Kristina Balaam (she/her)

Kristina is a Security Intelligence Engineer at Lookout where she reverse engineers mobile malware. Prior to Lookout, she worked as a Mobile Application Security Engineer at Shopify, securing the company’s Android applications. Kristina graduated with a Bachelor of Computer Science from McGill University in 2012 and is currently pursuing a MSc. in Information Security Engineering from the SANS Institute of Technology. She blogs about computer security on Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube under the handle @chmodxx.

1. What does cybersecurity and crypto mean to you? What is something you think people should know about this space?

To me, cybersecurity means the freedom to safely innovate on products that have a significant positive impact on people’s lives. Securing the applications and products we build is vitally important; these products can do so much harm without adequate security measures in place. I think it’s important that people understand that the security of our data and technology may not excite some people the way new features do, but it’s a necessary part of being able to live in a networked, connected world.

2. If you could wave a magic wand and solve one problem in tech, what would it be?

Bias against those underrepresented in the industry.

3. What is a piece of advice that you have found especially useful? This can be either related or unrelated to tech.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. I meet so many people who feel they need to know everything in their industry or niche. Those who belittle others for asking questions aren’t worthwhile mentors. You stunt your growth by being afraid to raise your hand.

4. What’s a challenge you’ve faced, and how did you deal with it?

Believing I was competent — I would second-guess myself constantly. I still struggle with it sometimes, but I’ve learned to gather empirical evidence and use it to silence the “imposter syndrome” side of my brain.

5.What is your favorite source of inspiration?

Cybersecurity professionals sharing their stories of making the world a better, safer place.

Pamela Gupta (she/her)

Pamela Gupta (she/her) founded OutSecure, Inc, in 2000 and serves as its CEO. Every 2.5 hours a company is hacked; Ms. Gupta helps companies stay profitable and achieve resilience by identifying key cybersecurity and privacy risk strategy. She is also a member of Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS).

1. What’s a piece of advice you’ve found especially useful?

In order to bring about systemic cybersecurity change, you have to understand human psychology. Cybersecurity is more than technology; it’s a mindset that involves changing how we think and function.

2. What’s a challenge you’ve faced, and how did you deal with it?

I am a woman entrepreneur in a male-dominated field. Having grown up and done my undergrad in India, I don’t have a strong support network here, which is critical for establishing a successful business.

I deal with it by working harder and smarter. I bootstrapped my company with self-funding, which made marketing more challenging than it already is. One way to market is to speak at events, but if you’re a vendor, you have to pay large sums of money to attend conferences. I didn’t have the resources to pay for presenting, so I devised a solution: given that my firm creates cybersecurity strategy, my client audience is companies in business management. I researched and found that there were no cybersecurity conferences targeted at business professionals and October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month; so, I took these as an opportunity to start a business-focused cybersecurity conference.

It cost thousands of dollars to rent space, cater, and arrange speakers, so I had to be creative. I reached out to a local university, and after numerous meetings, I was able to convince them to partner with me and provide the venue and food. I then reached out to my network and arranged a whole-day schedule. It was an intense effort, but we held our first CT’s Annual Business Cybersecurity Summit in 2013. I even got a proclamation from the CT Governor declaring the day of the conference as CT’s Cybersecurity Awareness Day! By being agile, I overcame the hurdle of finding speaking (and marketing) opportunities.

3. What’s your favorite book?

The Paper Bag Christmas by Kevin Alan Milne made me laugh and cry.

Yansi Keim (she/her)

Yansi (she/her) is a Ph.D. student specializing in Cyber Forensics at Purdue University. She researches cybercriminals and profiles their behavior, which helps to understand their deviancy.

Yansi attended her first BlackHat conference this year on scholarship and is also a recipient of the RSA Conference Scholar Class of 2020 and WiCys (Women in Cybersecurity) Scholarship 2020. Yansi is a former technical investigator for the Delhi Police’s Crime Branch and aspires to become a research scientist at Google.

1. What do cybersecurity and crypto mean to you?

As a doctorate candidate in this field, I tend to educate people on the correct meaning of “cybersecurity”: it’s about putting security controls in action against all your IT assets. These assets could range from a printer in a high school to a supercomputer at an enterprise facility. “Crypto” (cryptography) is about encrypting your digital information so that only the desired person can decrypt it. In layman’s terms, it’s making your information gibberish to everyone but the intended receiver.

The myth that “I never did bad to anyone, hence nothing bad will happen to me” should be the starting point to cybersecurity. As a research assistant, I’ve seen elderly people get scammed and children receive disturbing emails containing pornography. My intention is not to incur dread, but awareness: no age group is secure if unaware of the most basic cyber hygiene. Start today and uninstall unnecessary apps from your mobile phone. Put a webcam cover on your computer. Never use public computers for making an online transaction.

