20 years after graduating from UC Berkeley: career advice for today’s college students landing first jobs

With the economic and political future unclear, it’s no surprise that university students feel anxious about their job prospects. I shared my own nonlinear career journey — spanning two decades — a long list of tech, business, and entrepreneurship jobs, to demonstrate how your side projects and startup jobs can contribute to a successful long-term career.

Key takeaways: Stay curious, be visible, and share your journey! Whether through LinkedIn posts, collaborations, or posting about what you’re learning, your willingness to be visible unlocks unexpected opportunities.

Summary of my 20-year career journey since graduating UC Berkeley with English & Social Welfare majors — I talked about being less academically-oriented than my peers, and excitedly gaining plenty of work experience on the college campus, from web design to marketing, across 2 campus organizations (tech & entertainment). After graduating, I took a summer internship in Taiwan (Taiwan Tech Trek) and a couple ill-fitting (short-stint) jobs later, I started what I consider my real first job after college at a venture-funded startup in engineering.

From humanities college graduate to tech worker: I landed a job at a venture-funded startup in Palo Alto in the engineering team. Early-stage startups can also be great entry points into tech for folks with “non-traditional” degrees. This means usually Series A or Series B venture-funded startups (pro-tip: this Axios newsletter lists venture capital deals).

More important than the degree you earn (or begin, as in the many cases of people who don’t complete college) is the work experience(s) and projects you accumulate. Employers and collaborators are looking for what you can do: the problems you’ve solved, the things you’ve built, the ideas you’ve explored — through internships, side projects, and volunteer gigs.

Throughout my career, I balanced day jobs with side projects — and those passion projects eventually became full-time endeavors with supercharged impact. I wrote about women entrepreneurs for Women 2.0 in my spare time for years and hosted networking mixers at my house. Since not everyone wants to be a founder, I started Girl Geek Dinners to spotlight women working in tech jobs I hadn’t even heard of yet — by partnering with companies to host large networking events across the Bay Area. It was fun, community-driven, and full of discovery and inspiration!

The bonus? When I got laid off, I didn’t panic — I already had something I loved building that I would be able to take to the next level (full-time).

While today’s circumstances are unique, my lessons shared highlight job experimentation, online visibility, and career / job pivots as more relevant than ever! Sharing my battery of tech jobs (and how I got them) hopefully helps people navigate unpredictable times and keeps them open to new possibilities — and offering encouragement and tools for charting your own path forward below for career advice, global studies, and a long list of jobs women in working in tech who graduated with humanities, legal and architecture majors from UC Berkeley.

5 Helpful Talks (Videos) About Getting Started In Your Tech Career:

• Certifications — Yay or Nay? Sheila Vida — Principal Customer Solutions Engineer at Cisco — discusses certifications you get to apply to your role, or side projects, so the value “does not stop” after you pass the exam. She believes certifications introduce industry jargon to those breaking in to an industry.
• How To Sell Yourself: Advice From a Top Salesperson on Standing Out in a Crowd Maria Kitaigora — Senior Enterprise Account Manager at Amazon Web Services — shares tech sales techniques to get your dream job in a technical field. She covers positioning, strategy, technology, and more key levers for influencing and showcasing your relevant outcomes.
• Tips On Building Your LinkedIn Brand Lynne Williams — Executive Director at Career News Today — demonstrates where in your LinkedIn profile to effectively incorporate keywords, how to clearly brand yourself to be memorable, how to evaluate your headline (and add your unique selling point), and free tools and resources for jobseekers.
• Realistic Tips for Getting Started in Cybersecurity Betta Lyon-Delsordo — Ethical Hacker at OnDefend — discusses how to build experience without a job: “Entry-level these days means 2–5 years of the following — teaching cyber awareness to kids and seniors, competing in CTF competitions, doing Bug Bounties, posting about research projects, attending meetups and conferences, getting degrees or certifications, and working IT helpdesk or TA jobs.”
• Making Pivots In Your Career Dr. Julie Huang — Staff Scientist at Alector — shares her story of cultivating relationships, stepping outside of her comfort zone, and a whole lot of resistance and persistence led to her fulfilling career.

