Kristine Umeh

Kristine

My Background

I grew up in Nigeria and came to the US for my undergrad at Northeastern University (Doubly Husky), where I majored in chemical engineering with minors in Chinese and Music Performance.

After three co-ops in various biotech and pharmaceutical industries and being faced with graduating during the COVID-19 pandemic, I concluded that I did not want to work solely as a Chemical Engineer, and I started to investigate ways to transition out of that.

I discovered the Align program sometime in my 4th year but didn’t think about it as a path for me till I had to decide on a life path after graduating.

Since I was already a Northeastern student and had confidence in Northeastern’s educational standards as well as the co-op program, I decided it would be best for me to pursue this new and exciting field, packed with innovation.
I did not have any prior coding experience whatsoever, but I knew that Northeastern would help me prepare adequately to be a viable candidate for any tech jobs.

Bridge

I enjoyed the bridge program; it was very necessary. Since I did not have any coding experience, I was initially very nervous. It was a challenging feat throughout, but the professors, the TAs, and the advisors were rooting for us to do well. They were all very helpful and although the learning was remote when I took my bridge courses, and I was in a time zone that made my class schedule 3 am – 6 pm, it didn’t deter me from feeling like I would be successful in the program. I felt supported.

My Future

During my program, I had the opportunity to work at Handshake as a Backend Engineer, migrating from a monolithic app to microservices and at Lululemon as a Data Analyst working on dashboards, and improving efficiency in logs and metrics. I returned to Lululemon remotely even before graduation as a Data Engineering Contractor for 6 months working to maintain the integrity of their data pipelines.

I am passionate about financial services and entertainment; I want to work on the interface of hardware and software, recommendation systems or payment platforms, all to create a better user experience.

I also aspire to bridge the technological gap in my home country, Nigeria. Start a company that provides a technological advantage to Nigerian girls, equipping them with tools to make their dreams a reality.

I am passionate about empowering women and what better way to do that than to teach them hands-on skills from a young age so that they have a technological edge in life.