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African Americans find IT careers fascinating
Internships lead to jobs in IT
The hiring climate for IT is always good somewhere
By Sue Marquette Poremba
Contributing Editor
 Denise Holland, president of Black Data Processing Associates (www.bdpa.org), has one piece of advice for African American students considering a career in IT: “Get involved with an internship program.”
She explains that an internship works to the advantage of both the student and the employer. “The student gets the experience most companies look for,” she says, “and the company gets to evaluate a resource before hiring.”
If you can’t get an internship, Holland suggests volunteering with an organization like BDPA and attending a BDPA conference, or earning an
IT certification. “Certifications and networking
with professionals and others interested in IT
can only  help a student’s job-seeking credentials,”
she says.
IT is a field that touches every industry so the hiring climate is always good somewhere. Industry observers say that today’s “hot” market is the “green” or sustainable industry. Holland adds that there always seems to be a demand for her specialty, SAP.
She thinks IT is becoming more popular among African American students, in part because they are receiving the encouragement they didn’t get ten or twenty years ago.
“IT is an almost bias-proof profession,” she notes. “It’s a field where skills and the ability to do a good job open doors.”
Internship convinces Kerline Jules to join Citrix
 Kerline Jules first heard about Citrix Systems (Fort Lauderdale, FL) when Inroads matched her up with the company. Inroads is a national program that arranges internships for talented multi-cultural students.
After earning her 2006 BA in CIS and finance at University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL), Jules was happy to accept a job offer from Citrix. Over her two-year internship she’d done her homework and liked what she found. “The company had extremely high loyalty ratings and affiliations with Fortune 100 companies,” she says. Citrix specializes in application delivery for large corporate clients.
As internal operations coordinator Jules works for the company’s education department, which develops training materials, exams and certifications. Her job is to maintain and improve the efficiency of the department’s databases, which range from Microsoft Access to SQL.
Jules has always been fascinated by technology. As a kid, she took her toys apart so she could put them back together. “I ended up destroying the first computer my dad bought,” she says apologetically. “I pursued technology to learn enough to keep me out of trouble,” she adds with a smile.
Her finance background has come in handy. “I work with financial data and use my finance skills to do certain calculations,” she says.
Jules says that working for a young company that’s growing rapidly can be challenging. “Your systems and processes have to support the growth rate,” she explains. “This requires adaptability and teamwork.”
To help get her on track Jules has actively sought mentors. She agrees that behind every great athlete, there’s a great coach. “I think that also applies to the work world,” she says.
“I’m looking forward to a time when I’ll be able to manage new employees and help launch their careers,” she says.
Malick Diop: an ABC internship leads to ESPN
As media engineer for sports network ESPN (Bristol, CT), Malick Diop is responsible for the design and specification of ESPN’s content acquisition, origination, production and distribution systems. His work delivers ESPN’s sports content to fans’ TV screens.
Ironically, less than ten years ago Diop didn’t even speak English. He grew up in Senegal with French as his primary language. He came to the U.S. in 1999 to join his brother who was attending school here. “I wanted to learn a new language,” says Diop. He learned English by watching television and practicing the language at school.
Diop earned his 2004 BSEE at Polytechnic University (New York, NY). An internship with broadcast giant ABC, ESPN’s parent company, led to his current job. “ESPN is a leading company in technology, and there’s a lot you can learn here,” he says.
When he first joined ESPN Diop was providing real-time support during live broadcasts. He was promoted to his current position within a year.
Diop’s job is geared toward internal customer service, but it involves elements of project management as well. His group fulfills technical requests from the operation and programming end of show production. “With our help the show will go on…without any on-air glitches,” he promises.
He’s currently working on a project to build eight voice-over rooms for ESPN’s international networks and four integration control rooms. Diop is responsible for the engineering, design and implementation of the project. He works with the electronic systems support, production operations and transmission services departments.
As graduation approached, Diop saw himself in a job in the IT support industry, but his current career shows how a company that prides itself on its advanced use of technology can provide a multitude of opportunities, like Diop’s job in broadcast engineering, for someone who’s open to learning.
“My journey is moving along nicely,” he says, “and the work is very exciting.”
Frank Lewis finds Cisco fascinating
Frank Lewis became interested in technology in elementary school when a classmate’s father gave a presentation on what he did for a living. “I remember being intrigued by his work in technology,” he says.
That interest led Lewis to an engineering high school in Durham, NC where his passion for computers took hold. He earned his BSCS at North Carolina A&T State University (Greensboro, NC) in 2005.
Lewis took a semester off, then entered North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC) to pursue his MS in computer networking with a minor in business management. “I thought I’d be better equipped to take on challenges in the workplace with a masters,” he notes.
His entry into IT as an analyst at Cisco Systems (San Jose, CA) wasn’t a walk in the park. Intrigued by his skills at a career fair, a Cisco analyst signed Lewis up for “Cisco College Day” at the company’s Research Triangle Park, NC facility.
“Cisco is widely known for its rigorous interviewing processes,” he says. A group of candidates is invited to a Cisco site to participate in three one-hour interviews. At the end of the process, Lewis had a job at the North Carolina location.
Lewis’s work involves communicating business initiatives to the technical team and ensuring that business requirements are adequately fulfilled. He’s currently working on an initiative to expand globally and decentralize accounting.
He explains that creating a separate accounting “book” for each country will better organize the bookkeeping and provide more robust management reporting capabilities. His role is to create documentation for the developers so they can make the necessary changes within the database and reports. He’s also accountable for the system’s accuracy.
Lewis joined the team in the midst of this major project and had to get up to speed quickly. “I learned to ask the right questions up front, keep good notes and speak up when I don’t understand something,” he says.
Managing a global project means that Lewis sometimes works late to accommodate workers in other time zones. “It’s also challenging to develop a working relationship with someone 3,000 miles away,” he notes.
