Bring Your Full Self to Tech | Heather Darring

Good morning and welcome back to another, well, it's going to be a good evening when people see this, but welcome back to another special episode of the AGI podcast. It's Indiana Women in Tech Week. I am more than thrilled to have Heather Daring, Chief Innovation Officer for Kappa Alpha Theta. Did I say that right? I did not graduate college, so my Greek is not that great. But I will with that, I will pass the baton and just let you introduce yourself.

Yeah, thank you. As you said, I'm the chief information officer at Kappa Alpha Theta. I'm also the president of the Indiana CIO Network. I've worked for Theta for many, many years and just had the pleasure of starting out in the help desk. And I would tell people all the time I was kind of a jack of all trades, just able to learn so much and do so many things because we were a small team. So, you know, from the phones and database, helping troubleshoot computers, doing disk swap outs, sticking my arms in printers, all of this stuff.

So let me ask you this, like as a kid, I mean, until I came around, I didn't see myself in like technology period. I first off, I wasn't very math oriented. And and so I think large language models kind of opened that for me. But I had friends that were on their Commodore 64s. I'm probably a lot older than you. But like as a kid, like tech did not really interest me. Were you did you always have an interest in technology or is that something that developed over time?

You know what's funny, actually? You know, I did have a Commodore 64, and I remember thinking it was really cool when computers, you know, came into homes and, like, you know, those floppy disks and... And you have to type in little codes to launch programs and stuff. But I didn't think of it as something for me. And I actually went to school. I started out in the sciences. And then I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I panicked a little bit. And I made my minor, my major, to graduate, which is art. I am trained in oil painting. So I got into technology in grad school. And I did because, you know, you can't teach yourself with oil paintings. Some people can, some people can, but it's, you know, it's not an easy thing to go into. So I was like, I need to be able to feed myself. And so I went to grad school. I did the CICS program at Ball State University, Center for Information and Communication Sciences. And that's really where I got this foundation of knowledge and skills for technology. And then you just have to do the thing. You have to get in there and just learn as you go.

So first, let me say that's pretty pragmatic for a creative because a lot of people like go to New York because they want to be an actor or an artist and they get a job as a server in order to support themselves. You're saying that you leaned into tech as like a way to augment and make some money so that you could do art. I commend you for that. That was smart. My wife's a Cardinal, so go Ball State Cardinals. I think you might be the first Cardinal we've had on here. We have a lot of Boilermakers on here. Okay. So the first question I guess I really have, I have three daughters, one's 27. She has her PharmD from Purdue. One was