About

Hello, and welcome to my website.

This is for those who would like to be on a "want to know"— rather than a "need to know"— basis.

I’m Victoria Michalska, a recent graduate from Williams College. I’m a first-generation American, being born to blue-collar Polish immigrants; I was raised in Maspeth, Queens, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in New York City, living among the Polish community. I ended up going to The Brooklyn Latin School, one of New York City’s best public high schools. When it came to my academics, I put my nose to the grindstone. How couldn’t I, seeing my parents work the way they did?

I was admitted to Williams College— with the financial aid package they offered me, it ended up cheaper than going to any state or city college. I started off with an interest in art history and studio. I wrote and drew. I did internships in marketing because that seemed to be a perfectly fine application of an art history and studio major. But after dabbling with the process of email and website creation in HTML and CSS, and being exposed to the data collection involved with marketing, I realized that I wanted to learn more about coding, computers, and data.

The summer before my senior year, I declared a computer science major. Attempting to rush an intense major like that in a single year wasn’t really heard of— the classes that my peers normally took one at a time over the years, I would have to take all at once. And that level of intensity was unnerving. But I got into a rhythm - when there was always something to do, I didn’t have time to let fear stop me - and even when I didn’t do as well as I should have, it couldn’t have functioned as anything other than as a mistake I could learn from. I wasn’t ashamed to ask for help from professors and peers. I could have given up after the first semester, but frankly, I liked the subject and the experience too much to give up. And funnily enough, that was my most successful year at Williams— academically and personally.