Tell us about your path to Year Up.

I was set to attend college when my aunt became gravely ill. We are a close-knit family, and my aunt was one of my only relatives in the United States. She played a very significant role in my life. As a result, I made a tough decision to withdraw my college acceptance in order to care for her. I didn’t want to give up on my education, so I enrolled in a nearby community college and picked up a job that paid minimum wage. I was struggling to make ends meet.

At that time, a friend told me about Year Up, a program in which he had participated. I intended to major in engineering in college, and I've always gravitated toward mathematics, problem-solving, and troubleshooting — all of which are applicable to the field of IT. I enrolled in the Year Up program and was taken aback by the IT and professional skills instruction I received. As part of the program, I rebuilt computers, dissected the motherboard, learned about hardware and software components, and set up computer networks. I interned as a SharePoint Administrator in the office of the chief information officer for NASA. Everything I had learned in my Year Up training came back to me and proved to be very beneficial during my internship.