A cutting edge technology company, Cisco is the right fit for Lewis. “It’s always exciting to see the ‘gadgets’ our R&D team comes up with before they go to market,” he confides.
Sparkle White is in Nortel’s NGLP program
When she first entered North Carolina A&T (Greensboro, NC), Sparkle White majored in CS, but soon found she didn’t like the limitations of that major. She switched to electronic computer information technology (ECIT) and earned her BS in 2007.
White says that ECIT satisfies her interest in technology while opening other doors. “I can be a project manager or I can do programming.”
In high school White wanted to be a teacher like her mom, but her mom encouraged her to look into different careers. The IT field was beginning to boom and she enjoyed working with computer technology. “A Google search comparing job salaries helped me decide,” she says with a smile.
After graduation, White joined the New Graduate Leadership Program (NGLP) at Nortel (Research Triangle Park, NC). It’s a two-year rotation program that places new hires into four different jobs within the company.
To qualify for the NGLP a candidate must be a recent college grad with at least a 3.0 GPA. Participants choose each rotation from a variety of jobs. They also take classes for more specialized training and work on public speaking skills.
White is in her first rotation. As a project management analyst, she provides support to project managers for various Nortel accounts. Her job involves recovering lost revenue for the unbilled projects, and trying to determine why projects haven’t closed. “It’s a lot of tracking, a lot of data and a lot of support,” she notes.
By the time she’s completed the program White will be in a better position to choose her career path. “This is an opportunity to really learn what jobs are out there, something most people don’t get right out of college,” she says.
To facilitate the transition from college to full-time employment, NGLP participants are assigned a senior-level mentor. “I have someone to teach me the ropes and lead me in the right direction,” White notes.
“School gives you knowledge, but it doesn’t prepare you for the rules and regulations of a work environment,” she adds.
The road to IT isn’t always direct
Some IT professionals get into IT sideways. An interest gets sparked and they find a way to make the transition. BDPA president Denise Holland is an example.
She got her start in HR and moved to IT after serving as liaison between HR and IT. Today, as IT director for SAP at the passenger railroad Amtrak (Washington, DC), she’s responsible for overseeing the human capital management (HCM) mySAP production system.
Holland is currently completing her masters in IT. She holds a 1983 BA in business management, a 1984 AS in computer programming and technology and a 1981 AA in business and industrial management.
UBS’s Rebecca Kariuki left nursing for IT
“Mom isn’t always right,” says Rebecca Kariuki. At least that’s what she discovered when she pursued a career in medicine to please her mom and wound up hating it.
She completed her nursing program, but immediately began exploring a career more to her liking: IT. She checked out U.S. educational opportunities at the American Embassy in Kenya, her home country, and headed to Claflin University (Orangeburg, SC) with a scholarship.
Kariuki didn’t want to concentrate on programming, so she earned her 2006 bachelors in MIS. “MIS allows me to combine my interests in science and business,” she explains.
An internship with financial services firm UBS (Stamford, CT) led Kariuki to a position there after graduation. As technology analyst she works with development, network and database teams to provide technical support and solutions to the business.
A year into her job Kariuki worked on a six-month project in Sydney, Australia. She spearheaded the development of a Hong Kong disaster recovery infrastructure for Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol connections in the client-facing environment. “UBS’ equities business will not be interrupted by a data center power failure or even an earthquake in Tokyo,” she says proudly.
Kariuki thought a job in IT meant little interaction with the outside world, but has found it to be just the opposite. “There are five different nationalities represented by my six co-workers. I work daily with clients from every major financial city in the world. I thrive on my exposure to cutting-edge technology in a diverse, multi-cultural environment,” she says.
But it’s the UBS mentorship program that has been most meaningful to Kariuki. Her mentor is a woman in UBS sales who’s a mother of three. “The way she balances things perfectly makes me realize I can do this too,” she says.
Life in the U.S. has been an adjustment for Kariuki after her childhood in Kenya. As with others who grow up in another country, her image of America was formed by Hollywood. She soon realized that most people don’t fit the stereotype. “There are so many different cultures here, it’s incredible,” she notes.
Yet, when she started her job she felt like she fit right in. “I wasn’t an exception,” she says. “The learning curve was steep and expectations were high, but it was a level playing field.”
Ayesha Muhammad: IT at Walgreens
 Ayesha Muhammad got into IT as a helpdesk coordinator at Walgreens (Northbrook, IL).
After changing her major twice, she settled on psychology and earned her BA at the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2007. “I was afraid of becoming a professional student,” she says.
Muhammad had always been interested in Walgreens, even after she moved to Georgia to start grad school. She regularly scanned the company’s career page and got excited when she saw a posting for a helpdesk coordinator, an entry-level job.
She submitted her resume and landed the job. “It’s a great way to get my feet wet in IT without the education,” she says.
Muhammad fields calls from Walgreens stores and troubleshoots their technical issues. “We’re the first line of defense,” she notes. “If we can’t help them, we send a tech person to the site.”
Walgreens trained her on point-of-sale hardware, like cash registers and debit card machines. “We need to know all aspects of the equipment our stores are using,” she explains.
The job has whetted her appetite. “I want to gain more IT skills so I can go out into the stores,” she says.
But Muhammad’s ultimate goal is to merge her two passions: IT and psychology. She’s targeted human resources as a potential avenue and sees Walgreens as a means to that end. “If you make a convincing case, the company will consider your ideas, and even create a position that helps meet your career goal,” she says.
Muhammad has continued working towards her masters in psychology, but plans to pursue an IT degree next. “I’ll need the IT education to move up in the ranks,” she acknowledges.
D/C
Sue Marquette Poremba is an engineering and construction writer in State College, PA.
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