Maria Renteria

I attribute my success to the people in my circle, my closest friends and my partner of six years. They've been an incredible support system, always helping me through my dark times and setbacks, especially when I'm not being very kind to myself. They're always there to support me and encourage me, and they help give me that outside perspective of how I'm doing, even though I might not see myself in the kindest light. They're definitely the reason why I keep going.

The best career advice I ever received was to keep going forward, and that was something instilled by my mom growing up. It's really shaped who I am now. I have a lot of perseverance and grit, and I don't let any opportunity go to waste. I keep going forward, and once I achieve something, I look for what's next, what's the next thing that I can do. I've always been like that. Even when I have points where I find failure, I have a very hard time not getting myself back up. I always stand back up and keep going, even when I have those points of failure.

I would say that rarely we can make the wrong decision. Sometimes, when there are people like me that tend to overthink and have decision paralysis, we overthink about what would be the right decision or if the decision we're making is a bad one. I would say to just go for it, just take the decision, because rarely we make a bad decision when it comes to our career, especially for people that are in a minority like me. We tend to sometimes have this imposter syndrome in ourselves, and I would say to them to just have more confidence in their decisions and just go for it, to fill up that space in that room, because they deserve to be in there.

I would have to say the biggest challenge probably right now is finding out how to stand out. There's a big sea of lots of applicants right now in the computer science field. In the social media world, there seems to be a shortage of opportunities in computer science. But I believe that with grit and perseverance, there are ways to stand out for those opportunities.

I would say integrity is a core principle of mine, always maintaining true to myself and to others, because the only person that you're lying to is yourself if you're not being honest. The other core values that I have would be growth. I love constantly growing myself and improving myself, and with that, it comes with a lot of empathy and patience. I have definitely grown my patience over the years, just with the setbacks that I've had. Slowly but surely, I'm becoming more and more of a patient person, and I like to have a lot of fun with that, just seeing how I've grown and progressed over the years.