Her Story
About Annika
Annika Singh is an engineering professional with nearly five years of experience, specializing in robotics and robotic safety. She earned her bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Washington, where she minored in entrepreneurship and graduated in 2025. She is currently pursuing a master's degree in computer science at Stanford University. Annika joined the Society of Women Engineers during her undergraduate studies and remains a member. While at the University of Washington, she conducted research on robots and the importance of safety and legibility in human-robot interactions. She also founded a company aimed at helping students secure housing for summer internships with companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing. In her current role at a small company, Annika focuses on market research, go-to-market strategies, customer conversations, and converting insights into scalable deliverables and testing infrastructure. She attributes her success to the values instilled by her parents, both engineers, emphasizing hard work, looking out for others, and being a good person. Annika advises young women in the field to take up space by asking questions and to increase their exposure to opportunities to improve their luck.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Annika
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute most of my success to my parents and how they raised me. They instilled values like being hardworking and always looking out for others. Both of my parents are engineers, so they taught me not only how to be a good engineer but also how to be a good person, which has been super helpful to where I am now.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
One thing you need to learn really well is to distill the message of whoever it is you're talking to, whether a customer or an employee. The quality of the interaction can be dictated by how good you are at distilling what exactly the person is saying or what they want. I've been trying to do that especially at work when talking to customers to get to the bottom of their problem.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Make sure that you know that you can take up space. Even if you have a question and you think it's stupid, you still need to ask it because without asking it, you remain where you are. Luck is very important, and getting lucky can make or break your career, but the people who get out there more and put themselves in positions to get more opportunities are inherently more lucky. When I got to Stanford I tried to get out into all the spaces, clubs, networking events, speaker series, recruiting, making new friends because there is a positive correlation between how exposed you are to the world and how lucky you get.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Robotics is super big right now with a lot of development happening across the field internationally. The field is going to expand pretty quickly which means a lot more jobs. Nothing is really set in stone for robotics yet so if somebody wanted to get involved they could probably get involved as any part of it, whether hardware, cybersecurity, or more on the brain side with policies and neural networks. The ideas are endless.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I try to prioritize excellence, even past just grades, whether delivering for a customer or at work, making sure the bar is really high quality. Relationship-building and being trustworthy with a high bar so customers understand they can get exactly what they need from you. From an early age I've always had a really high importance of trying to meet new people, meet people who are doing what I want to do and learn from them, and establishing trustworthiness and familiarity has been very important to my career.
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