Getting Real With Engineering : Career progression from Intern to Manager to Executive

Internships provide students with the opportunity to take the skills obtained through college coursework and apply them to real-life work situations. Being able to demonstrate success in the workplace will undoubtedly give them an edge over a sea of competitors when it comes time to seek a job after graduating

But in some cases, finding a coveted internship is not easy. And after one land an internship that converts to an entry level engineering position, how does one navigate the organizational challenges and carve out a successful growth path?

In this interactive session with 3 dynamic women engineers representing distinct stages of a typical engineering career - from an individual contributor to a manager to an executive, we will address the following:

·         Landing an Internship: Do’s and Don'ts

·         How performance during internship impacts landing a permanent position

·         What to watch out for during early career stage in large companies? 

·         What do startups offer an engineer that big companies can't?

·         How to chart a path from an individual contributor to engineering manager to executive role?

Speaker Bios:

Surbhi Kaul

Surbhi Kaul is an engineering & business leader with immense strategy experience in both B2B and B2C companies. She has built & led product and engineering teams at technology icons like Google, Netflix, Cisco to name a few. She has launched many successful and Insightful products over the last decade many of which encompass AI and machine learning expertise. She led query disambiguation and speech recognition efforts on leading edge Google Home and Google Assistant enabled devices using Google Cloud ML models. 

In her current role, she leads Juniper’s Enterprise Datacenter business as Head of Product for Network Virtualization and SDN Software products.  

Surbhi holds a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from IIT Kanpur and Master's degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University.

She is extremely passionate about supporting the IIT community and is one of the key leaders of the IIT Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning forum, a Board Member for IIT Bay Area organization, and the former President of IIT-Kanpur West Coast alumni association. She has also Chaired and led the "Women in Product" San Francisco Bay Area organization. 

Sukrutha Bhadouria

Sukrutha is the CTO and co-founder of Girl Geek X, and a Senior Engineering Manager at Salesforce. Sukrutha graduated from USC with an M.S. in Electric Engineering. Sukrutha is involved in Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners because she wants to change the world for girls, one geek dinner at a time, and she is passionate about technology, gender diversity, and engineering leadership. Sukrutha was named in Business Insider’s list of “30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech“ in 2014 and “San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40” Tech Titans of 2016. In her spare time, Sukrutha trains for races – swimming, running, biking.

Shreya 

Shreya Malik is a software engineer at Humana Inc with 4+ years of professional experience. She completed her undergraduate degree in bioinformatics at the University of California, San Diego. Before entering a full time role, she successfully navigated 5 internships at companies of varying sizes, sectors and locations. Outside of her day job, she manages a successful career coaching business and social media platform, which can be found at www.codewithshreya.com. In her free time Shreya serves as an alumni mentor for her alma mater, a Yelp Elite reviewer, and an avid world traveler (pre-COVID, of course!).