2. If you could wave a magic wand and solve one problem in tech, what would it be?

To all the Santa minions at work, please arrange an 11"-long holly phoenix feather core. Once I possess that, I’d like to take on all the pending cybercrime cases in the world. It’s ironic how we secure ourselves with anonymity on the Internet, and at the same time, people use it to commit cybercrime. With all these cyber offenders at large, researchers work hard to come up with better digital forensic methodologies, procedures, and tools — which in turn takes months, even years, to implement.

3. What’s a piece of advice you’ve found especially useful?

My uncle Ajay Mishra once told me, “Wasting time is a crime and so is thinking low. Think wisely, choose the best.” He made me realize it’s not an option to be mediocre in this world; one must always strive to be the best version of themself.

4. What’s a challenge you’ve faced, and how did you deal with it?

Coming from a lineage where no one ever stepped outside my home country, the cultural changes of moving to the US have been the biggest challenges in my life so far. I applied to Purdue, got a scholarship, now here I am among some of the brightest minds of all time.

5. What‘s your source of inspiration?

My family, without a doubt. The fact that they never stopped believing in me makes me feel very special. I believe with family by your side, your motivation doubles, and your strength triples. I want to be a big person for them, if not for myself. Besides them, I am inspired by Alan Turing and Vint Cerf.

6. What’s your favorite movie?

My all-time favorites are The Imitation Game, The Matrix, The Theory of Everything, Inception, and A Beautiful Mind.

Yansi is a Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) member.

Kristen Beneduce (she/her)

Kristen (she/her) is a Security Researcher and Incident Responder at Sandia National Labs, where she builds future-focused cyber technologies for national defense and hunts threats on critical networks. She transitioned to cybersecurity with a background in contemporary art and business. Kristen is also the founder and Vice President of the Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) Silicon Valley Affiliate, a regional community dedicated to elevating women and diversity advocates in Northern California.

1. What does cybersecurity mean to you?

I was 12 when I discovered Windows Temporary Internet files, one of many digital artifacts that can be used to retrace a user’s browsing activity. I can distinctly remember the thrill of the hunt, and my determination to recover what I was looking for.

In college, I studied the social impact of hacking, including artists who hack technology as part of their creative process and the lure of the “Love Letter” email worm that infected 10 million computers in May of 2000. I learned that cybersecurity underpins many civil liberties and has enormous cultural and economic influence.

Today, working in the federal space, I see cybersecurity at the center of National Security. Our nation’s prosperity depends on it. My daily reality is comprised of threats that impact our nation’s future. I deal with it by constantly researching new attack techniques and designing scaleable systems to defend against them.

“My daily reality is comprised of threats that impact our nation’s future.”

2. If you could wave a magic wand and solve one problem in tech, what would it be?

Our nation would be a lot more secure if we solved diversity retention in cybersecurity. Many studies have shown that diverse and inclusive teams are more productive and that diversity and inclusion are especially critical in cybersecurity, where teams need to be at the top of their game to stay ahead of evolving threats. With millions of unfilled cybersecurity jobs around the world, the industry needs to support underrepresented groups. Everyone can be empowered to be a part of security solutions. Security leaders who are full of empathy will help us get there.

3. What’s a piece of advice that you‘ve found especially useful?

“Find good mentors.”

I had the fortune of having several great mentors before my career in cybersecurity. But in my first security role, when I looked around and up the chain, there were few people like me with a nontraditional background. I had questions!

I started getting involved with organizations like Women in Cybersecurity, and as I reached outside my immediate circle, I felt overwhelmed finding other women, albeit the statistical minority, who are also passionate about changing the ratio.

Being in cybersecurity has also broadened my definition of mentorship. It’s normal to feel like you only know 10% of everything you should know, but the beautiful thing is that everyone only knows 10% of the pie and it’s different from your slice. So, peers can also be mentors when it comes to breaking into a new cybersecurity domain.

4. What’s a challenge you’ve faced, and how did you deal with it?

I met my share of naysaying from colleagues and family when I told them I was leaving my corporate role to pursue a masters in Computer Science and Cybersecurity at a small defense academy without any formal technical background.

I understood their concerns. I was on a solid path in the business world. My peers were moving on to prestigious positions at Fortune 100 companies, or founding their own. With an emphatically liberal arts vitae, I was not what they envisioned when it came to cybersecurity.

