Tiffany Arielle on How She Got Started With Her Youtube Channel
She’s an influencer and a woman in STEM, empowering herself and other women
By Alina Gao
From programming at an engineering camp while she was in high school to teaching others on Youtube, Tiffany Arielle is a woman shrinking the legendary STEM gender gap. Despite STEM being a male-dominated industry, Tiffany Arielle continues to make videos educating others about computer engineering on her Youtube channel. She began by making covers of songs, and now has a channel with over 3,000 views. Tiffany creates all sorts of films, from tech videos on coding websites to singing acapella in a diverse list of genres and helpful lifestyle videos. Her personal secret to success? Being reasonable and realistic with her goals, and not giving up when it’s hard.
Tiffany Arielle is an influencer, coder, artist, and successful, empowering woman. You can find her here:
Tiffany Arielle (@tiffanyarielle) • Instagram photos and videos
Tiffany Arielle (@tiff_arielle) / Twitter
Here’s what she has to say about her beginning and what motivates her now.
When asked what inspired Tiffany to start a Youtube channel, she responded: “I was always the choir kid growing up, I used to be in choir church and things like that. And now that I’ve been living here in Austin, I haven’t really been in a choir, so I wanted an outlet to continue singing because I really enjoy music. And then with the pandemic, you’re stuck in the house, so you think ‘oh I really need something to keep myself busy’, and with everything that was going on last year, that was why I started my Youtube channel, which I originally just started with the covers.” She later branched out into coding and lifestyle because they were fun subjects she was passionate about.
What shaped the content you put on there? Why did you choose technology, music, and lifestyle as your main themes?
“I kind of talked already about the whole music thing. That’s just my background, singing is very calming for me, it’s very therapeutic, so anything involving music for me I just need it in my life in some shape, way, and form. And then the tech part I started because I was seeing a lot of posts from people who are trying to get into tech and learning how to code and those type of things, and I thought ‘well, I know how to code, maybe I can make videos showing other people these things, so that’s why I decided to do that. I just in general like teaching and mentoring and those types of things anyways, so it kind of tied into that as well. The lifestyle thing was just kind of random. I would watch other people’s videos and think “oh, this looks cool! I want to make a video like that’, so there’s no particular reason how that made it in there, it just kind of made it in there.”
This is common for many Youtubers — they create content just for fun. If you’re thinking about starting a Youtube channel, try sharing your passions as well!
What motivates you to continue making these videos?
“I don’t know if I would say ‘achieving goals’ because I don’t really have too many goals for my Youtube channel. It’s really hard to grow a channel. My channel is still pretty small, and I’ve been doing this for six months at this point. I try not to have too many high hopes for goals in terms of size of things and things like that. I think for me it’s really just I enjoy making the videos, and the people who do watch and the people who do comment positively, that’s really nice to hear, so that’s really what motivates me. It’s just fun and also just connecting with some people.”
If you’re wondering how to get into coding, Tiffany started coding at an engineering camp when she was in high school. “[I was]…probably 15, 16 at the time. And I didn’t really code code, but we had one of those lego robots. I think it was like one of those drag and drop types of coding, and that was kind of cool. I liked the whole thought process of trying to say ‘okay, do this and do this and do this’, so the goal we were trying to achieve was to get this robot to go through this maze, and I just thought it was fun. So when I went to college, I decided to major in electrical engineering because I liked coding. I like computers and stuff like that, and of course, as part of that major, you have to take computer science classes. So that was when I first learned how to actually code, so those videos I’ve been doing are actually the very first assignments that I was doing when I first learned how to code, so that’s from the introductory computer science class there. I was a sophomore in college by the time I actually learned how to code.”
To get a career or become proficient in coding, you don’t have to code your entire life. Starting late is still better than never!
Do you have any advice for empowering yourself as a woman?
“I would say that making sure to have a support system, especially if you’re in a career where I’m in, there’s more men than women. Joining employee resource groups is a huge help, even if it’s not your job but you may join Facebook groups. I’m in Facebook groups for other women in tech, and also Black women in tech, so that helps a lot because you have people to talk to, to ask for advice, to bounce ideas off of, and things like that. You just don’t feel like you’re dealing with things by yourself. That I would say is a huge huge help, and then outside of that you just have to know what you want and not be afraid to go after it, because sometimes there may be people, especially if you don’t have the support groups, that might tell you ‘oh, that’s hard,’ ‘oh, you can’t do that’, so you have to have in your mind ‘yes, I know it’s hard, but I’m putting in the work and I can do this.’”
Learning to code isn’t nearly as impossible as many people think it is, and with so many resources such as Tiffany’s, coding has become more accessible to everyone in general. Check out Tiffany’s videos to learn how to use the coding language Karel and help shrink the gender gap in STEM.
