Emma Betts Award

If you told me 3 years ago that I’d be living in New York City and working at Facebook, I would have laughed in your face. My journey to solutions engineering was… a journey.

Up until the summer that I graduated from St Aidan’s, I was convinced I would be a fashion designer. I had spent most of my life preparing to study fine arts at uni.

At the final stage, I was rejected. I didn’t have a backup plan. I was one of those nightmare students in high school. Despite this, I had two teachers who I truly felt believed in me.

The first was my art teacher, Gaye Brown. Not only could she see that I had potential, but she actively celebrated all of my accomplishments.

The second was a maths teacher that I had in grade 10. She was the only person who ever made me feel like I was “worthy” of being in STEM classes and worth her time.

These women had such a powerful impact on my life and I wanted to follow in their footsteps. I decided to start my undergrad in mathematics.

I loved logic and number theory and started to realise that if I was going to follow this path, I’d end up desperately wanting to go into research.  I took an intro to computer science course and immediately fell in love. I applied to the first job I saw on the uni careers page, which was an ambiguous job posting for a role at Uber.

I started in data engineering for Uber Eats in New York and worked my way into the time prediction team.

For exactly 12 months I had my dream job.

Uber laid off thousands of employees during the pandemic… and I was one of them. This was especially devastating for me because I have a severe autoimmune disease that requires tens of thousands of dollars worth of medication a month. I had no confidence left & wasn’t even sure if I could continue living in the US.

My life completely changed when Vishal Sankhla from Facebook, offered me a role as a Solutions Engineer. It’s a perfect combination of all of those roles that I’d had and loved before.

There were so many moments that I thought I’d never live out my dream.

I refused to take no for an answer then, and I never will in the future.