Ruba Katoot

-September 2023
LinkedIn

Coming from the Middle East and wanting to claim a place for yourself is not easy, being a girl on top of that is a completely different story. This story follows our heroine Ruba, a pioneer tech girl in a male-dominated field, where you’ll hear the words “only woman, first woman” quite a lot as we go.

Ruba Katoot, was 15 years old with a passion for mathematics and coding, making her way through Codeforces on her own to get better scores, it is not easy training alone. Luckily, she started the Meshka training program at this time where she got a deeper and better understanding of problem solving and how to spot her weaknesses and work on them. She realized that the problem was with the way she approached the problems, once that was spotted, a revelation took place.

Through the program, she was widely encouraged to participate in challenging competitions for problem-solving like IOI “International Olympics Informatics Competition where students participate from all over the world”. At that time she was the only girl in Palestine that would represent her country internationally. Palestine had little to no presence in international problem-solving competitions, it was only when groundbreaking startup Meshka showed up that the scene was changed.

“I was the only girl in the Meshka training program, the only girl to join an international competition from Palestine at that time. I was surrounded by a team of truly amazing skills, that gave me a big push to elevate my skills and compete”.

During the program, Ruba was introduced to important fundamentals in tech and coding, like the presence of algorithms and how to use them to solve a wider array of problems and fields. As the program focused the most on the skill of problem-solving itself and its practicality, this made a huge impact to not only use it for tech but also opened her mind to change her way of thinking in life as a whole.

The first competition in 2020 Ruba participated in was PCPC; the Palestinian Collegiate Programming Contest for university students while she was only still in school, where her team got 7th place. In the year 2021, she also participated in PCPC where she won first place with her team and granted them entry to ACPC Teens (Africa and Arab Collegiate Programming Championship for teens) for the first time, where she got 11th place. Afterward, Ruba got into the prestigious competition by Google; Google Code Jam for women where she got the 67th place on a world level. She then participated in ACPC Girls 2021 online contest where she got first place.

After entering university she participated again in the year 2022 where she got 4th place on a national level and got into ACPC one more time to win 28th place. Ruba’s participation in competitions did not stop on a regional level but extended to the qualifying competition Palestinian Olympics in Informatics 2020 where she got 3rd place, in 2021 4th place, and in 2022 again 3rd place, an achievement that is remarkable and eventually qualified her to enter the IOI; International Olympics in informatics. In addition to that, Ruba participated in the Arab Future Programmer Contest that took place in Jordan for school students from Arab countries and she got first place with her team. Granting them a 100% tuition scholarship from the University of Applied Science in Jordan.

Following that, Ruba got numerous scholarships since she started her journey with Meshka, including a fully funded scholarship from Palestine Technical University Khadoori for winning first place in IC programming competition for school students organized by the same university and the Ministry of Education. Ruba is currently studying computer science at Birzeit University in a financial aid program that covers a big part of her tuition fees thanks to her academic excellence and problem-solving skills she acquired through Meshka training.

“Being the only girl in my environment, training and competing, for once, I thought it is something to do biologically between girls and boys that makes this field more male dominant, maybe they have the right brains for it. But moving on I realized it’s an illusion, we are the same in this sense and have the same capabilities and fair play. Only that maybe women have other interests in our country.”

Ruba strongly encourages women to not hesitate to enter the tech field as it was a life-changing experience for her that; absolutely changed her character, way of thinking, and opened the door to amazing opportunities for her that she never imagined possible. She also significantly improved her English skills.

In the near future, Ruba plans to continue problem-solving during university and continue participating in competitions both locally and globally. She also plans to apply for international summer internships to add to her experience.