Today’s Tech Role Model is Kate Maxwell. Currently, Kate is a Business Lead at Strava, a mobile and web app connecting millions of runners and cyclists through the sports they love. Kate studied marketing and built a solid AdOps career in New York City. After several years in the industry, she felt like something was missing but wasn’t immediately sure of her next step. Through deep introspection, the power of networks, and her own persistence, she made a big move.

Today’s Tech Role Model is Karen Baker. Today, Karen is the Senior Community Manager of Alumni at Udacity, a San Francisco-based education company offering open online courses. Karen studied Rhetoric and Chinese in college conducted branding research with Millenials, and later transitioned into managing tech communities. She’s also a proud alumna of Seth Godin’s altMBA program.

Today’s Tech Role Model is Sam Provenza. Sam began her career in graphic design, but today she builds intuitive and beautiful user interfaces for digital products. She’s currently a Product Designer for Tailwind, a SaaS start-up producing Pinterest and Instagram marketing tools. In spite of her busy schedule, she is also the NYC chapter lead of Girl Develop It, a group that organizes coding classes and career workshops for women.

Today’s Tech Role Model is Erin Morrissey. Erin began her digital design career at a small tech startup before transitioning to Criteo, a global ad-tech firm. Over the past three years, she’s climbed the ranks to her current role of Advanced Digital Designer. Work keeps her busy, but she still finds time for personal art projects in her free time.

Today’s Tech Role Model is Meka Seymour. Currently, she’s a full-fledged software engineer at Harry’s, a startup that makes and sells shaving equipment. Meka started working on their Customer Experience team. As she interacted with more engineers, she realized she wanted to move into software engineering. Instead of quitting her job, Meka took a different approach and shared her vision with her manager. With her manager’s support, she enrolled in online courses and studied in her free time to build her skills.

When you think of the words “job search,” how does your body feel? Anxious? Tense? Uncomfortable? I feel you.

Illustration by Andy J. Miller

This past Monday, I had the honor of attending my sister’s Ph.D thesis defense. She’s been on this path since she was in college, but this hour-long talk was the culmination of six years of serious work. We’re talking late nights and weekends in the lab, lots of experimental failures, and plenty of going back to the drawing board. While I’ve followed her throughout this journey, most of our conversations centered around particular events during a given experiment. Monday was the first time that I heard the narrative behind her research and understood how it all fits together.

Illustration: Moncho Massé

Today is the last day at my job. I gave five weeks notice, put together a hand off plan, met with all the stakeholders, and created a step-by-step manual on how to do my job when I’m gone. This work comes naturally to me as a process-oriented, Type A human. The most difficult work came later when person after person asked me the same two questions: “What happened?” and What’s next?”