I grew up in a really large family. I’m the youngest of four children, and the age gaps between us are significant. My oldest brother is 18 years older than I am. We were born in Hong Kong, but when I was three years old, we emigrated to Toronto, Canada.

Having grown up in a family of tech professionals — both my parents work in IT and my sister studied computer science — it made sense for me to obtain a computer science degree, which I did, at the University of Colorado Boulder. What I would do with that degree, I didn’t yet know. In my mind, this would lead to a career as a web developer, and I wasn’t really interested in writing code all day long.

In 2017, as I was heading into the last year of my bachelor’s program in computer systems engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I was given the opportunity to do a three-month summer internship with Palo Alto Networks. In my program, the curriculum actually focused on both hardware and software, providing graduates with a more well-rounded education.

I was born in 1972 to Vietnamese parents. My mom, one of 12 kids, lived with her family in Nha Trang, a small beach town in South Vietnam. During the Vietnam War (1955-1975), her father would frequently rent out extra rooms in their house to soldiers.