Faculty Profile: Drew Ochengco Wants You to Figure Out Who You Are
by Marcelle Santos
If you’re in a graduate engineering degree program at Northeastern in Silicon Valley, at some point you will take ENCP 6000: Career Management for Engineers with Drew Ochengco. In the course, Drew will teach you how to professionally network in person and through social media platforms like LinkedIn. More importantly, they will encourage you to find out who you are.
“Oftentimes, when I’m talking to graduate students who have come here for a vocational degree, when you ask them about themselves, the first thing they’re talking through is their work experience, where they want to be in two years. But you have very few who talk about identity first,” she says.
That’s when she realizes some of them are getting it wrong — they’re trying to appear employable and blend in when it’s the opposite that will help them succeed.
“I think the higher up I’ve networked, the more I’ve realized incredibly successful people share the thought that if there’s nothing divisive with what you have to say or how you are perceived, then you’re just… not to say you’re nobody, but it’s like, Who are you? There’s nothing that stands out.”
That’s why she urges students to take the time to discover their identities, values, and strengths. “The real work that I task my students with is self-exploration because I think that was my work. It was not so much a focus on LinkedIn or how I was presenting myself with a portfolio, but rather asking myself, What does it mean to bring my full self to the table? And even before that, Who am I?”
Who is Drew Ochengco?
Drew (who uses they/them and she/her pronouns) found out who they were by exploring their interests, trying out different jobs, living in different places, and giving themself permission to defy people’s expectations of them.
“Growing up as a queer kid and as a child of immigrants, a lot of the time I was not myself. So by the time I went to college, I was like, I have no more time to do this. Let me just be true to whatever my thoughts are, and if it doesn’t fit anyone’s narrative, then that’s fine as long as I’m doing okay.”
Today, she describes herself as a woman in STEM (“It matters to me to be able to go back home and talk to everyone in my community about helping women enter STEM”) and an advocate for Asian and Pacific Islander queer and trans people.
How she got here
Drew grew up in Carson, a city in Los Angeles County, with the confidence that they could do whatever they wanted.
“We were a Filipino immigrant family living in a mobile home. But for whatever reason, my family was like, ‘You want to go to Harvard? You’re going to go to Harvard!’ And I will pinpoint that because we had a little Harvard magnet on my grandparents’ fridge, that was why I eventually said, I need to do this because the magnet was on the fridge. This needs to happen.”
Going to Harvard ultimately brought her to Northeastern. “I couldn’t afford Cambridge rent while I was over there, so I lived right behind Northeastern in Boston. By proximity, I learned a lot about Northeastern’s culture, about the students there, and a little about the co-op program.”
When she moved back to California and saw an opening for Assistant Co-Op Coordinator at Northeastern Silicon Valley, she applied. The job seemed perfect for her, a bioengineer with computing skills, a Master’s in education, and a passion for helping people.
“I remember in my interview I told the manager, ‘I think this is an amazing fit. However, I have to say that I feel a little weird moving into a faculty position as somebody who’s had such a non-linear professional background.’ And I remember her very clearly telling me, ‘Oh, that’s what we want! We want people that know how to pivot and can show students how to do it in a way that makes sense.’ I took that to heart. I support my students who are coming from out-of-tech backgrounds, and I’m also thankful for students that do have a pure tech or CS background, that I’m knowledgeable enough to guide them at the level that they need as well.”
Career Advisor / Witch
Once, a student came to them for advice on whether to accept a job offer from Amazon or work with Peter Magnusson, former Vice President of Engineering at Snapchat and creator of the Google Cloud Platform. “I was like, ‘Why are you choosing between Amazon and being directly mentored by this man who started everything that Amazon depends on?’”
Still, the student hesitated. “That was a real wake-up call for me where I was like, Oh, we need to really emphasize stepping away from branding and also pride in tagging brands to our self-identity. What does it mean to think about the values and perspectives I am trying to learn? And past just trying to gain a network of people who are also associated with some level of branding? What does it mean, to understand the value of somebody’s contributions to a sector, even when that goes unbranded?”
To Drew, Peter’s contributions meant something. So much so that they reached out to him on LinkedIn. He wrote back and eventually agreed to come and speak on campus. “He drove all the way from Reno, Nevada on his own dime. I booked him for an hour. He stayed for six.”
His visit was one of the highlights of her year. “I appreciated how we went from talking about data privacy to personal identity and communism in China… I did not expect any of those things to come up, but she did.”
Drew’s like that, too, so they quickly became friends. “One of the first times we spoke, he called me a witch. He went on to talk about witches having intuition, and being able to connect one idea to another to another.”
Coincidentally, her parents used to call her a witch, too. “On days I didn’t comb my hair, I was bruja. On days that I combed my hair, doña.”
She continues to alternate between the two. For example, she was wearing pajama pants during our interview. (“I wake up, like, a minute before work.”)
But later that evening, she was flying off to Spain to celebrate her 27th birthday in an 11th-century castle. She was planning to “have a doña moment” while she was there.