For memoQ, Girls’ Day has become a cherished annual tradition. This year, twenty high school girls visited our Budapest office as a part of the initiative organized by the Women in Science Association (Nők a Tudományban Egyesület). This initiative aims to inspire young women to explore careers in STEM fields, where female representation still has room to grow.

Showing up is already a step forward

The morning kicked off with a warm welcome from memoQ’s Chief People Officer, Kata Juhász, whose opening remark set the tone for everything that followed. She said that she was genuinely proud of every girl in the room for showing up. Actively seeking out career inspiration at a young age, she said, is already a sign of something important. Her hope was simple: that each participant would walk away with at least one thing they didn’t know when they arrived.

Where curiosity takes you

The first session brought together Ágnes Varga, Chief Technology Officer, Kata Juhász, and Zsófi Lelner, Product Marketing Specialist, who shared their very different journeys to their current roles across product, marketing, and beyond. Their key message: curiosity matters more than a perfect plan. Career changes are not failures; they are part of the story. And the uncomfortable situations that feel like failures in the moment, those are often the ones that build the most confidence in the long run.

How a product is born

Marianna Nagy, Senior Product Manager, and Zsófi Lelner took the girls behind the scenes of something they interact with every day without a second thought: social media. Using Instagram as a lens, they explored how product and marketing must work in harmony and showed that creative thinkers have a very real place in the tech world.

Design is not about beauty, it’s about people

The afternoon session brought the day’s most hands-on energy. Sas Orsolya (UX Designer), Csilla Hegedűs (Junior Software Engineer), and Krisztina Závecz (Frontend Software Developer) led the girls through an exploration of UI and UX design. They opened with a role-reversal exercise where the girls took turns playing designer and client, illustrating that good design is not about self-expression but about observation and empathy. Using the BKK transit app as a real-world example, they unpacked the difference between interface and experience. A ketchup bottle drove the point home: a product can look beautiful and still fail if you can’t actually get the ketchup out. The session closed with a look at the design process itself and the role of AI as a tool that supports but never replaces human thinking and judgment.

A day that stays with you

memoQ believes that the tech industry is richer when it reflects the full range of human experience and perspective. Girls’ Day is one small way of saying that out loud, and ensuring that the next generation of designers, developers, product thinkers, and language technologists knows that there is a place here for them.

The day was packed with honest conversations, hands-on activities, and more than a few moments that challenged the girls to look at the world and themselves a little differently. We hope to see some of them back one day. Not as visitors, but as colleagues.