I gave thorough pause to their concerns, and I took inventory of my values. Cybersecurity deeply aligned with my desire to help others. Plus, I loved that it would challenge my comfort zone and I could constantly be working on ‘the next thing’. So, I leveraged my strengths in research, analysis, and creativity and charted ways to formalize my self-learned technical skills. Despite the naysaying, I would not even call the decision to pursue cybersecurity a calculated risk. It was a win-win!

5. What’s your source of inspiration?

Technology-based artists. Designers. TED talks. Nature. Fierce women!

6. What’s your favorite book?

Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy

The Code Book by Simon Singh

Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig

The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software by Andrew Honig and Michael Sikorski

The Tao of Network Security Monitoring by Richard Bejtlich

Kristen is a Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) member.

Angelique Taloyo (she/her)

IT Resident, Google

“Like many Filipino-Americans, I was pigeon-holed by family and peers into pursuing medicine without a thought as to whether or not it was right for me. I struggled in my life science courses and pushed through by blaming my own lack of ability rather than a lack of interest. I constantly tried to convince myself that I enjoyed my coursework, despite my declining grades and increasing apathy.

It wasn’t until I worked in a UCLA computer lab that I discovered my interest in technology. Tinkering with computers guided me toward honest introspection, which led me to pursue a complete switch into tech late in my junior year. It took an immense amount of work and dedication to learn everything that I could about IT, while finishing strong in my classes, but it allowed me to land a great job at Zscaler. From there, I was able to leverage my experience within a fast-paced environment to secure an offer from Google as an IT Resident. I’m currently pursuing yet another transition from IT to UX Engineering and these experiences continue to give me confidence that I can make that next step!”

Aditi Jain (she/her)

10 Questions with Aditi Jain, Software Engineer at Google

Aditi Jain is a Software Engineer at Google. When she is not at work using Machine Learning to improve Google Maps, she enjoys spending time doing Education Outreach. Her experiences include advising a local After-School Robotics Club, teaching kids Scratch, and even trying an EdTech startup on the side! A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, these days, Aditi lives in San Francisco and spends most of her free time applying to master’s programs, where she hopes to deepen her knowledge of artificial intelligence

1/ When did you know that you wanted to work in tech?

My first hands-on exposure to technology was when I joined the school’s Robotics Club at 10 years old. I was immediately intimidated by the male-dominated environment. I went back a few times but ultimately, fear of making mistakes in front of my super smart peers caused me to stop going back. I chose math instead as an area of study, where I was able to work on getting to the right answer on my own, and only had to show my answer to the teacher when I knew my solution was perfect.

Ten years later, I was in my sophomore year of undergrad trying to figure out where my math degree could land me a summer internship. I ended up joining Google as part of the Engineering Practicum program (now called STEP) on a team in YouTube that was both math-y and coding-intensive. That experience helped me realize that there is a fusion between these fields in industry. I came back to Google the summer after and worked in Google Research doing complex camera geometry under the title of a “software engineer”. Both of these internships made me realize that the engineering occupation takes on many forms, and that’s when I decided that I wanted to work in tech.

2/ Who is a role model that you look up to?

Math teachers have always played an important role in my life. In particular I had a teacher, Ms. Evans, who taught me Algebra II and later AP Statistics in high school. Ms. Evans was a teacher who pushed students beyond their limits in the best way possible. I appreciated her close attention to detail and the energy she brought every day to class. She made students want to study extra hard during recess just to get full marks on the daily 10-minute quiz. I looked up to her because she made me feel that all of this is important, and in high school it’s easy to lose that sense of direction.

3/ Where is your hometown?

Los Altos, California.

4/ What is a struggle that you’ve faced and how did you handle it?

I want to tell a story that taught me that perfection is not always attainable, a lesson that often hits hard the first time, especially for women. I got straight A’s in high school and so, naturally, when I went to college, I expected the same. My first semester at CMU, I was thrown into a happening social life, intramural sports clubs, dorm life, and linear algebra.

Midway through the semester, I had a D in linear algebra, I was barely passing my other classes, and I was unsure how I’d gotten there. I had a conversation with a trusted upperclassman, and she helped me understand the reality of the situation — I was not going to be able to recover my grade at this point, no matter how hard I tried. I would instead have to drop the class, making me technically a part-time student at the university. To me, this was a failure. This was rock bottom. Since then, I have faced more struggles, but getting through that first one was crucial to putting later failures in perspective and assuring myself that I can bounce back from anything.

5/ What is something that you are immensely proud of?

