Hello Everyone!! My name is Lourdes Louis, and I am a fresh graduate of Chapman University from the MBA program with an emphasis on Marketing and Analytics. I recently landed the position of Data Architect at Women Lifting Women (WLW).

With a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, I have more than seven years of experience developing custom software solutions. Due to the flexibility of the MBA program at Chapman, I was able to take up an Independent Study as my final elective. Under the guidance of Professor Toplansky and Dr. Hersh, I developed the data infrastructure to collect Crunchbase data and make it available for analysis and visualization on Tableau. This project gave me the confidence to take up the offer from Tiffany Grandchamp, the CEO at WLW, to be the Data Architect at WLW.

I met Tiffany in the Mentorship program at Women in Tech through the recommendation of Tuanni Barroso Vasconcelos. This was my second mentorship program. I had high expectations after the value and quality learning I got from my first mentor Jenny Dinnen, Co-Owner and Board Member of MacKenzie Corporation. Tiffany did not disappoint. She helped me understand and evaluate my strengths and principles and how they play in an everyday professional capacity, among many other things. Working with her, I was able to build my value proposition. This helped me to approach my job search in a more structured manner.

At this point, I would like to share two important lessons I learned. First, make the most of all mentorship programs. Not because of a future job or internship but to learn from such distinguished and accomplished individuals. From understanding industry trends and practices to learning nuances in work culture, the time spent with my mentors helped in the job search. The second is to understand your strengths and principles and how they will help in your job. Identify the position that helps your strengths to grow in that position. But also, be aware of when a strength can become a vulnerability. This leads to building your value proposition. Once you have a value proposition, you will know which job/organization/team/location will align with your values and strengths.