Millisent Fury Hopkins

I'm very hard-headed, and I know what I want. I attribute my success to finding the most diplomatic way to express that and to help move things forward, whether it's something personally for me or for an affinity group that I'm advocating for. I think that's my strongest quality - being determined and knowing what I want, while also being able to communicate that effectively to help achieve goals.

The best career advice I ever received came from my maternal grandmother who raised me. She told me to just keep learning - that if you show interest, and you want to advance, and you want to move forward, you want to move up, just keep learning. There's always somebody that's going to be available to teach you if you just ask. It wasn't from somebody along my career path, but from my grandmother, and that advice has stayed with me throughout my professional journey.

Don't be afraid to get it wrong. I actually started out as computer science major, and I felt very hard-headed that I was going to be a programmer. But my professor, who was also my advisor at the time, told me 'you don't like this. You struggle to get here on time, you don't really seem to grasp all of the concepts, you struggle with the work, you don't seem to enjoy this - you don't have to do this. You should switch to management information systems.' And she was absolutely right. So my advice is: don't feel like you have to do something in order to prove somebody else wrong, or to be the first woman, or to increase the numbers. You're going to find a lot more joy in doing what you feel is right, and what you're comfortable with, and what you feel good at.

I would say it's the numbers - there's a consistent struggle for equality, and not so that everybody has the same level playing field. There's been a change more recently, probably in the last 10 years or so, where there's not as much of a push or allyship in order to elevate all voices in the room, including women in tech and women in the sciences, in order to make it a level playing field and to make it equal for everybody, which just disadvantages women. So I feel like that's something that's a great opportunity for a lot of companies in order to uplift and elevate the strength of those voices in their companies.

I would say diligence and never giving up are the most important values to me in both my work and personal life. These values guide how I approach challenges and opportunities, and they reflect my determination to keep pushing forward no matter what obstacles I face.