I grew up in the small town of Los Altos, California, about two miles west of Google HQ. Last October, an email was sent out to all Google employees encouraging us to take part in the annual Computer Science Education Week. Immediately, I reached out to my elementary school, Loyola, to see if I could host a Google Hour of Code Party. The principal was so excited and asked if he could have me there the whole week so that each student could take part.

We ended up compromising and instead stayed at the school for one full day, where 250 students had an opportunity to learn Scratch. Being back at my elementary school with the opportunity to show young kids where their education could take them was a surreal experience. I was proud to see my elementary school doing well and filled with students much smarter and sharper than I was back then!

6/ Favorite food?

Guacamole is a food, right?

7/ Favorite book?

Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins.

8/ If you could try another job for a day, what would it be?

This is a hard one! The first three that come to mind are elementary school teacher, where I get to design my own curriculum, food truck owner, where I get to travel the world spreading healthy recipes, and scientist working in a remote laboratory in the middle of nowhere doing cutting-edge, top-secret research. Though I guess if I could only get one day on the job, I would pick this last one.

9/ If you could give your 18-year-old self a piece of advice, what would it be?

Striving for perfection is fine, but making mistakes is even better, and learning from those mistakes is the best! In college, expose yourself to everything possible, from coursework to research to new social experiences. Take the time to study yourself, as well — figure out what helps you relax and what gets you fired up.

Janelle Wang (she/her)

10 Questions with Janelle Wang (she/her), Co-Founder & CEO at ACTON

Edited by Clarissa Bukhan.

Janelle Wang is an Industrial Designer turned entrepreneur with over 10 years of Strategic Product Development, New Category Creation & Design Thinking for Fortune 500s to Start Ups, bringing breakthrough innovation and sustainability.

Janelle was selected as one of “19 Influential Women In Mobility” in 2019, she was awarded Female CEO of the Year in 2016, and has been featured in WSJ, FastCompany, CNN, VOGUE, BBC, and more. She holds over 30 utility patents in innovation and design.

1. When did you know that you wanted to work in tech?

I decided I wanted to be in the tech industry when I was a kid. My father is a physicist, so I got motors, battery packs, and soldering tool kits as gifts/toys from my father at a young age. I hand made a portable personal electric fan at age 6 and have enjoyed making and creating things with some type of tech in them ever since.

2. Who is a role model that you look up to?

I looked up to Marie Curie. She changed the world not once but twice. She founded the new science of radioactivity — even the word was invented by her — and her discoveries launched effective cures for cancer.

3. Where is your hometown?

I was born in Northern China and spent the other half my life in Los Angeles. Now, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

4. What is a struggle that you’ve faced and how did you handle it?

Years ago, when I had just come back to work from maternity leave, I had to travel to Germany for 2 weeks. As a young, first-time mom, leaving my couple-months-old baby behind for the sake of trying to achieve a goal for work left me feeling very confused and frustrated. It made me wonder whether work / life balance really existed or not. After that experience, I reached the conclusion that there isn’t such a sharp line between these two; you will always have to have a dashed line in between. I learned how to find my own personal balance and to enjoy the process.

5. What is something that you are immensely proud of?

I traveled to Africa by myself when I was in my early twenties. This is something I’m proud of because it gave me a chance to experience new cultures, meet totally new people, and explore a brand new continent. That trip changed how I look at and feel about the world. As a result, I have no fear. I’m optimistic and I believe everything is the best arrangement.

6. What’s something that’s been on your mind a lot lately?

I’ve been thinking seriously about how to solve traffic congestion issues and how make our cities better places to live.

7. Favorite food?

My mom’s dumplings.

8. Favorite book?

7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

9. If you could try another job for a day, what would it be?

I’m still designer at heart, so I would like to draw/design/research as a designer for a day.

10. If you could give your 18-year-old self a piece of advice, what would it be?

Enjoy the process.

Nyasha Francis (she/her)

Nyasha Francis is a sophomore from the Bronx, New York, attending Clark Atlanta University in New York. This summer, she interned at GoFundMe, where she worked on website frontend development. It was her first time using JavaScript and React, but she had a wonderful time building new features for the site. Moving to San Diego and visiting the Bay Area was challenging at first, but thanks to her mentors and the welcoming culture at GoFundMe, she excelled and looks forward to continuing frontend development during the upcoming school year.

During the last week of her internship, Nyasha made a presentation to the product team and the CTO about her experience at GoFundMe. Her joy in discussing the new feature that would impact user interaction with the site was exceeded only by the opportunity to show her appreciation to her mentors and truly thank them for changing her life.

Source of inspiration: Talking to other engineers of color.

Book Recommendation: White Teeth by Zadie Smith.

