Episode Transcript
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 0:08
femininity is powerful in all its forms exceptional women, rare girls must be appreciated in every way for their perspectives, actions, thoughts, and their unique ways of being. Such rare girls are inspiring. And this is what this podcast is all about. Hello, my name is Aziz and my guest today is Maria. Deanna do Tikka. Deanna is a computer science major at Politehnica, University of Bucharest, tennis player, as well as an intern at Goldman Sachs. Dianna, how are you today?
Maria-Diana Dutica 0:52
Hi, this, I'm great. I'm very happy that I have the opportunity to do this podcast with you. How are you?
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 0:59
I'm feeling happy. I'm feeling lucky, optimistic and very curious about you. So I'll begin with this. Because I'm sure your mind is full of ideas and experiences these days, what is something that you have been thinking on about a lot because it's happening in your life or something you're trying to improve, or an ambition you're trying to create.
Maria-Diana Dutica 1:26
So this days, I'm I just returned back from UK from London. And what what was most on my head was how to be more organized how to take the most out of my time, because I entered the last year of university. And I have to do my final my my final paper work, and also wants to find a very good job for the next summer to the job that I will be happy with. Right now in tech. Things are very competitive with very competitive with the current things that are happening. So yeah, organizing my time in the best possible way, in order to be able to do everything that I wanted to do was the thing that kept me very busy these days. Yes.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 2:27
Thank you. I have so many questions about that. I'll begin if someone wishes to be inspired by your productivity method, how do you organize yourself both. So that you get everything that you need to do done, as well as avoiding burnout? Because sometimes people can feel so overwhelmed that they get into a state where they cannot do anymore? So can you speak about yourself as a little productivity guru? What is your method,
Maria-Diana Dutica 3:01
so what pushes me to be motivated is to try waking up as early as possible. Because if I make if I make the effort to wake up early, then I stay motivated for the whole rest of the day, to do constant work and to do the work to do very high quality work and spend less time or I on I don't know, spend less time on Instagram or scrolling on on things that aren't very important to say. So into now, I can say that. I know that there are methods with splitting times, for example, working two hours on a task, then another one hour on another task and stuff like this. For me, this doesn't really work. I rely more on my instinct to say so. So if one day, I feel like reading about a subject, I read the whole day, the whole day about that subject, but what is important is like to really read. And if I spent I know, five hours reading about the topic, then after those five hours, I should feel that I really evolved in a way and that I really assimilated that information. So this is how it works more for me like productive means that I'm very concentrated. So after a certain amount of time, after I finished the task, I really feel the difference in my knowledge that okay, I really accumulated the information, the information that I wanted to know.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 4:53
This is great. And can you tell me about London? Are you fascinated with the culture there or is it more What are the education? Or how is the culture as well there compared to the way you grew up? In Bucharest?
Maria-Diana Dutica 5:09
Yeah, London is different is more multicultural than Bucharest, that's for sure. There are people from all over the world and everyone is very, very friendly. You've even if you meet a lot of people with different backgrounds, all of them are very open, very easy people to talk to. And this makes things very easy for a person to integrate in London and in the London life lifestyle, I really loved. And I still really love a lot or growing up in Romania, spending time in Romania and Romania in general, because it is my country, of course. But also London was something exceptional for me, I never expected to feel so so good there and to make so many friends. But it's different for sure. It's an it's a bigger city, you meet a whole new bunch of people with different backgrounds, different motivations, and points of view. But this is very good, because all of them are friendly. All of them are open to chat with you. Give you the their their best advice. And I love that so much. I hope that I will go back there soon. Yes,
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 6:39
that is wonderful. And can you tell me more about how was that decision of choosing computer science as something to study? There wasn't an easy choice. Did you consider different alternatives? And why did you decide and end up with this subject,
Maria-Diana Dutica 7:01
choosing computer science was very, something very natural for me, I would say because since I was a little kid, since primary school, I was very, very good at math. I loved math. And then in middle school, I loved physics, I was very good at physics. So math, physics, and then in high school came computer science. And so I decided that okay, I should follow a computer science degree, I think that it was what fitted me the best. And I also considered studying medicine. But medicine was something a little bit like, I loved medicine as an idea. But I knew that I spent most of my life studying math, and computer science was closer to math than medicine was. So then medicine is so this is why I chose computer science. And I think that I made the best decision for myself. I'm very happy right now of it. I think that studying computer science gave me a lot. And there are still a lot of opportunities that if you work hard, you you, you can take those opportunities and have very good life and a lot of friends and be very high from a career point of view.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 8:35
Of course, I like that. And I know you're a tennis player. Is this a way that you relax and forget all troubles and avoid burnout? Or what do you do while you're doing all your studies, projects, etc. So that you remain sane and mentally okay?
