Academia to Tech Industry Unlocked with Norah Abokhodair Ph.D.

Jan 15, 2020

When Norah graduated from college with Computer Science degree from King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, women were not welcome to apply for engineering jobs. Those jobs were limited to men and foreigners at that time in Saudi Arabia. Norah searched for a tech job for over a year but then decided to take a job outside of the tech industry. The job she got had nothing to do with her degree. However, she was grateful for that first job because it taught her many soft skills she now uses as a Senior PM at Microsoft.

Here are some topics we discussed in this episode:

• Candid facts about the struggles of being an international student and how to overcome them.
• How to learning and growing from failure.
• The importance of networking, asking for internal referrals and having an elevator pitch when looking for a job.
• Recognizing that your years in college accomplishing your Masters or Ph.D. counts as work experience.
• The gap between western and non-western world in terms of technology development.

Connect with Norah:

Personal: https://norahak.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Norahak

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/norah-abokhodair/

 

Connect with Grace:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/GraceMacjones

Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/gracemacjones/

Follow the podcast:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/techunlockedpod

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Linkedin: Tech Unlocked

If you like this episode, please leave a rating and review on iTunes & Spotify. Use the hashtag #Techunlockedpodcast. Have a tech-related question? Shoot me an email [e-mail]  :)