Success comes from unexpected places

Let's fast-forward to my childhood

The world of mathematics, programming, complex calculations... Could I imagine my life story without it? Hardly. From the earliest years, I was inspired by my family’s example and had a strong interest in studying STEM. My grandma is an honored teacher of mathematics of the Soviet Union, mom is a developer, father’s an engineer-manager who invented a ventilation system in Ukraine. Can you believe these people raise a writer, an artist, or a movie star? Probably yes, but considering that the spirit of tech was in the air, it was impossible not to fall in love with STEM.

My studying years

And so when it was time to choose the future path, I was inspired by the parental example and had no doubts that engineering is the right way for me. To get the excellent basic knowledge, I started my way in the Physics and Technology lyceum, in an incredibly friendly class with 50/50 girls and boys. Honestly, I’ve never heard that boys are smarter than girls, and this spirit of equality inspired me to be better every day.

The first step is behind, so let’s move on to university years. I decided to dig into the protection of information. Programming, signals, physics, soldering — all of these were incredibly interesting for me, but not for other girls. Out of one hundred students on my speciality, only fifteen were girls, and half of them had enrolled there by accident. I think, somewhere on the way to adulthood, though, girls lose the feeling of confidence and give up on the hard things. Definitely, as in any field, it takes time and effort to figure it out, but it doesn't mean you couldn’t do it. As soon as you start to succeed, you automatically start to like it. It happened to me too.

Success comes from unexpected places

I always feel the passion and the curiosity to dig into a problem and try to solve it. Through my university years, I have always been studying hard to be a professional in my field. That’s why my third year of university was the beginning of the career path. Morning, tram, me being sleepy and going to university... My glance fell upon the Microsoft training center, and an ambitious thought came to my mind: “how cool it would probably be to work there” In those days I didn't know that dreams could come true. And just in a couple of months, I became (the happiest girl ever) an intern in the partners’ relations department, where I successfully got my first work experience.

A few years later. Same tram, the same morning, but a new office in my eyes — Hewlett-Packard. I always kept saying, "Yes," to new things and experimenting, and, as you could guess, after a while, I became a support engineer in this company. You couldn’t even imagine how exciting and, at the same time, hard my position was. I had to support enterprise clients in storage systems, network and server equipment at the level of installation, maintenance, repair, upgrades, large installation projects, software updates. When I applied for the position, my manager had a fear that I was a girl and the job is something that I’m not a match for, but a good knowledge of the architecture of computer networks helped me to become a part of the Hewlett-Packard team.