Hannah Lily Postman (she/her, they/them)

Hannah Lily Postman comes from a long line of independent women.  Raised by a single mom in a small house in New England, she credits her mom and her sister for motivating her to pursue her diverse interests.  She went to college in Ohio, where she studied math and comparative literature, and arrived in the Bay in 2016. She is currently leveraging her unusual combination of skills in computer science and writing as a Technical Writer Intern at Google, where she was selected from tens of thousands of applicants to help Google write developer-facing documentation for one of its oldest and most innovative offerings, Google App Engine.  She lives in Berkeley where she loves to visit local book stores and marvel at California farmers markets year-round plethora of fresh fruits.

I wasn’t interested in the tech industry at first - I was interested in math. Math led me to computer science, but only after my high school physics teacher led me to math. I used to ask him questions after class, and sometimes he’d give me an answer and then I’d have a question about the answer, and oftentimes it would go on like this for quite a while. One day we got to a point where he told me that the questions I was asking should really be answered by a semester long course in number theory. When I got to college, I saw that number theory was a 300-level math class so I started taking the prerequisites and really enjoyed the material. A few people suggested that I might like computer science, but I’d never met anyone I could relate to who studied it and the term “computer science” made me think of the clunky old desktop my family had when I was a kid.

Eventually I took the intro computer science class as part of my math major. I could see why everyone had told me to take it! The problem-solving felt really intuitive, and I loved that the puzzles let me use logic and creativity at the same time. But I still wasn’t sold. As a woman I think it’s easy to just never recognize your own achievement -- I assumed I got an “A” because it was an introductory class. I was totally taken aback when multiple people told me that it was actually one of the most challenging classes at my school. Hearing that made me realize that I might have earned the “A” because I did good work. That was the moment where I kind of said “Oh, maybe I do belong here.”

Source of inspiration: My grandma. When I get bogged down, I just try to think of my grandma raising my mom while going to medical school when the field was almost entirely dominated by men. She was one of four women in the first class at her school to accept women, and the only single mom. Her decision to go to medical school changed things for our family. Like so many of the ceiling breakers in her generation, her determination to excel in the field despite the mistreatment and double-standards she faced changed things for a whole generation of women -- both in terms of opening up professional opportunities for women, and in terms of offering patients the option of a woman provider. Thinking about this reminds me that if I stick it out, things will change -- for me personally and (hopefully) for future women engineers. I also believe that having more women in engineering will allow us to build better products for women consumers, because engineers influence products at the design level, not just through purchasing power when a product reaches market. I really believe in the importance of diversity in all its forms.

Book recommendation: Oh there are so many good books! I recently read Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. I don’t usually read cookbooks cover to cover - I actually don’t usually read cookbooks at all because I don’t like to follow recipes - but this was such a fun and informative book. It’s full of diagrams and is meant to help you not need a cookbook. So if you’re not a cookbook person, this might be the cookbook for you - especially if you’re an engineer, because it’s very much a book of logic and method. I also love Barbara Kingsolver’s books (especially High Tide in Tucson and Small Wonder), Rachel Naomi Remen’s My Grandfather’s Blessings and Kitchen Table Wisdom, books about business and entrepreneurship, and most fairy tales.

Mayuri Raja (she/her)

Mayuri is a Software Engineering Intern at Google and rising fourth year at the University of Texas at Austin studying computer science and completing a certificate on Asian American antiracist activism. In her free time, Mayuri volunteers teaching computer science to middle school girls in underprivileged areas. Since grade school, she has thought about how to give a voice to those who are often forgotten. When she was in middle school, she attended a career day talk by a software engineer. Although her interest was piqued by the subject matter, she noticed that she was the only woman in the room. This made her decide that she wanted to be a software engineer so that the next generation of women do not feel alone in that setting.

“I was very involved in my high school's theater department, but I was one of five people of color in the whole department and the only person with dark skin. Living in a very white suburb in Texas meant that people weren't as open-minded as I would have liked, and one director routinely excluded me from being considered any role that wasn't specifically written for a person of color. I knew it wasn't a matter of my skills because other directors were casting me in lead roles, but I was too scared to speak out because I knew I'd be jeopardizing my chances of being cast in the future if I did. Finally, my senior year, the last thing I did for the theater department was a one man show. The assignment was to pick a deceased famous person and act in a ten minute show as the chosen person. I saw my chance, and I took it. Through the character of Fatima Meer, an Indian South African apartheid activist, I spent those ten minutes on stage taking a very public stance against racism in a community that wasn't ready to hear such a raw critique of their own behavior. I called out my theater department's casting methodology, and I called out my peers for seeing nothing wrong with it. It felt good to finally say what had been on my mind all those years, and it was also the moment that I stopped hiding my opinions for the sake of my own success.”

