02 GALINA PROSKURINA
Galina Proskurina wrote
her first program in Basic
in 2001, at the age of 16; it
was a psychological test to
determine if the user has a
normal relationship with his
or her mother, replicated
from a multiple-choice
quiz in a women’s magazine. “My classmates were
impressed by the visual
effects—in the opening, I
had the letters in the name
of the test dance onscreen,”
Proskurina says.
MySQL, and mathematics.
In addition to her work
with university students,
Proskurina teaches programming to high school
students—she’s currently
instructing them on how
to build simple utilities
for mobile phones using
Java ME.
The most important concept about programming
that Proskurina learned
in school, she says, was to
use libraries. She initially
wrote all her programs
from scratch, but learning
Java EE gave her another
view of programming: as
the “assembler” of existing
parts. “The most important
part of Java programming
is to understand what is
already built and what you
have to build yourself,”
Proskurina explains.
When not teaching or
coding, Proskurina loves
being active. She likes to
ski, swim, and ride her bike,
all of which “make me feel
like I’m flying,” she says. In
the future, she would like
to be an in-demand, “cool”
programmer and work on a
project with significant societal impact. Someday, she
hopes, one of her programs
might even save the world.
JAVA TECH
ABOUT US
Meet Galina Proskurina.
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Since then, Proskurina
has written many applications, including the prototype of a decision-support
system for a gas transport
company. Currently she’s
a teaching assistant at
Vladimir State University
in Vladimir, Russia (180
km from Moscow), where
she teaches Java, SQL and
Age 27 | Occupation Teaching assistant at Vladimir State University
Location Vladimir, Russia
PHOTOGRAPH BY OLEG NIKISHIN/GETTY IMAGES
