Vicky grew up in a small town in New Hampshire and now works as a Product Manager for Adobe at their striking new building in Utah County. She’s also an aerospace engineer by training.
When she started studying engineering, she didn’t have any idea that jobs like the one at Adobe were options. It was the experiences that came along the educational journey that led her there.
“You can’t open doors that you don’t know exist,” Vicky says. Early on in her life, Vicky moved from her small town schools to a high school with international students and connections and became aware of a world beyond. Her experiences there contributed to a desire to learn more, and she continued to “say yes” to opportunities that she came across.
One of those was an internship that exposed her to new careers that she hadn’t considered. Another was the opportunity to participate in a leadership development program, which required her to branch out from the aerospace curriculum to take classes in product design and user experience. Those classes were a big turning point for Vicky.
One day after listening to a guest lecturer from Adobe during that class, she joined them for dinner and was intrigued by what she heard about product management. When the guest lecturer tried to recruit her colleagues, she liked what she heard and saw ways that her skills could be applied to the job. Soon, she too was headed to Utah.
All of these experiences came from being in educational environments and pursuing a variety of opportunities to learn. Some of the things Vicky has learned along the way are that:
- Education opens doors and expands your experience.
- It makes you aware of the doors you didn’t know about.
The people you meet in your educational experiences will open new doors to you
It was the people she met through the educational experiences that put her in a place to hear about what skills they need at Adobe. The skills she had developed in both her classes and university extracurricular involvement also prepared her to fill the need at Adobe when the opportunity came up.
Education opens door exponentially
For Vicky, once the doors started opening, she found there were more and more. Without the experiences at her international high school, while training as an engineer, and then teaching undergraduate college courses, Vicky would not have found the position she enjoys so much now. Education is in many ways a journey, and new ideas and opportunities are discovered along the way.
Vicky has grown accustomed to being one of the few females in a mostly male environment, but it hasn’t fazed her much. In fact, the only time she really thinks about it is when someone else points it out to her. “The important question is what you as an individual can contribute to your community,” she says. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female. Prepare yourself to be a contributor and doors will open.”