Maria-Diana Dutica 8:57
Right now, I wouldn't necessarily call myself a tennis player. I play tennis from time to time. I played tennis for seven years in a row like professional tennis, but this was some years ago. At some point, I decided to concentrate on my studies. So I gave up tennis. In general, I'm a person that likes doing sports, practicing sports so so much the sport that I watched the most is tennis, and I'm very keen on watching a lot of matches, tennis matches, and I like the sport a lot. Then sports as other sports that I'm practicing, I would say I like a lot running like running. And also other teams sports like basketball, home handball, but for this you need a bigger group of people to play with I also like formula one a lot. I started watching Formula One, one year and a half ago, I would say yes. And all these activities helped me, like help me relax. And to avoid burnout and burnout, I feel that it's important to spend as much time as possible outside, like during COVID, we spent a lot of time in our houses. And personally, I saw the effect the effect that this had on me. So right now, when it's possible, I try to spend time outside time in the in the sun, time with my friends, socializing, and all this stuff. And I think that is very, like this helps a lot with burnout. Definitely, moving helps moving your body helps with burnout. Thing, spending time in the fresh air under the sun helps with burnout and also helps you frame more clearly seeing the problems before clear perspective with a better perspective. And taking better decision being more productive and all this stuff. For me, it helps a lot more than I don't know, staying on the sofa or on the couch and watching a movie. I'm more of a sports person and being outside type of person.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 11:34
That's really, really cool. Thank you, Deanna, and I'm curious to since you travel, you spend time in London, et cetera, what drove your decision to choose the Polytechnical University in Bucharest, compared to any other university in the world,
Maria-Diana Dutica 11:52
when I chose this university three, four years ago, I chose it because it was the closest University to where I stay. And it's a very, very good opportunity. It's a very, very good university, that gives you a lot of opportunities, choosing a university abroad would have meant that I would see my family very, like very rarely, or two or three times a year, and the quality of the studies would have been pretty much the same. The building can University in Bucharest, like out of my automation and computers University from Bucharest. It's a very competitive one, it's a very good one. And also computer science as a subject is something that I think that can pretty much studied from anywhere in the world. Because we rely a lot on searching things on the internet. Like in order to stay up to date, you find the things the information on the internet, not necessarily from a person or from a book and Googling stuff. You can do it from any retailer, literally from anywhere in this world. So yeah, this is why I started this university. And also I had friends that too, were going there to like friends, friends from high school. And I made the decision. Maybe the other decisions that another decision that would have worked for me quite good would have been to go to university in London, maybe Imperial or UCL. But Polding was also a very good decision. And right now again, I'm happy. I'm happy with it.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 13:49
Thank you. That's wonderful and happy, you're happy with your decision. And like you mentioned, the IT field, especially for great jobs is very competitive. Maybe there is someone who is going to choose to study and they're curious, what is your method? For example, how did you find that internship at Goldman Sachs? How will you go about finding a good job for after graduation? How do you believe that a computer engineer or someone experienced or educated in that field should go about finding a really good job
Maria-Diana Dutica 14:32
at the internship and new grads role sets soft at the software companies? It's very important to be good on algorithms and data structures in my country algorithms and data structures are studied since high school. So someone that was very, very good at algorithms in high school pretty much has no problem in the Dealing with the interviews at the high tech companies. The way I prepare is doing like it, there is a site called leet code and I try to prepare from, I try to prepare on problems from leetcode. Knowing what type of algorithm or what type of data structure to use, depending on the problem that I receive, it's something that I put a lot of accent on. But also what matters a lot is your attitude during the interview at the high tech company, like how you express your ideas, how, what are your path, what is your path of thought, like, if you come up with a solution, how you reached to that solution. And pretty much that's it like, in general, at the high tech companies, there are between two and five interviews, in order to get the job. One of them is a behavioral interview. One of them is a behavior in behavioral interview where they check if your company feet, Team faith, and that you have the most amount of motivation to do high quality work and to be at the standards of the highest standards of the company. And the other interviews are, as I said, pretty much algorithm based data structure based, sometimes system design, you have to have some knowledge on this on system design. And the way people can apply is simply going to the website of the tech company, and then go to careers or jobs or stuff like this. And they're all the jobs are listed. And they can send their CV respond to the other to the other questions, sometimes even writing a motivational letter. And they will be like in general, you're contacted in around the week with the schedule of the interview, and so on. The more you after a person interview, there comes the second interview, the third interview until you have your final interview and get the job.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 17:32
Thank you. And you mentioned that you're trying to reduce your consumption of social media. Yet you grew up in a time especially as someone who is fascinated with computers all around Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, everything. Do you feel that as you grew up your personality? And culture is Romanian? Or are you more cosmopolitan, international and a mix of I don't know, American, Korean, British, all kinds of different cultures in one person.
