Climbing the Lattice Mujda Alamzai

Thanks to the popularity of shows like "Silicon Valley", the startup stereotype is something that people across all sectors are familiar with. Images of young kids right out of college doing keg stands and spending their evenings playing ping pong are ubiquitous even for those who have never worked in the tech industry. This week, join Mujda as she looks back upon her own startup days and shares the hard-earned lesson and wild anecdotes from her time working at an early stage biotech company.

As the COVID-19 pandemic transforms the American economy and millions of American find themselves thrust back into the role of job seeker, starting a new job while working from home has become the reality of career transitions today. In this episode, Mujda talks about her experience starting her first full-time job as a software engineer remotely and some of the strategies that have felt like life preservers in a time where she has felt thrown overboard.

There has been a lot of work done in recent years to try and boost the number of women choosing to go into STEM careers. Initiatives to target girls and push them into technical careers have largely been successful at increasing enrollment at institutions of higher learning, however, the retention rate by the time these girls become women plummets. This week, listen to Mujda share a few of the trying moments she's experienced as a young woman trying to make her way in Silicon Valley and get a better idea of why girls who code have to put up with a lot to become women in tech.

For many computer science students, their internship search starts as early as their fall semester and culminates into the moment school lets out and they embark on their first few steps on their career journey, As the summer internship seasons kicks off and aspiring software developers begin their tenure working at tech companies all across Silicon Valley, join Mujda as she reminisces on her first software development internship and the lessons to last a lifetime that those short 12 weeks left her with.

Father's Day is coming up and what better time is there to thank the people that paved the way for our host: Mujda's parents! In this episode, Mujda tells the career lattice stories of her parents, who have each made more than their fair share of career transitions in their lifetime. Follow her as she shares the interesting path that lead her parents to becoming entrepreneurs, salespeople, even educators; and the lessons that Mujda learned from watching her parents take their winding paths to the American Dream.

There are books, videos, seminars and entire organizations dedicated to teaching budding software developers how to crack the coding interview. Yet, there are few accounts detailing the emotional and mental toll that the coding interview can have on you. In this episode, Mujda tells the stories of her first interview season in a new field and the nuggets of wisdom that those experiences have gifted her. Follow her as she shares what it was like to be administered a mock interview by her fiance, to struggle through her first onsite interview and her first internship offer.