By Shandana Mufti

After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in environmental engineering followed by several years working in the field, Isabel Su (MSCS ’16) needed a new challenge. She’d already tried her hand at programming, first through online tutorials, then through basic classes taken at a community college. The next step was logical – find a program that would allow her to earn computer science credentials.

The ALIGN program was a perfect fit. The graduate-level program is designed to prepare individuals for careers in STEM, even if their undergraduate degree was earned in a different area of study. Isabel completed her undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University in China, where she studied environmental science and engineering. She earned her masters in environmental engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Isabel joined CCIS in 2014 and will graduate in December with co-ops at Shutterstock, Amazon and Facebook under her belt.

“We have a lot of info sessions from tech companies and a lot of opportunities for internships or full-time jobs,” Isabel says. “Our instructors are from the industry and I’ve found it really easy to talk with them. They always talk about the real questions and problems they have in daily work.”

Her favorite professor, Zhifeng Sun, also works full-time at Google, and is eager to offer his students connections at Google. His algorithms course is one of Isabel’s favorites, thanks mostly to Sun’s teaching methods. “He encourages people to go up front to write their solutions on the board. This could be intimidating but it is the real interviewing process which is you need to speak out of what you’re thinking and be able to explain clearly to people,” she says. “Somehow, I can just concentrate – his class is three hours, but sometimes I feel like three hours went by so fast.”

Isabel also asked Sun to run mock interviews with her, and it paid off. Her first co-op was at Shutterstock, where she worked as a management information systems intern. Then she joined Amazon as a software engineering intern, where she got familiar with working a new language. Right now, she’s at Facebook, working as a software engineering intern on the Save for Later feature. There, she’s learning about data collection and machine learning, as the team runs A/B testing to see which of two designs receives better feedback from users.

Two years of classes – and professors willing to go the extra mile – have positioned Isabel to succeed in the computer science field. “I was really glad to see that they accept students from all kinds of backgrounds,” Isabel says of ALIGN. “That’s why I decided to join Northeastern.”