Laila Jackson

I attribute my success to being personable and intentional about building genuine relationships. NSBE has also played a major role in shaping my journey by providing mentorship, leadership opportunities, and a strong support network. Staying open to opportunities and consistently showing up in spaces where I can grow has helped me advance both personally and professionally.

The best career advice I've ever received is to be personable to people and let your personality show everywhere. Being personable and making genuine connections has gotten me super far and given me the network that I have. I've been able to connect with so many of my former coworkers, whether they were interns with me or in leadership positions. One thing that has really helped me is leveraging my personal interests, like following college sports, basketball, and football heavily. Being able to use that as a way to connect with others in conversations has truly made me stand out and helped people remember me. We stay in contact and are able to take trips, have connections, and be friends outside of the work that we do. The key is that when you're personable, people advocate for you in rooms that you're not in, and opportunities flow from that. I've literally been asked on campus to be on panels because somebody recommended me. It's super cool to not have to do it all alone and know that you've made an impact on people, and that they do think about you in rooms that you're not in.

I would tell young women entering my industry that you can't do it alone - please utilize your community. Find those that are doing what you want to do, find those that identify with you, whether it's finding another young woman, finding another woman of your identity, your ethnicity, or whatnot, or whether it's someone that's literally doing the exact role that you want to do. Just being able to see where you want to go, I think that helps so much. I was lucky when I came into college - my NSBE chapter had only 3 freshmen, and everybody else was upperclassmen. When we came in, we literally only had all these people with all this wisdom to talk to. That really was a good foundation for me in college, because I've been being poured into and carrying that advice and learning from so many people with so much experience, truly, since I stepped on campus.

I would say, especially with the development of AI, the biggest challenge is being able to make sure that processes and systems being made in large corporations and businesses are repeatable, meaning that after the person who created it leaves, is it something that we can recreate? Is it something that's sustainable? Making a system is nothing if it's not sustainable, if it can't carry on from year to year. A system can be anything from the process you follow for features to how you identify who you want to feature. The challenge is making sure that someone's not using a super-duper hard-coded thing to make something happen, and then the next person comes in who can't even code and can't repeat that. In my roles, I manage the engineers and lead them as a project leader or project manager, so I focus on making sure that the team understands that's the goal - figuring out not only from an engineering perspective how we can utilize everyone most efficiently, but also from a business side, does everyone need to be on this project? It's about making things that have been created more efficient for future sustainability.

The values most important to me are definitely family and representation. I want to make sure that I'm not only representing my family in a strong manner, but also being an example to my younger sister, since I'm an older sister. I have a strong passion for making sure that our underrepresented students see an example of what they can be. Growing up, I didn't necessarily know that engineering was the path I was going to take, so being able to expose students who don't know that engineering is something they can do, who don't know that STEM is something that they can do, and being that positive influence and example for them is truly what I hold near and dear to my heart. I do a lot of K-12 outreach and mentoring, whether it's going to the schools or having people send their younger siblings to me to help them get started with college. I used to work for our career center for the College of Engineering, so just being able to be that resource for people and that helping hand in everything that I do is really important. I would also say transparency is important because I tell students the reality of engineering. I'll tell the girls all the time, we need more girls in engineering. I tell our underrepresented students, we need more underrepresented students in engineering. Just being transparent with them and being honest about the experience, about the time commitment and everything.