Humans of Engineering - Mitali's Story

This article was originally published as part of an internal series called Humans of?Engineering,?a collection of stories shared by?our employees?to encourage, inspire, and connect with each other as around the world, companies transitioned to work from home.?The series was created by our WIT team based on?the popular?Humans of New York ?blog.?

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I was never meant to be an engineer.?

I grew up in an immigrant household; my parents came to the US for graduate school and like many, stayed back to pursue their dreams. Today, my dad is a business executive and my mom is a pharmacist. Part of growing in their careers though meant I moved around a ton- Orange County, Erie (Pennsylvania), Boston, Mumbai (India) - you name it, I’ve done it all.

As a kid, I loved math and science, but I for sure, wasn’t coding at 10 years of age. I honestly ended up in Computer Science (CS) by chance. I needed to take an elective in high school and I “eenie meenie miney mo’ed” my way into my first CS class. Initially, I actually hated it -- “what are all these 1s and 0s i.e., microprocessor’s instruction set? What are compilers?”. But then, a couple months in, we started programming in Java, and that’s when things started to click. How cool was it to go from typing a couple lines of code to actually seeing something actually pop up! It was wonderful to see my work in action.

Pursuing CS in college seemed like a natural next step after 4 years of CS in high school. My time at University of Washington (UW) was an absolute blast - I took CS classes I loved, did research with people I looked up to (I even first-authored a research paper!) and met some of my closest friends. But above all - in those 4 years, I learned what computer science and software engineering actually meant and the level of impact I could have. Internships like those at Uber, Stripe and LinkedIn taught me what the day to day of a software engineer is like, what type of teams I liked and how I could be my happiest self building products.

Post college, I was pumped to come back to LinkedIn full-time, particularly LinkedIn Learning, because it was the perfect blend of engineering maturity with a nascent product. Over the last 4 years at LinkedIn, I’ve built so many cool products and driven many engineering initiatives - from building the foundations of LinkedIn Learning Hub, then improving the resilience of our platforms through Project Titanium, leaning in on Learning’s career outcomes strategy, and now, rebuilding our mobile payments stack within LinkedIn Business Platform; in many ways, I feel like I’ve spent years here, but it still feels like we’re just getting started.

Recently, I’ve taken on a new role to co-lead WIT (Women In Technology) Next Gen, something that I’m really excited about. My first WIT experience was way back at UW when I joined the UW Society of Women Engineers (SWE). While I might have initially joined for the free pizza (lol!), I stayed on once I realized how isolating being a woman in tech can be sometimes. One of my earliest memories of subconscious bias was late one night my freshman year of college, when I was studying for my physics final. It was one of my last prerequisites to apply to CS and I wanted to do well. One of my classmates came up to me and said, “Why are you studying so hard? You will easily get into the CS program as you are a woman”. I remember being extremely startled; I didn’t say much and thought to myself, “Is being a woman the only factor that will help me get into the program? Does all the effort, grades and extracurriculars that I’ve done not matter?” It’s at that point, WIT became a personal journey for me. As a WIT Next Gen leader, I hope to bring women together to share their experiences, to inspire each other and to build a strong knit community.

4 years in, I couldn't be more excited about engineering and the WIT platform at large. It means so much to me to have the opportunity to grow at LinkedIn and be able to give back to a community that has given me so much.?

While I might not have been meant to be an engineer, I am so grateful to be one.

--Mitali Palekar , Staff Software Engineer [as told to?Chinmayee Vaidya ]

Want to see more posts like this? Check out past Humans of Engineering stories HERE