Antara Roy

My career journey has been anything but linear, and I'm proud of every step. I started as a preschool teaching assistant in Ohio, but had to leave after four months due to health reasons. That experience, particularly the way the HR team made me feel so comfortable and welcomed, inspired me to pursue HR as a career. I decided to go back to school and enrolled in an MBA program with a focus on Human Resource Management at Wright State University. While completing my master's, I worked as an intern at Mission Addiction, a nonprofit that helps people recovering from addiction, where I got hands-on experience with recruiting, job descriptions, and database management. During this time, my family had to move cross-country from Ohio to Phoenix for my husband's job, and I had a young son who was just a few years old. Balancing my master's degree, part-time work, and moving across the country with a small child was incredibly challenging. There were many times I wanted to quit, but I kept pushing through because I didn't want all my hard work to go to waste. I graduated in 2020 and landed my first full-time HR role in Arizona as an HR Compliance and Training Specialist with Safe Streets, a telecommunications company. From there, I moved into talent acquisition and recruiting, spending two years at MUFG Union Bank, followed by a Senior People Operations Analyst role at Opendoor, where I learned the back end of HR and gained deep expertise in Workday. Around this time, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, an autoimmune disorder, and was laid off from Opendoor right before I needed bowel resection surgery. Looking back, I realize it all happened for the right reason at the right time, because the layoff gave me the time I needed to recover. A month into my recovery, I joined Solidime, a semiconductor startup that spun off from Intel in 2021, where I've been for about two and a half years as an HR Analyst in the HRIS and People Analytics team. Workday is my jam, and I've completed multiple certifications in Workday reporting, HCM, and advanced courses. My goal is to continue growing as a Workday expert and transition into technical project management. I'm currently working on learning Power BI and project management to support that goal.