Computer Science Extra Credit Blog 12/13

At today’s speaker event, I had a great time listening to both speakers talk about their life journeys through STEM. The frist speaker was Kathyleen Beveridge. She was born in Vietnam the moved to San Diego in 2004. She received her bachelor’s degree at Santa Clara University and her MBA at USC. A quote she likes to live her life by is, “mission in life is to not merely to survive but to thrive and do so with passion.” She began her career with a job at an investment bank at Wells Fargo, where she was a stockbroker and worked with mutual funds. She did not like this career so she went back to college and started to work with High Tech, where she later got a job at Qualcomm. The companies she worked for included: HP Inc, Qualcomm, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. A value that all these companies have in common is they all want to make the world a better place through coding. One of her main titles at these jobs was senior director for marketing and sales. The second speaker was Kris Porter. He attended Livermore high school alum. As a high schooler, he found that he had a strong love for STEM-related classes. He went to UCLA for electrical engineering and focused on communication systems and computer networks. He then got his master’s degree in electrical engineering from Cal State LA. Right when he finished graduate school the market crashed and he went to work at a shop that fixed broken Mac computers. He then became a systems engineer at a start-up called GPM. He also worked at places such as NBC Universal, Qualcomm, and Twitter. Some of his main titles throughout his career are software engineer, SRE, DevOps, and Infrastructure Engineer. In order to further his learning he has done things such as CCNA training, Machine learning, and deep learning(Qualcomm), and taught himself Python and Twitter university. Projects he has worked on throughout his career are streaming media infrastructure for the 2012 Olympic games, analytical infrastructure projects(LocationSmart, Qualcomm), Twitter projects-new datacenter deployment, and migrating home timeline to GraphQL.One interesting that stood out to me that Kris Porter said was that nowadays interviews are very tough for coding-related jobs as you are given 30-45 minutes to solve a certain problem with code without making errors. Overall, both speakers were amazing and I am grateful they took the time to talk to us about their journeys.