Source of Inspiration: The group Communities of Color United in Austin.

Book Recommendation: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Urpi Pariona (she/her)

Urpi was born in Peru and grew up in Chicago. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Yale University. After college, she joined President Obama's campaign team in 2012 as Regional Hispanic Press Secretary for Virginia and Ohio. Having developed an expertise in Hispanic voters, Urpi joined Google as a digital consultant, connecting Fortune 500 companies with multicultural audiences including African-American, Asian-American, and LGBTQIA+ communities. Urpi then decided to leave Google to get her MBA at The Wharton School, after which she is hoping to transition to a product-focused role through which she can continue advocating for all users. In her free time, she enjoys traveling with the Wharton Social Impact Consulting Club and mentoring Latina college students at UPenn.

After the OFA campaign, she received a couple of offers. One from President Obama’s press team and another one from Google’s start-up multicultural sales team. She turned down the White House offer for three reasons. First, she wanted a job that would offer her the greatest opportunity for growth, greatest resources for personal development, and largest scale for impact. Secondly, having seen how the use of analytics and digital platforms can make a positive impact in donations and voter turnout, she wanted to learn more about how technology could empower minorities and other communities around the world. Thirdly, she wanted an industry that aligned with her personal skills. She excelled working with large learning curves, constant change, and ambitious targets. The public sector isn’t known for quick changes, but tech is.

“I helped to organize a group at Google that advocated for using technology to empower all voters during the 2016 presidential election. It was comprised of individuals across the organization (advertising, engineering, marketing, etc). We advocated for Google to make search products available in other languages in addition to English. As a result, the One Box with voting information was released in Spanish and Chinese. I will never forget showing my mother how she could now type “where to vote” in Spanish and she’d be able to get directions to the nearest polling place and study the ballot questions. At least 20 million Spanish dominant Hispanics living in the US now had access to this information in Spanish and could become better-educated voters. This experience reminded me of the unparalleled scale of impact we have in the technology sector.”

Source of inspiration: Last semester in business school, my executive coach taught me to identify activities that give me energy and activities that deplete me of that energy. I figured out that painting, playing the guitar, working out, meditating, and volunteering are activities that give me energy. Whenever I do these, I lose track of time and after I finish I feel replete, ready to share that positive energy with others. I have since set time aside each day to pursue one of these activities for at least an hour.

Book recommendation: When I was an adolescent, full of dreams and ideals, my favorite book was The Alchemist. When I was unemployed and struggling to overcome a major life failure, my favorite book became Steve Job’s biography by Walter Isaacson. When I joined President Obama’s campaign, my favorite book became Dreams of My Father. When I was looking to strengthen my mind and find focus, my favorite book became Autobiography of a Yogi.

Cori Grainger (she/her)

Cori Grainger is a University Relations BOLD Intern at Google. She graduated high school as the founding valedictorian at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women. She has gone on to attend the Johns Hopkins University with a full-ride scholarship, double majoring in Spanish and Medicine, Science, and the Humanities. Some of her favorite accomplishments over her time at JHU include studying abroad in Salamanca, Spain and interning at Intel Corporation as a product development technical intern, and doing Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Cori is now completing her dream internship as a BOLD intern at Google, working with some of the top ML and AI researchers in the world. A fun fact is that Cori’s unrelenting desire to succeed was documented in the award-winning film, STEP the Movie.

As a rising sophomore in high school, Cori was accepted into the University of Maryland's Young Scholars Program. She lived on campus for one month and completed an Introduction to Engineering Design course, where she was introduced to everything from the magic of programming/coding to the wonders of physics and electrical engineering. Amazed by the potential to create awesome products, while leveraging her creativity to do so, she decided that tech was definitely for her.

“At a prior internship, I was not having a positive experience. I felt undervalued and underestimated by my colleagues, and as a technical intern, I was not having a technical experience in the least. I wanted to know if others felt the same way, so I co-founded an initiative called "Intern Power Hour." Through it, we worked to increase intern visibility to upper-level management and implement a standardized internship program so all interns could have positive, wholesome learning experiences. Though I left the company, our initiative lives on and has been adopted by the Vice President of the business group where it began. I am immensely proud because many times I felt discouraged as the only young, Black woman on the team but I found a way to transform that negative experience into a positive one for all the interns to come after me.”

Source of inspiration. Seeing others succeed and pursue their passions. They push me to also be great!

Book recommendation: The Power of Habit.

