Despite her intellectual abilities and career success, West had long wrestled with the feeling that she was inferior. She felt proud that she got the job, but knew the hard work had just begun. She was hired to do programming and coding for the huge machines. When she started her job, the navy was bringing in computers. West at work in the Dahlgren naval base in 1981. And she was one of only four black employees. This made her only the second black woman to be hired to work as a programmer at the base. Then she was offered a job at a naval base in Dahlgren, Virginia. She briefly took on another teaching position after graduating. She returned to the university a few years later and earned a master’s in mathematics. “I knew deep in my heart that nothing was getting in my way.”Īfter graduating, she became a teacher, saving money for graduate school. It was largely studied by men, but she didn’t take much notice of them. She decided to major in mathematics because it was a well-respected subject. But now I look back and I should have,” she says before laughing. “I was so dedicated that I didn’t care about missing the fun. She quickly learned that, while she had been the best in her rural school, she had to put in work to keep up with students from bigger cities.
She confided in her maths teacher who, after seeing her potential, offered her a part-time job babysitting. Her parents could help for the first year, but she would need to find funding for the others. While her tuition was paid, she needed money for room and board. “And sure enough, when I graduated from high school, I got one.” The scholarship allowed West to attend Virginia State College, a historically black university. “I started doing everything so that I would be at the top,” West says. Then a teacher announced that the state was going to give a college scholarship to the two top students from her year. She tried to put money aside, but became frustrated at how little progress she was making. If West was going to go to college, she needed to find a way to pay for it herself. Her parents tried to save some money to send her to college, but unexpected bills kept hitting the fund. The seven year groups, who were all black, were taught in one room, but West quickly stood out. The red schoolhouse, as West’s elementary school was known, was a three-mile walk away, through the woods and over streams. What she could not have guessed was that this focus would shatter the perceptions of black women of the time and even lead to the invention of one of our most widely used inventions – GPS, the global positioning system.
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