Cohort Stories: Meet Nicole N.
vol. 5, no. 68 — guest post by Nicole Nater Navarro
Three years ago, while living in Puerto Rico, I didn’t think the career milestones I’m achieving were possible. As an undergraduate student on September 20th, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico and became the landmark disaster of my life. It damaged and reduced structures and the entire electrical power grid of the island. Our society was plunged into complete darkness with no access to communication. Basic provisions were limited or rationed out, and it took too long for help to arrive. Getting back on track with my studies was a challenge that I was resistant to accept because I was immersed in a collective mourning, for not only the deaths of people, but also for the loss of familiarity and progression of life. I couldn’t find the motivation to think about something so far reached as a career when everything around me made me hopeless. Navigating through these challenges, I rediscovered my passion for research and business analytics.
While working at a local bookstore cafe, I designed and conducted a recovery plan to respond and mitigate the negative effects the hurricane had on the business.
It included a market analysis, a pulse on the situation of customers and demand forecasts. This moment was a launching pad for me as I finally found the hope that I had lost and decided to pursue a degree in marketing analytics.
From when I was a child until 5 years ago, I have struggled to choose a career interest. I’ve wanted to be an astronaut, a nurse, a vet, a surgeon, an architect and an artist. Nothing has ever been consistent except the fact that I’m innately curious, intuitive, and creative. My parents saw high potential in me and enrolled me in a specialized STEM high school where I discovered that life and physical sciences were not my passion. It was only in college, while majoring in architecture, that I understood that I was driven by a fascination for human behavior and the dynamism of social trends. I decided to change my major to marketing and did a minor in sociocultural anthropology. From my operations management class, I was fascinated by Lean Six Sigma and the concept of Kaizen for optimizing design, as this was something that I also saw in architectural design with Feng Shui and in Anthropology when discussing the ergonomics of tools. Unaware of where it would take me, back then I was just happy to find a common thread weaving the seemingly unrelated information I was learning together. Now as a graduate student, it has been fascinating to find my place in the STEM world through data science.
Learning about digital marketing analytics has made me particularly interested in the area of UX/UI design and I’m eager to discover if my behavioral science background will give me an edge in the tech design industry.
I think Hack.Diversity will be the glue that I’ve been searching for my entire life; having mentors guide me into leveraging my diverse skills to work in the tech industry. This is what I have been preparing my whole life for and I am very excited for an opportunity to begin designing efficient experiences for consumers. I’m also very excited to be a part of a diverse community, meeting colleagues who I can relate to. As a Latinx woman who is starting her career in an unknown place, I think spaces like this are very important so we don’t feel unseen or disregarded. Working in the tech industry is my dream, but I don’t want to feel lost navigating it when I graduate. Hack.Diversity represents me because the people that support this program do what I aspire to do as a professional: humanizing the experience, building empathy in the tech community, and prioritizing the greater good.
I believe the next generation of business people have the responsibility to innovate in ways that are environmentally sustainable and culturally inclusive; eradicating social divides like racism, ethnocentrism and gender discrimination. To be able to accomplish that, the industry needs diverse, research savvy people to interpret data and convert it into useful intelligence. That’s who I want to be.