Miranda Go (she/her)

Miranda is a current undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Mathematics and Cognitive Science. This upcoming year, she will be finishing her Bachelors degree and starting her Masters in Computer Science, focusing her research in Computer Science education, specifically for introductory courses. This is her second internship with Google. She started as an Engineering Practicum intern on an SRE team and is currently on the Google Cloud Platform team for Microsoft Active Directory.

“I knew I wanted to be in the tech industry in 7th grade. At that point in my life, I was fascinated with technology and how much of an impact it made on people socially. As I continued my journey through college, I realized that I not only wanted to be in the tech industry, but specifically in the EdTech [Education Tech] industry. After seeing how much I enjoyed tutoring and teaching others how to code, I knew that I wanted to continue to make a difference in people's lives by teaching them how to be digitally literate.”

Source of inspiration: My a cappella group, The Treble Singers! Not only are the members a daily inspiration and encouragement to keep working hard and doing my best in everything I do, but singing together and hearing how the harmonies all work together always brings me joy and allows me to think through anything I may be struggling with.

Rose Garcia (she/her)

Rose Garcia’s work on the Chrome Accessibility team mirrors her commitment to making tech more inclusive. A rising junior at Oregon State University majoring in Computer Science, she works on the Gender Inclusiveness Magnifier (GenderMag) project for improving software usability for all. Her commitment to inclusion stems from her own experiences.

"The summer after my junior year of high school, I competed in an all-girls hackathon in San Francisco. I had only taken one computer science course and wasn't very confident in my ability to contribute to any sort of project. I was nervous I wouldn't fit in, that everyone else would be a better programmer than me. Despite the nerves, by the end of the day I was part of the winning team. I absolutely couldn't wait to do more hackathons. The friends I competed with had been supportive when I struggled to get the project to work and I got to experience what it was like to program on a team. I knew almost immediately that I was lucky enough to find something that I love to do.”

Source of Inspiration: Dance, especially hula

Book Recommendation: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Su Yang (she/her)

Su interned at Instagram, Microsoft, and Raptor Maps before joining the Google Maps team as a software engineering intern. Even though she is now a rising senior at MIT with a lot of programming experience, she didn’t begin her journey knowing the most in the room.

"All the boys I knew growing up talked constantly about their Lenovos, Motorola Razrs, and Minecraft servers. I could beat them at algebra but couldn’t tell you the first thing about computers. So I started teaching myself how to code, mostly out of spite, but also because I wanted to make my Neopets page look cooler. I didn’t get exposed to computer science or software engineering until halfway through my freshman year of college, when I decided to take an intro web development class on a whim. I ended up hacking together a language-learning platform with some friends. It was incredibly empowering to bootstrap an app with almost no prior knowledge. Being able to see your own logic manifest itself into tangibles that can help further the world is still one of the reasons I’m in tech today."

Source of Inspiration: Su is endlessly inspired by the people around her who pour everything they have into what they do, whether that’s a passion project or a 45-minute workout class.

Book Recommendation: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Sue Valdivia (she/her)

Sue was born in Chosica, Peru, and moved to the U.S. at age 13. With a double major in Finance and International Business under her belt, and now pursuing an MBA at NYU Stern, Sue is excited to be working for Google, a company she sees as dedicated to making information available to everyone in the world.

Source of Inspiration: Sue’s grandmother is a pharmaceutical chemist, a professor, and the mother of five children. Not only that, she also started her own business and has traveled to five continents. This is an extraordinary achievement, given that, at the time she did this, women in Peru were supposed to stay at home, cook, and clean for their families. When asked why she never learned how to cook, she responded, “I have three graduate degrees.” Her favorite piece of advice when someone asks if they should pursue a different career path or go somewhere they’ve never been is, “If not now, when?”

Book Recommendation: Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

Danielle Lomax (she/her)

Originally from the Washington, D.C. area, Danielle is an MBA candidate at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. This summer, she is interning at Google on the Emerging Markets Users and Products team. Prior to business school, she founded a digital marketing startup in Washington, D.C. Even though she didn’t know exactly what she was doing in the beginning, she’s now proud of herself for taking the risk and is grateful for the friends she was able to lean on. Always seeking out the next adventure, she first pivoted to management consulting as a member of Deloitte’s strategy practice before becoming an early member of CapTech’s product innovation team in Atlanta. On campus, she’s now actively involved in amplifying Michigan’s technology ecosystem. She works alongside a team of 5 amazing ladies who are empowering women to launch their own ventures and become investors through Women Who Launch (WWL), providing a voice for black students and alumni.

