Written by Mandi Myers
One of Three: A Love Letter to Women in STEM
On being the outlier, then finding a home at LoanNFT
Three Women in My Class
Several years ago, when I graduated with my degree, there were only three women in my major. Three — out of a graduating class that was so much bigger than that.
Computer Science and Computer Information Systems were never exactly fields flooded with women — but even knowing that going in, the number still stopped me.
I’ve always loved math and science: the clarity of them, the challenge, the strange creativity it takes to solve a genuinely hard problem. That love is what pulled me into tech and business in the first place, even in rooms that didn’t always feel built for people like me.
What Being the Outlier Taught Me
Being one of only a few women in nearly every class in my field meant learning things I didn’t expect to have to learn.
How to speak up in a room that wasn’t used to hearing from someone like me.
How to lead confidently without waiting for permission.
How to back myself, especially in moments when I was the only one who looked like me at the table.
Those lessons didn’t stay behind in school. They’re the same instincts I lean on today — building something new, in an industry (credit unions and fintech) that, like tech, still has a long way to go on representation.
Why This Still Matters at LoanNFT
AI and technology are rewriting the rules of what’s possible, faster than most industries can keep up with. That makes this exact moment — not five years from now, now — the moment to make sure women have a seat at the table as these systems get built.
Not just to even the playing field, though that matters too. But because the systems we’re building today — the ones that will decide how credit unions lend to each other, how communities access capital, how trust gets encoded into infrastructure — need diverse minds and lived experience behind them to actually work for everyone they touch.
That’s part of why I do the work I do at LoanNFT. Building financial infrastructure isn’t just a technical problem. It’s a people problem, and people problems get solved better by rooms that don’t all sound the same.
To the Next Three (or Three Hundred)
To the young women out there who love equations, data, and big ideas: keep going. The room might not always feel built for you yet. Build it anyway.
We need your brilliance in the future we’re building — at LoanNFT, and everywhere else this industry is headed next.