Ariana ORTEGA

I think two things, and they kind of may be the same answer. First, my mom definitely role modeled how to be a really hard worker. She also really enjoyed public speaking, and I have very fond memories of being a kid when she would take me to her speaking engagements occasionally. I hated it at the time because I would have to shake hands with people, and you never want to do that when you're a kid, but it taught me a lot about how to conduct yourself professionally. The second thing is being a climber. There's an aspect of my personality where there's a point where your sense of adventure overcomes your fear. Climbers call it getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, and just kind of playing on that precipice and acknowledging, like, oh, this is really scary, but I trust myself, I know my skills, I have faith in the people around me, and we're gonna take a chance, essentially, and that's where really cool things can happen. I also believe what Rick Rubin talks about in The Creative Acts - that expertise is really just pattern recognition. At a certain point, when you look at something and you understand it quickly, even if it's new, you can rely on your experience and your knowledge and your intuition.

I'm gonna give a really funny answer - it's that Elle Woods quote of, like, what? Like, it's hard? I feel like sometimes, especially as a woman in tech, you just kind of have to check yourself and go, you know what, it's okay not to have answers, and it's okay to say, I don't understand something, I need you to explain it to me. Like, that's not a bad thing. And being able to say, yeah, I did it, and it was really hard, but, I mean, we all got through it, right? And then being able to have the skills to learn from those types of experiences. It's just one of those quotes that comes around in my head a lot of the times, where you only think in retrospect, like, oh, we actually did that.

The transfer student pipeline in the United States is really profoundly broken. There's a lot of really horrible statistics about average graduation rates for students, and the amount of credits that are lost between colleges. There are technological challenges around receiving and sending transcripts, in addition to the cost that's associated with it for a population of students that's already pretty cost-sensitive. I see the possibilities because I work in technology, and I think there's some technical solutions that are out there that I'm aware are being developed. But what we learned from COVID is that those sorts of shifts can really happen quickly, and for myriad reasons right now, they're not. I would really love to continue to have a hand in - I hate to use the word, but fixing - the transfer admissions process in the United States.

Just treat people like people. That's really hard, apparently, for some people. But if you're starting from a place of trust, that's the foundation, and there's really no other way to be a successful leader in my mind. I just imagine that people who approach leadership as a way to be in front is not something that I find myself agreeing with. What I enjoyed most about being a manager and coaching people through their careers was identifying what happened with me eventually - to say, like, you know, you're pretty good at this. Like, do you have an interest in this? Do you want to learn more? And eventually maybe sending someone an internal job description for a role that I thought they might be a good fit for, and working with them to ensure that they're a good fit for that type of role. That's just really gratifying to see people move up. Working for an organization that's mission-driven is definitely an important part of my life, and being able to contribute in that way is really important to me.