Mary

My Background

After graduating from Wellesley College with a bachelor’s degree in French and a minor in psychology, I entered the workforce as the office coordinator at a small business/technology consulting company. I then came to work at Northeastern University, and it was here that I learned about the Align program. While my original intention was to study counseling psychology, Align won me over!

I have been a staff member at Northeastern since 2015, and I started the Align program in 2021.

Future

I’ve loved my experience with the Align bridge courses! The faculty are engaging and supportive, and the course material is plentiful and challenging yet accessible with hard work. Furthermore, I love that the Align program embraces and celebrates the intersection of computer science with every other field imaginable, and that it emphasizes the positive impact that computer science can have on the world via this intersection. Rather than simply converting its students into computer programmers, the Align program equips its graduates to pursue their passions through the lens of computer science. Personally, I was already interested in mental health, and now I plan to pursue a career in the intersection of technology and mental health care.

It was easy for me to choose this program because I was already at Northeastern! Khoury College is a friendly and inclusive environment, and even when I was laughing at myself for even considering pursuing a master’s degree in computer science, with no background whatsoever in computer science, my contacts at Khoury College were telling me I would fit perfectly in the Align program. The fact that I was taken seriously as a prospective computer science student, given my nontraditional background, stood out to me.

I am very interested in the area of virtual mental health care. This field existed before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was somewhat niche, and now I think it has come into the spotlight. In my understanding, virtual mental health care offers tremendous opportunities for expanded accessibility and support, and only some of its potential is being realized. This untapped potential, and the opportunity for tangible impact, is a large part of why I want to work in this area.