Weird & Wonderful Mainframe Journeys #1

Spotlight 1 - Keelia Estrada Moeller

There are many skills that are important in a mainframe career and could directly contribute to your successes and/or growth.

Some of these are less obvious than others, and only with a breadth of experiences can we truly appreciate the importance of certain transferable skills.

Likewise there is a vast amount of advice from across different industries that people deem pertinent in mainframe-specific roles.

To that end Niall Ashley and Elitsa Popova have taken the time to interview a variety of different mainframers, learning all about these malleable skills and being informed about their most relevant advice.

That has been fashioned into this series of articles, which WAVEZ is publishing!

Strong in Body; Strong in Mind

Keelia Estrada Moeller is a Marketing Content Specialist for Broadcom

Many people would attest that this is an impressive role already, yet this remarkable woman also participates in the sport of Strongman.

So how did it come to pass, that a marketing content specialist also became a weightlifting competitor?

Winding back the clock to 2017, Keelia was first exposed to the mainframe during her college course -? Parallel to her studies, she had a paid internship with a marketing agency, spending 30 hours each week writing about the mainframe in a digestible format.

During this time, she was also lucky enough to meet the women who would become her first mentors: Evelyn Hoover and Mari Bray.

As a mentee, Keelia learned a lot about behaviours and interpersonal dynamics, while building admiration to two strong female icons who proved it was possible to break the glass ceiling.?

Keelia, Mari, and Evelyn worked with others across the mainframe ecosystem to help pioneer the community group “Making our strong community stronger”, focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

This relationship was so influential that Keelia began to see Evelyn as a true inspiration, and would think to herself? “Evelyn is the sort of person that I want to be like”.

After graduating with a Bachelor's Degree in English at the University of Minnesota, Keelia soon became the managing editor of "IBM Systems magazine, Mainframe Edition" while pursuing a Masters Degree at University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

Shortly thereafter came a chance meeting with Greg Lotko, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Broadcom's Mainframe Software Division.

Understandably, this was quite a nerve-wracking moment for Keelia, but she remembers just how patient and approachable Greg was, rousing her to speak without fear of judgement.

With her career showing the momentum of a runaway freight train, Keelia eventually became Senior Editor for TechChannel at only 25 years old. By this time, she had also entered an English PhD program at the University of Minnesota.

Leaving TechChannel in 2023 to join her current employer Broadcom, Keelia was equipped with a myriad of lessons that Evelyn and Mari had imparted upon her.

Entering this new role in Broadcom’s content marketing team, Keelia was introduced with another inspiring figure in the shape of her first boss:? Amanda Gerber encouraged her to work hard and make her voice heard, leading to innumerable successes in this new role.?

It was during this time Keelia finally decided her career goals were within the mainframe ecosystem, and not the world of English academia. Although a difficult decision, she chose to withdraw from the English PhD program after completing another Master’s Degree instead, fully dedicating herself to her mainframe career where her passions truly were.

Keelia often finds herself reflecting on the fact that you have to put yourself out there, and apply all that you can, while remaining unafraid of failure if you want to achieve anything worth doing.

This message of “your fears aren’t going to overrule your talent” has become a way of life for Keelia, as she maintained this mentality when she began as a strongman competitor in 2020, joining the sport because of her motivator, personal trainer and brother (all the same person).

A few years into this hobby, she has taken to teaching new joiners and organising "Strongwoman Saturday" sessions to help foster community and learning between seasoned and new female athletes in the sport.

When asked about her best piece of advice was for our readers, Keelia stated the following:

"The limitations in front of you are often self-inflicted"

"The only way to get better at something is to fail and learn"