Maria-Diana Dutica 18:12
Very, very interesting question. Personally, I feel that I'm still at this moment, pretty much Romanian because I spent almost all my life in Romania. Of course, there is a lot of influence of other cultures, even on us on people from Romania, for example, I think that the American culture can be found here because of the movies of this, like the movie series. And the celebrities that we know in Romania are in general from the United States. So they gave us a little bit of their culture, like the people from my generation, are different from the people who are, I don't know, 20 years older, even with all of us grew in Romania, but from a cultural point of view, we are different. For sure the people who are now like that they that have now around 10 years old, they are influenced by maybe or maybe of Tik Tok, and they will develop themselves in a different way than my generation was influenced. Now, myself, I feel that I'm pretty much Romanian, but I have friends of my age, like classmates and stuff that for example, they have more Asian influence on themselves because they said that they are watching Asian movies from Asia and that they liked that culture very much and maybe think of moving They're, and they think different than all these things. But it's like, it's also very hard. Even if you watch movies on or spend time on the internet and interact with other people, as long as you grew up, mostly in one country, most part of your life or was in was spent in a certain country, you have the culture that is there. I felt this way. When I moved to the UK, no matter how many UK movies or movies from UK or UK television series or you are celebrities from UK, I was following on Instagram or watching and all these things when you go there and see how people behave in the normal circumstances. After only after that you actually see the cultural differences, and maybe you can take up from their behavior and change yourself as a person. But yeah, pretty much. That's it watching things on this social social apps that we are using influence can influence you, but not that much as real life interaction with another culture.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 21:33
Thank you. So since you spoke about that, and you analyzed and have noticed the difference between your culture and like you said, the UK, etc. to you? What does it mean to be a Romanian girl,
Maria-Diana Dutica 21:50
I think that it's not that different, like not that different than another girl from another Eastern European country or another European country. Being a Romanian girl, probably like I found that girls in Romania had a lot of, for example, from this point of equality, I never felt that I was viewed from in, in an equal way than a boy in Romania was viewed like, I felt that in Romania, we always had this equality between boys and girls. And since I was a little girl, I always felt very empowered. And I saw everybody is equal, like equally smart, equally powerful, equally motivated, equally good at something and that motivation and hard work, were the things that actually made the difference. Being a Romanian girl probably means I know dealing with being like dealing with the responsibilities a woman should have at home, but also being keen on building yourself a career very being very good from a professional point of view. It's something like studying to become a doctor studying to become a computer scientist or a lawyer. And also, taking care of yourself as a woman and also doing the work that a woman in general, from a cultural perspective should do at home, like knowing how to cook and all this stuff. But it's not something standard, of course. I like life in Romania, as a girl, I think that it's very good. And also, I don't feel that at a very high level, it's different than an A girl from any other country, from Europe or any other part of the part of the world.
Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 24:22
Thank you so much, Deanna, this was enriching. This was truly unique and all I wish you a success, or you wish your productivity and I wish you to find the job of your dreams. Thank you.
Maria-Diana Dutica 24:38
Thank you. As always, thank you for this opportunity. Really great talking with you. I like the questions so so much, and all the best with this series of podcasts and bringing other powerful and exceptional girls at your podcast. Thanks You so much
