Software Engineer Kristen Sundquist Pushes Past Pressure To Excel In Programming

Kristen Sundquist has always loved math, but it wasn’t until college that she discovered programming. Encouraged to take a basic computer science course she instantly found herself doing as well as the top students in the class, and people who had been coding for years. She also discovered that she loved the craft, and had a huge smile on her face as she was completing projects. That led her to pursue a career in software engineering.

Even before she finished her degree with San Francisco State University, she started working as a quality assurance intern for the account management based startup Manilla.com. She did so well there that upon graduation she was offered a job as a Web Integration Developer / Junior Rails Engineer. There she wrote screen-scraping scripts in Ruby, fixed bugs, participated in daily standups, and trained new hires to work with the architecture of the company’s system.

Moving on from Manilla, Kristen took a position as a software engineer for SigFig. There she was tasked with learning a whole new programming language, Angular JS, while working on the job. This was a terrifying and exhausting process that had her worried that she would be fired if she couldn’t keep up with everyone else on the team. She also suffered from a severe case of imposter syndrome that threatened to overwhelm her with the pressure of her responsibilities.

She decided to begin attending Women Who Code events, where she met strong independent females that were excelling in technology careers. Meeting other women like her, gave her the confidence to push past her own self doubts and overcome the challenges that her new position presented. After just seven months she had caught up with the rest of the team, and was confident not only in her Angular JS programming skills, but also in her ability to learn and grow in high pressure situations.

Although she’s conquered every problem in her path, and has developed a career that she loves, doing work that she is passionate about, Kristen has not stopped taking on new challenges. Her latest quest has her embarking on an 8 week CodePath course in order to learn iOS development in swift so that she can start building her own apps. This is particularly gratifying as she is one of only two females in a class of 30, which gives her the ability to show that women can be just as capable when it comes to programming.

In her free time Kristen gives back to the community by volunteering as a TA/Teacher at Railsbridge. She also works hard to be a positive role model in the community, in order to show other women that it is possible to succeed and even excel in a technology career. In addition, she attends WWCode conferences as a coach and mentor, and even hosted a recent event.