Her Story
About Melissa
I graduated college in 2013, but I actually started my career even earlier with my first internship as a credit analyst back in 2010 at an RV Bank in Oklahoma. I was in banking for about 10 years before I made the transition to nonprofits. The switch happened because I started having kids and needed to balance my life, but I was also pushed by where I was in life. I felt like I needed to do something where I'm definitely touching people's lives. Now I work full-time at Step Up, a nonprofit where we give scholarships to kids in Florida, which is something I wake up every day thinking about because it's for a good cause. I also work part-time at Pan Africa Academy, a Christian nonprofit where we help doctors in Africa become surgeons and they study for free. This is very meaningful to me because it's giving back to Africa since I came to the U.S. in 2009 for school. My main area of expertise today is finance and data analysis. I love managing finance with data, creating dashboards and doing daily reporting and analysis where I get data from different software and make sense of it by telling a story based on the data that is there.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Melissa
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to integrity, hard work, transparency, and communication. Most of the time, with the people I work with, one thing I always hear is I work hard. I don't just sit here and sit and work until whatever it says I'm gonna get done, I'll get it done. And also that transparency and communication with my managers and stakeholders has been key to my success.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I've ever received is don't quit. It's very basic, but very accurate. It doesn't matter how hard life becomes at work, at home, wherever. Wake up, show up. Show up even when you don't know what you're about to do, just show up.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say be bold. Take it one day at a time and follow your dreams. Follow your dreams. I feel nowadays I've seen people doing what everyone is doing. It's good when they say come, we train you, but I strongly believe that we all have a talent. I can be doing finance, but there's a talent inside me. There's someone else, we have the same, went to the same school, but there's something that's gonna differentiate that person and me because of me upbringing, uplifting my talents.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I would say the biggest challenges are being a woman itself in a room where you can be sitting and be in the meeting, but just because you're a woman, your feedback would be received differently than a man. It's a man's field. Another thing is being a woman of color. I start talking, and it doesn't matter, I know I understand what I mean, but because of being a Black woman and also coming from Rwanda, the first question is like, oh, where are you from? And when I came across so many times when you tell the person, oh, from Rwanda, where is Rwanda? East Africa. So there is a label that that person will put on you. There's something that they feel like there's an opportunity that you're not going to get because of who you are. They have another way of seeing you, like you've been limited.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The values most important to me are transparency and integrity. Transparency is number one. When things are transparent, of course you don't get it every day, but it makes such a difference. And integrity means if you say you're gonna do something, do something. Yeah, sometimes it's not gonna work, but at least communicate.
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