In this episode, I spoke with Mariana Briones, Incoming Hardware Program Manager at Microsoft and Alejandro Davila, FDSE at Palantir Technologies, both born in Mexico and raised in the north of the country. They share their experience as international students studying in the US and crossing the border every day to go to UCLE in El Paso, Texas. Having gone through so many struggles to get their first internship and trying to make it easier for others, Mariana and Alejandro founded InternMakers, a YouTube channel with resources in one place to help students get prepared for their intern opportunities and full-time opportunities. They are Latino content creators in STEM that want to bring more people like us to conferences and careers.

We spoke about how they got into tech, Mariana as a Latina in Microsoft, her experience when crossing the border, and the time she met Satya Nadella, InternMakers, and finally, about what students can start doing right now to get an internship.

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Connect with Mariana
and Alejandro via Linkedin:

* Mariana Briones* Alejandro Davila

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Mentioned resources:

* UTEP* Palantir* Cummins Inc.* Satya Nadella* GitHub* Cracking the Coding Interview* Cplusplus* InternMakers* NACE* SHPE

In this episode, we talked about:

* 01:42 – Welcoming Mariana and Alejandro to LWT* 04:12 – Getting into tech * 15:38 – The time Mariana met Satya Nadella * 20:40 – About crossing the border* 25:32 – A Latina in Microsoft* 27:30 – Both at university together; Mariana in Seattle and Alejandro in New York; what about InternMakers?* 37:48 – Main things students can start doing right now to get an internship* 44:41 – Last words of advice

Who is Hugo Castellanos?
Learn more about him on Linkedin

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