Kristine Umeh on Doing It All
Kristine Umeh (Khoury College of Computer Sciences ’23) may be a software engineer now, but that’s not going to stop her from playing music or breaking into Nollywood. “I have multiple interests, and I don’t feel like I have to silence one for another. I can do it all,” she said.
A self-described “double husky” (her undergrad and graduate studies were both at Northeastern), she’s saying goodbye to student life in just a few days after spending the last eight years on campus. “I pretty much grew up here,” she said.
When she arrived at the Boston campus at sixteen, she had just finished high school in Nigeria, where students pick a professional focus area in their freshman year. “From year nine, you’re streamlined into Science, Arts, or Social Science/Business, and it feels like you can’t do anything else,” she said. “I was in Science.”
Faced with the two main career choices available for those in Science — Medicine or Engineering — she chose the latter. “I was thinking about what would give me the most variety of industry options,” she said. “So when I came to the US, I came to study Chemical Engineering.”
When she realized she could also choose a minor, she picked Chinese. As a child, she’d taken Chinese lessons from an acquaintance of her mother’s (her mother worked for Huawei, the Chinese multinational tech company), and those lessons had left her with a lingering curiosity about the language. “I realized that [if I took up Chinese as a minor], I could understand the characters I couldn’t read as a child, so I decided to give it a shot.”
She also took piano, guitar, dance, and acting classes, and starred in a musical, all of which set her apart from her more narrow-focused peers. “No one in Chinese was an engineer, and no one in my engineering classes was interested in the arts,” she said.
As graduation approached, the differences between her and other chemical engineering students became even more obvious. She wasn’t as excited as they were about spending her days inside a lab — especially not when, at the height of the pandemic, remote work became mainstream. “I had a COVID reckoning. I was interested in technology, and I wanted to be in that space. I was also twenty, and I thought, There’s still time for school! I saw that Northeastern had a program that opened doors in tech for people without experience.”
Kristine isn’t scared of doing hard things — she moved to another country on her own as a teenager, and committed to learning Chinese as an adult. She believes anyone can do anything, so long as they know what’s required and put in the work to get there. “The things you want, you can make them happen,” she explained. “You just have to understand what it takes to do it, so you can face it for real.”
Which is why she met with past students and faculty before signing up for the Align program, which provides a direct pathway to a MS in computer science for students without a background in tech. “I was asking questions like, What do I need? What do I need to be doing right now? And I realized I didn’t require anything extra, I was ready.”
That’s not to say that she didn’t struggle or have to work hard after she enrolled. When the program began, she was in Nigeria (she’d returned after graduation to stay with her family during the pandemic), which meant she had to attend classes from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m.
Since all the concepts were new to her — she’d taken a coding class in her freshman year in college, and that was the extent of her experience — she needed extra help. “I set up one-on-one support with a TA,” she said. “She met with me every week to review the concepts in a safe space where I could ask questions.” When a bad grade in deep machine learning had her in tears, she made more time for studying — and finished the class with an A.
Her dedication paid off. “Every time I run my code and it doesn’t give me bugs, I think, I AM A GOD RIGHT NOW!”
Seeking support when she needed it, asking questions, and practicing has gotten her far enough that, right now, she’s confident in her understanding of computer science and her ability to figure out whatever coding challenge potential employers send her way. “They [employers] are looking for someone who knows the basics of what to do and is an engineer that they can work with. It’s not what you code, but how you approach the interview. Are you confident? Are you asking questions? Are you taking feedback? These are softer skills you need to have,” she explains.
In her second year in the program, Kristine landed two competitive software engineering internships, one at recruiting platform Handshake, and another at athletic apparel retailer Lululemon, which later hired her.
But she hasn’t lost sight of her artistic dreams. “I like acting and music and I want financial stability. I don’t want to be an artist that’s just hustling. I want to be able to take whatever classes I want, to travel wherever I want. I can work from nine to five, be involved with the innovations taking place in the world, and still learn and create on the side. That’s my plan.”
So far, doing it all is working for her. She was an extra on the Netflix show The Politician, and regularly puts out covers of songs on Instagram while building her career as a software engineer.
The key, she said, is never missing an opportunity to prepare for the future she envisions. The commencement speech she gave at graduation is an example, as was this interview. “This is good practice. I feel like I’ll do a lot of this in my life. I have to get better at it.”