Source of Inspiration: Yoga has transformed Danielle’s life. To her, there’s nothing more humbling, yet encouraging, than contorting your body in a heated yoga class.

Book Recommendation: Simple’s Uncle Sam by Langston Hughes.

“During my junior year of college I decided to start my own business. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I asked a few friends to help me get started, leveraged the marketing and PR classes I had taken to find customers, and relied on Google for the rest. In the beginning, I targeted customers in the sports industry but quickly realized I didn’t have the network, so I pivoted to hospitality.

Looking back, I did everything wrong. But I’m proud of myself for taking the risk. I didn’t hesitate; I just did it. The business lasted about two years, yielding a small customer base that took a chance on a college kid. It also yielded a repository of success stories and a newfound passion for being entrepreneurial.

Although I decided to pursue consulting after that, I’ve maintained that passion for being contrarian and taking risks. I think that’s one of the underlying reasons why I ultimately ended in up tech. There’s a culture of failure and iteration. You just do it.”

Olivia Li (she/her)

Olivia recently graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Electrical Engineering in Spring 2019 and will be returning to complete a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering. Olivia is a first-time Google Intern and enjoys playing indoor volleyball with friends around the Bay Area. Olivia’s fascination with technology began almost out of necessity. When she received an iPhone 4, she had to promise her parents that she would take very good care of it, having already broken too many phones. Once she started using it, she realized what impressive things the tiny device was capable of doing. It was then that she realized that she wanted to be a part of this tech world.

“Prior to this internship, I had interned at a company for 2 summers and was prepared to go back for a third. I loved the company, but I wasn’t sure if it was where I wanted to work long-term. I realized I wanted to try something new for my last summer internship before graduating college. But because this company had already given me a return offer, my parents were against me seeking opportunities elsewhere, thinking it would ruin my potential for a full-time offer.

After talking to many people, I decided that I was going to try and go after another internship. Now I’ve made it this far, into a company I never thought I’d have the courage to apply to. My parents are so happy I took a leap of faith to pursue something I was determined to see through, even if it meant doing something they weren’t happy with at the time.”

Source of inspiration: Her family and friends

Book Recommendation: Divergent by Veronica Roth and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Rebecca Turner (she/her)

Rebecca is a software engineer studying computer science and mathematics at Brandeis University. In her free time, she enjoys tweaking her website, doing calligraphy, wearing sunglasses, and bicycling. In her junior year of high school, Rebecca realized that she could channel her creativity towards computer science, a field with more jobs than her other favorite hobbies of graphic design and jewelry creation. She was able to use this creativity last summer when she noticed that her friend couldn’t afford the same technology Rebecca could. This made it difficult for them to make calls, use email, take photos, etc., so Rebecca pooled her money to get them an Android. Now, she and her friend can use the same tools to stay in contact.

“I have a friend much poorer than me. Last summer, I was upgrading my phone because it had been about four years since I last bought one. It struck me how immensely unfair it was that my friend didn’t have access to the same technology as I did.

It was difficult for them to make calls, use email, take photos, and sometimes even turn their phone on, so I pooled together some money and got us both new Androids (after asking if there was anything else, like tuition, they’d prefer the money went to). Now we can all share selfies and apply to jobs with the same tools!”

Source of inspiration: While she loves seeing beautiful systems, whether they’re embodied in the construction of a typeface or a computer program, nothing is better than an abrasive, poorly-designed system that inspires technologists to create something better.

Book Recommendation: Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer and House of Leavesby Mark Z. Danielewski

Arsha Nagrani (she/her)

Arsha is a PhD student at the VGG lab in the University of Oxford, UK. She was born in Mumbai, India, and lived around the world in Hong Kong, Singapore, Mumbai, Cambridge, and Oxford before finally landing in California as a research intern at Google. Her work is mostly focused on using machine learning to understand videos for applications such as video retrieval, automatic movie descriptions for the blind, and face/speech recognition.

Arsha was recently part of the organizing committee for the Women in Computer Vision workshop at CVPR, the largest computer vision conference for academics. As part of the organizing team, she helped organize a mentoring dinner for over 130 people, matched young women in the field to senior mentors, and organized keynote speeches, as well as a panel to discuss diversity-related issues in computer vision. The organizing team she was on worked across 5 different time zones and managed to raise over $100K to provide travel grants to 50 young mentees.

Source of inspiration: Ruth Bader Ginsburg for being a force to be reckoned with and raising a family, getting top grades in a competitive degree, and looking after a sick partner all at once. It gives Arsha hope that it’s possible to do anything and everything.

Book Recommendation: Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling and Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin