“In 2019, I received a full scholarship for four years to play tennis at Fordham. When I visited, I really liked the campus. I felt almost drawn to it in a way. The distance between California and New York is not small, but I really wanted to take a shot, and it ended up being quite literally the best decision of my life. Last year, my team won the Atlantic 10 championship for the first time since Fordham was founded. That was one of my biggest accomplishments during my time at Fordham.”

“When I was a senior in high school, I took an engineering class. I think I was one of two girls in the class, but I really liked being able to build something, problem-solve, document my work, and come to a solution. I love computer science for the same reason. Even though it’s also a predominantly male field, when I started at Fordham, I immediately declared it as my major. I really loved all my classes.”

“In the summer of 2022, I interned for Amazon Web Services as a cloud support engineering intern. I was remote because COVID was still lingering at the time, but it was still an incredible experience. The cloud is huge nowadays. Little startups, big companies … everybody's shifting to it because of its security and scalability. To be able to learn about that, especially when I was just a junior, gave me such a great foundation. I still use the skills that I learned in that internship today in my job.”

“I fell in love with Apple because of how minimalistic and effortless everything is, and how intuitive the user experience is. I knew that it was a difficult company to get into, but I wanted to take a chance, so I submitted my resume, and a few weeks later I got an email from the recruiter. I saw the little Apple icon at the end of her email, and I was completely shocked. The whole summer, I was coding in Python. I helped automate processes to protect our systems. I felt so welcomed and valued because although I was just an intern, I was able to contribute just as a full-time employee would.”

“One of the most memorable classes I had as an undergraduate was Cybersecurity Applications. It gave me such a strong foundation of the fundamentals of cybersecurity—everything from how encryption works and how to secure a database to different types of hackers and what they're capable of. My professor, Abdullah Al-Hayajneh, was absolutely amazing and super engaging. He really was the one who sparked my interest in the field. It really helped me with my current job at United, which is to protect employee and customer data, and I oversee all of the applications that are within United, whether that's a machine learning application, a robotic automation application, or a kiosk at the airport. I oversee all the data that's going in and going out, where it's being stored, and I make sure that everything is configured the way that it should be.”