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

Hidai Olivas-Holguin (she/her)

As a young girl, Hidai loved problem solving and math. During her sophomore year of high school, her advisor encouraged her to take an introduction to Python class. At the time, she had no idea what coding was, but she soon found out it was something she enjoyed. Her passion for computer science classes through the rest of high school led her to select it as a major at MIT. However, when she got to MIT, she started feeling imposter syndrome. To counteract this, she leaned on her support system back home and found a community at MIT, aiding her in quieting that negative voice in her head.

“Getting into MIT is my proudest moment. The year leading up to it was probably the hardest of my life. Junior year of high school, my mom’s cancer returned, and the summer before my senior year, my grandma passed away suddenly. This was around the time that everyone was worried about college, and I had no idea how the application process worked. I didn’t even know that people studied for the SATs until a week before I was supposed to take mine.

So, I was figuring out how to apply to college on top of stepping up my role as big sister. I never felt alone, and that was what helped me get through that year. My parents have always encouraged me to dream big. They immigrated from Mexico in pursuit of the American dream, and it always pushed me to work harder because I knew what they sacrificed. So, getting into MIT wasn’t only for me, but something that made everyone around me proud. Many happy tears were shed that day.”

Source of inspiration: Her parents. Even though they don’t fully grasp what being a software engineer is, they have never let Hidai feel discouraged. They immigrated from Mexico in pursuit of the American dream for their children. This has, as a result, pushed Hidai to work even harder to make them proud.

Book Recommendation: How Women Rise by Marshall Goldsmith and Sally Helgesen

Mackenzie Clark (she/her)

Mackenzie aspires to become an engineer to give back to those who aren’t as privileged. This desire to give back spans from animals and the environment to a desire to alleviate poverty. Originally from BC, she now studies at the University of Toronto in robotics engineering, and she absolutely loves learning. It was her grandfather who first opened her eyes to how fun engineering could be, showing her pictures of him climbing up to fix overhead power lines. Now at Google, she has the opportunity to jump into a different kind of fun and excitement by helping to prevent malicious ads from being on the internet.

Source of inspiration: Michelle Obama inspires Mackenzie, and one quote that resonates with her, especially as a woman in engineering is, “I tried not to feel intimidated when classroom conversation was dominated by male students, which it often was. Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.”

Book Recommendation: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghes

Kaarthika Thakker (she/her)

Kaarthika Thakker is currently an associate product management intern at YouTube and last summer, she was an engineering practicum intern at Google. Outside of tech, she is passionate about music, working as a station manager of her college radio station, and social issues. Her dream is to find a way to leverage tech to deal with issues like housing inequality, gentrification, and displacement.

When Kaarthika went to college, she wanted to make an impact on social issues, so she studied sociology and economics and did diversity and inclusion research in a psychology lab freshman year. When she took an intro computer science class, she fell in love, although it took her until her junior year to officially declare as a Computer Science major. She sees so much opportunity to do good within the tech industry and wants to mobilize people and resources within tech to focus on the impact technology is having on the local community.

“My favorite class in high school was Physics, although when I took it, I was the youngest student and one of only two girls in a class of forty people. When I went to Rice University for college, I wanted to make an impact on social issues, so I studied sociology and economics. But then I took an introductory Computer Science class and absolutely fell in love.

As much as I loved Computer Science, it took me until my junior year to officially declare it as my major because I never saw myself as an engineer. I always thought I wasn’t the “type” because I was into art/music/social issues and I didn’t “fit in” to the stereotype. But now I see so much opportunity to do good within the tech industry. I want to mobilize people to care more about the impact tech is having on local communities.”

Source of inspiration: Kaarthika is inspired by her mom. She was born and raised in India and she became the main income earner of her family at a young age. Although she didn’t go to college, she manages all the finances of her house and small business. She has sacrificed so much, but she always makes her family here first priority.

Book Recommendation: Becoming by Michelle Obama

Rebecca Parker (she/her)

Rebecca was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and was interested in math and science from a young age. In middle school and high school, she never explored computer science, because she was intimidated by people who already seemed to know everything about coding. However, in school at the University of Missouri in Columbia, she took a computer science course on a whim and changed her major three weeks later. Since then, she has been soaking up as much knowledge as she can about the field and has been loving every second. Although shy, Rebecca has taken the internship at Google as an opportunity to branch out and take ownership of her learning. She is quickly overcoming her fear of asking questions and is embracing this newfound ability to learn and grow much faster than before.

“This may seem small, but I’m very proud of myself for asking one of my hosts to teach me about debugging just yesterday! I have struggled my entire life with speaking up for myself and asking questions. I have always been very shy, as well as anxious about what people will think of me. I worry that others will think I am unintelligent if I ask questions. But over the course of my internship, I have really branched out and taken ownership of my learning. I am quickly overcoming my fear of asking questions and embracing this newfound ability to learn and grow much faster than before.”

Source of inspiration: Long hikes or bike rides outside, which allow Rebecca to do her best thinking.

Book Recommendation: Knowing God by J.I. Packer

Meghan Wilkens (she/her)

Meghan was raised in a military family and traveled all over the world, living in multiple countries throughout her childhood. She fell in love with the feeling of being completely immersed in a culture different from her own. After serving in the US Navy for 9 years, she is now pursuing an MBA at UNC Chapel Hill and completing an internship at Google.

“Upon graduating from high school in Guam, I went on to earn a bachelors degree in Advertising at Marquette University and secure a job at an advertising firm. But it didn’t take long for ‘cabin fever’ to set in. My thirst for adventure drove me to follow in the footsteps of my family, and I commissioned as a Supply Corps Officer in the US Navy, deploying early on in my career.

I learned management, operations, and logistics skills every step along the way. I also had the opportunity to lead sailors and teach them methods of problem-solving that started out here in Silicon Valley. After marrying, having two children, and completing nearly 9 years in the service, I am moving towards a transition into the tech industry, working on my MBA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and using an MBA internship at Google to get a taste of this world — a culture very different from what I’ve known in the military.”

Source of inspiration: Her sister, Kassandra, who served in the Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer before making a name for herself in the tech industry. She is someone Meghan looks up to for her confidence and resilience.

Book Recommendation: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans