If anyone is obsessed with supermodels like I am, the name of the beauty Karlie Kloss rings a bell. A supermodel, an entreprenuer, and a current student pursuing a degree at NYU, she has reached a level of success that others might aspire to.
If you are not familiar with Karlie Kloss, she is a 26-year-old supermodel from St. Louis, Missouri. In 2007, when she signed a contract with Elite Management, and she immediately appeared on the cover of Teen Vogue. Having taken ballet as a child, Kloss quickly became the muse of John Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier, the two great designers at the time.
In September of the same year, she made her debut on an international runway and showed up on the Calvin Klein show of New York Fashion Week, as well as on the Gucci show of Milan Fashion Week. That October, Karlie showed off for Alexander McQueen, Chloe, VALENTINO, and other brands during Paris Fashion Week. What boosted her sudden fame was becoming a Victoria’s Secret Angel in 2011.
Karlie later took a business course at Harvard University to effectively run her own business. When she was in her early twenties, she came to the front of the stage. But her fascination in programming led her to give up her annual salary, around $5 million, in the glorious period of her career.
Having achieved modest success, Karlie Kloss decided to share her own passion toward other determined girls around the globe. Kloss is dedicated to empower women working in STEAM field and is trying to highlight their stories to her millions of social media followers. She went to New York University to study programming and set up a Kode with Klossy programming scholarship. At Gallatin school of individualized study at NYU, she had alternative choices of learning from different fields of study while also traveling around the world as a supermodel. She is eager to inspire females in the modern world to seek knowledge and achieve their dreams.
What makes Kode with Klossy stand out is that it provides a platform for post-2000 young females to have access to programming, engineering, and computing. Initially, it was just a summer camp that encouraged teenage girls to learn coding, as they created practical apps through two weeks of intensive training.
Because it was so successful and influential, Kloss soon developed the project into a scholarship model. Every month, a woman who aspires to program gets the scholarship. In addition, the girl is able to go to an American website and mobile development trainer to study an online course of network development. At the end of the course, the participant is also expected to become a partner in the Kode with Klossy project.
Kloss decided to set up this non-profit organization to let other young women, who wanted to develop their skills in the field of science and technology, obtain the skills they needed. According to its official website, the numbers are impressive. 100% of camps they hold have female instructors as role models and nearly 8 of 10 participants report “increased interest in STEAM education, careers and other opportunities” (source).
Seeing these millennials becoming thrilled over learning more about programming as they had not been previously exposed to it, Kloss offers opportunities at no costs for these girls to explore their possibilities. What she is trying to convey is that technology can coexist with other things women long for, such as fashion and beauty.
Karlie, congratulations on your diamond ring (she recently got married!) and thank you for giving young females like us the chance to experience coding in the States. You are gradually making a difference in the lives of women, and you are a shining contemporary female figure for us to look up to.