Jacqueline Moreno

After college, I got a job as an Assistant Legislative Deputy to an elected L.A. County official. Her name is Gloria Molina, and the elected position she held was supervisor on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. The five people on the board are kind of like mayors to the places in the county that don’t have a mayor of their own to legislate for them. Supervisor Molina was the first Latina to ever get elected to this powerful board. While working for her, I did a lot of communications writing—press releases and speeches about her legislation, so that the communities in her district could learn about it and respond. But my most exciting task was writing for her website. Now I’m an engineering intern in the data science department at a business named Reputation.

I went to Wellesley College, and I studied Comparative Literature. At that time, all I wanted to do was read the fiction that inspired me, and write my analysis of the these stories and what they mean. I liked that mostly because I could think about their meaning as it relates to my own personal life. I had a lot of trouble securing the kinds of jobs where I could just analyze other people’s writing. Unlike some women from my school, I didn’t get a call back from publishing companies or want to be a creative writer—I just wanted to do literary analysis. I compared myself to others a lot, but then I decided I would stop that, and by the time I transitioned into studying computer science, I decided I’d ask those same people I was comparing myself to for help instead.

I had a friend who was a software engineer, so he helped me a lot with my first coding class. Finally, I got the courage to apply to a post-baccalaureate program in computer science at Mills College. I liked the idea of a post-baccalaureate program. Instead of being a master’s program where you needed to walk into it knowledgeable about the subject, it was OK that I was still new at it. I also liked this program because if I turned out to be really good at it, I could apply for the school’s master’s degree program, and it’d be likely that they’d accept me if my grades were good enough in the first program. Another great thing about a post-bacc program is that I could learn only the subject I want to learn because post-baccs are for people who already have their bachelor’s degrees. I didn’t have to take any general education courses in other subjects, just the computer science classes I wanted to try. All of this told me that I had nothing to lose. I’m the kind of person who loves to live in new places, so starting a new life in another new city—Oakland instead of Los Angeles, or Boston where I had come from and studied—was more exciting than scary to me. That excitement for something new and unknown helped me ignore doubt holding me back at first.

The most important person I was proving my seriousness to was myself. I felt like besides college, I really did tend to take on hobbies or aspirations without seeing them through or fully committing to them. Even though I could probably secure a job as a software engineer without finishing school, I feel like finishing school is my way of showing myself that I can finish what I started. When I feel discouraged, I tell myself to think more about what I could do if I succeed, rather than what I couldn’t do if I fail. I think that’s the definition of a dream for me—when you want the benefits of success so much that you can ignore your own self-doubt long enough to just get it done.

It also helped me to break up what I would have to do to succeed. I told myself, don’t worry about the stress of getting a software engineer position just yet. First, just worry about finishing school. I can worry about the rest later. Because could you imagine how hard life would be if we worried about everything about the future, all at once?

In my old job, writing for Supervisor Molina’s website involved more than just writing and editing—it involved the design of what the page looked like, the monitoring of how well the website was working for the users reading from it, and the teamwork involved in communicating my bosses’ vision to the website team from an outside county office. I started learning about how introductory programming languages like HTML are related to the content of the writing we were posting online, and thinking about how to set myself apart from the other people on staff. Everyone seemed to have either many years of policy experience, or a law degree helping them to make a positive impact on the communities we served. I felt like if I pursued the same things they did when they were my age, it might not be enough, because they were already taking care of those elements of our work at a senior level. Then I noticed how I was the most tech-savvy person in the office. That was the part of our work where I felt I made the most impact, so I took my first online class to learn how to code in Java. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to learn, even though for others I’ve talked to, it was easy enough for them. I realized, though, that there was a great demand for Latinas like myself to enter jobs in computer science—only something like 2 percent of us are in there. So I felt like instead of being a number, I’d have a unique experience to contribute to the teams I might work with in this new field.