felt cheated by this method of teaching. Right now, I can live with this in traditional institutions, but in high school, I could not accept it. My whole life was about true learning, and I was suddenly being told that you needed to do specific things to get specific grades which you need to pass. Not doing the tutorials before the exams meant I spent more time figuring out how to go about them during the exam. Technically, if I had triple the time, I would most likely have passed, but I didn’t, and I ended up with 1.5 or 2.5 out of 5, grades I have never gotten in my life. This was when I first experienced what it felt like to have no one believe in me. My parents, my friends and teachers all doubted my abilities and tried to convince me to drop Math in the next year. I was told that Math wasn’t meant for me. They all seemed to have forgotten all achievements from the past, and the times I even tutored my friends. I remember telling my mum that if I didn’t do Math, I would drop out of high school, but everybody had stopped believing in me. This, combined with my bad grades, was a really painful blow to my self-confidence. Thankfully, my first year Math teacher still had faith in me and gave me the recommendation I needed to take Math the next year, and I loved it and I excelled at it once I got my rhythm back. That was when I decided not to let anyone define who I am , or tell me what I can or cannot do. It was so hard to get there, because I was broken, literally, by everyone’s lack of faith in me and it took me so much time to regain confidence in myself.”
Olfa went on to finish high school and was ranked among the top 200 in Tunisia. After a hard debate with her parents who wanted her to pursue Medicine as a career, she finally started the two years of the Preparatory School for Engineering Studies, but she was at her limit of the conventional educational system. It was during this time that she discovered ALU, and she fell in love with it. Anyone who applied in 2015 will remember Olfa. She was the most active applicant on all the portals, writing essays in response to other applicants’ comments, even creating a Facebook group for all the applicants. If there is any such thing as (good) borderline fanaticism, Olfa was it.
“I remember spending sleepless nights memorizing the map of Africa and the flags of each country, because it wasn’t covered in our curriculum in high school. I didn’t know how to speak English then, but I applied in English to challenge myself. I had a notebook where I wrote new words and when I got up to 15 new words, I wrote a paragraph in English and sent it to all my mentors to give me feedback. I put in so much effort, summarised every article, shared my summaries with everyone, I participated in every single discussion. I spent 2 months with sleepless nights, going through the Africa Rising course. I really wanted to get into ALU. I was so close to getting into ALA in the past, I loved the kind of people I met at each stage, the conversations, the ALA culture. I wanted to get in so badly, I was so excited and so afraid that I would lose it, that on the day of the final interview, I was so nervous, I couldn’t speak. I remember my interviewer then, telling me that he really believed that you belong in ALA, but I was shaking so much and just couldn’t speak, so they had nothing to work with, and I didn’t get in. But, I was going to get into ALU. Thankfully, I did.”
“She is my daughter, not yours. I raised her to be free and responsible and to do great things. It is not up to you or anyone else to decide what she does with her life.”
“I will always be grateful for having such supportive parents. When I was about to leave, it was a big deal with my extended family. My uncle once told my father that if I were his daughter, he would not let me leave, and my dad said, “She is my daughter, not yours. I raised her to be free and responsible and to do great things. It is not up to you or anyone else to decide what she does with her life,” and I could not have loved him more than I did then. If I was my uncle’s daughter, I wouldn’t be here right now.
I wouldn’t trade my first year experience at ALU for the world. It was everything I had hoped for and more.