Incredible jobs in tech you may not have envisioned — and the women who graduated from non-technical majors at UC Berkeley now employed at companies including Apple, HTC, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Sephora, WhatsApp, Yelp:

• Product Managers: Claire Lee — Product Manager at Sephora — was a UC Berkeley Political Economics and Product Designer major, and Sabine (Alam) Staub — Product Manager at Pinterest — was a UC Berkeley English and Economics major!
• UX Designers / Product Designers: Samihah Azim — Staff Product Designer at WhatsApp — was a UC Berkeley Political Science and Mass Communications major (check out her incredible portfolio of work!), and Yue F. — UX Designer at HTC — was a UC Berkeley design school graduate.
• Software Engineers: Camille Teicheira — Staff Software Engineer at Sofar Ocean — was a UC Berkeley Anthropology major, Esther Nam — Senior ML Engineer — was a UC Berkeley Psychology and French major, and Julie Truong — Software Engineer at Yelp — as a UC Berkeley Integrative Biology major!
• Designers / Marketers: Jessica Choi — Visual Merchandising at Apple — was a UC Berkeley Architecture major, Saba Moeel — Visual Designer at Oaklandish— earned her UI/UX certification from UC Berkeley, and Tamar Grigoryan — Product Marketing Manager at Evodyne Robotics — earned her certification in Digital Marketing from UC Berkeley Extension.
• Therapist: Eve Peters — Psychotherapist at Grateful Heart Holistic Therapy Center — was a UC Berkeley School of Law graduate before becoming a therapist! We know nurses, doctors, and lawyers, but what about all the valuable behavioral health and mental health employees who work on helping people create balance in their busy lives
• Program Managers / Project Managers: Paola (Leonardo) Nash — Senior Program Manager at LinkedIn — was a UC Berkeley Economics and International Politics major.
• Entrepreneurs: Holly Liu — Co-Founder of Kabam — was a UC Berkeley School of Information graduate. Whether you have a family (or friend’s) business to offer to help, or you want to build something new of your own vision, find the right people to help build a viable business that you believe in. The best part? You don’t need permission — you can start today.

3 Tips For Landing Your First Job After College:

• Widen your aperture of the jobs you’re applying for. Start by applying to companies and jobs you are lukewarm about, with the goal of landing interviews, improving your interviewing abilities, and getting job offers and experiences to negotiate and learn from, respectively.
• Be open to remote, hybrid, and onsite jobs. Even if you find that remote jobs could pay less than you’d like, you can negotiate when you have a job offer and/or find a better-paying job later (and make up the difference).
• Start building your portfolio of work before you land a job. From an open-source project to building something with minimal coding, you can add your project experience as work experience to your resume / LinkedIn — helpful for interviewing because you have something to talk about.

Special thank you to Caitlin Hope Kaliski for inviting me to speak at UC Berkeley’s Philosophy Hall about my journey as a humanities grad who worked in many jobs in tech, business, and entrepreneurship!

Useful Links for Students in Global Studies / International Studies:

• Entrepreneurship in Palestine: Lessons learned from entrepreneurs building startups in the West Bank and Gaza
• TechWomen Comes Full Circle: Mentoring with My Mentor in Gaza
• Volunteering at Gaza Startup Bootcamp in 2015

I appreciated the opportunity to pause, reflect, and distill modern takeaways from my twenty-year career — especially with today’s graduates stepping into a world of economic and political uncertainty, paired with rapid technological (AI) change in a post-ZIRP era.

Build your work experience ASAP by volunteering or participating in side projects, it will be helpful when you interview for a job — whether you work in tech, health, nonprofit, government, overseas, etc — and also it helps you learn what you like to do, and don’t like to do.

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Speaker Angie Chang is CEO and Founder at Girl Geek X (formerly Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners), a growing community of 40,000+ mid-to-senior level women in technology. Girl Geek X works with mission-aligned companies to help them engage, hire and retain women and non-binary leaders & technologists via custom recruiting events.

Over the past decade, we have partnered with hundreds of the world’s most innovative tech and consumer brands (PayPal, Etsy, Tesla, Adobe, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix and more) to host more than 400 events in the San Francisco Bay Area, and virtual events for over 20,000 attendees — creating opportunities for more than 2,000 women to take the mic and share their thought leadership and expertise as speakers.

Prior to Girl Geek X, Angie was VP of Strategic Partnerships at Hackbright Academy, a women’s engineering school for female software engineers. Angie led partnerships with employers at Hackbright, where she built valuable hiring partnerships, launched the mentorship program (enlisting 700+ industry engineers as volunteers in 4 years) and connected countless women to new jobs in tech.

She co-founded Women 2.0 in 2006, a media company which promotes women in high-tech entrepreneurship. She was named in Fast Company’s 2010 “Most Influential Women in Technology”​ and more recently Business Insider named her one of “30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech.”

Angie has been invited by the U.S. State Department to speak on women’s high-tech, high-growth entrepreneurship in the West Bank, Switzerland and Germany. In her early career, Angie held positions in product management and web/UI production at various Silicon Valley startups. She holds a B.A. in English and Social Welfare from UC Berkeley.

Book a call with Girl Geek X or email hello@girlgeek.io to discuss Angie Chang speaking with your organization or group in 2025!