Ilene Gawaran

I am the first in my family to attend some college and born from immigrant parents. Navigating through life has been quite the rollercoaster since my parents were still learning how to navigate life in the USA. I never really knew what I wanted to do in life. I've always just delved right into a job whenever I was given an opportunity and that's how I ended up working so long in the pharmacy even though my heart longed for technology. Despite my last role being a training specialist at a specialty pharmacy, I jumped on the chance to work on a project that no one wanted to take on. It required me to teach myself VBA from scratch and I was able to build a template tool in Excel that would validate the data entered, checked that all pertinent fields were filled, the template would change according to the data being entered, and some templates even generated emails straight from excel. I loved this moment because it gave me some confidence that persistence pays off. I am currently trying to transition to a data analyst role to eventually move into data engineering.

Ideal Workplace Values

My ideal workspace is a place that is inclusive and diverse. I am an introvert that will attend work functions that gives me a safe space to get to know my other coworkers. Flexibility and continuous feedback helps keeps my anxiety at ease.