Baruch College’s Undergraduate Student Government hosted a Women in Tech Panel on March 23.

The panel featured three Baruch alumni who are currently working in the technology field. The panelists included Archana Raj, Caroline Albanese and Sara Landy.

Raj majored in accounting and graduated from Baruch in 2011.

She began her career at Deloitte as an audit senior in 2011. After three years at Deloitte, Raj started searching for a new path and found herself in India. She initially did not intend to stay long in India but ended up picking up various business roles throughout her three-year-long stay.

Raj is currently a senior manager at Ernst & Young. Her day-to-day tasks include running a product team, helping clients build digital strategies and a lot of internal management.

Albanese graduated from Baruch in 2013. She did not anticipate a career in tech after majoring in journalism and creative writing. She began her career by freelancing and doing tech reporting for small media sites post-graduation.

Despite her unconventional background, her experience in journalism equipped her with several transferable and highly-valued skills she was later able to apply to her tech career.

“If you are able to do a bunch of core things, the tech will come to you,” Albanese said.

Her background in journalism helped Albanese hone her verbal and written communication skills, allowing her to work with hard deadlines and become adaptable.

Albanese is currently the director of data products and capabilities at Dow Jones. Her day-to-day involves analyzing data from subscriptions and managing her teams.

Landy was part of Baruch’s class of 2011 and majored in finance. She has been working at JPMorgan Chase & Co. for nearly 12 years and has worked in various positions within the company.

Currently, she is the executive director of finance and business management, and concentrates on infrastructure technology. Landy describes herself as a “storyteller with numbers.”

Similar to Albanese, Landy did not expect to find herself in the tech industry, starting her career as a business analyst.

“The opportunity presented itself to me,” she said.

One of her managers gave her an opportunity to break into tech with a role concentrating on cloud technology. In comparison to her finance roles, Landy stated that understanding data analytics and statistics was key to making her role different from the normal financial analyst and allowed her to thrive in a tech space.

Landy’s day-to-day tasks include more management-based duties and figuring out how to improve customer experience. She works with her team to figure out which technology should be invested in and built. She greatly values team-wide cooperativeness and emphasizes its importance in the tech field, as a person will have to be prepared to work with a multitude of people from many different sectors.

Despite all three panelists’ diverse backgrounds, they all agreed that curiosity is an important attribute to have in order to succeed in the tech industry. Students who wish to pursue technology must have the drive to want to know more. The best tech workers are open problem solvers dedicated to innovation.

Even if someone does not have the answer or tools to solve a problem, they still should indulge in inquiry about the situation at hand, the panelists explained.

Technology is “fluid and diverse,” according to Albanese.

Raj and Albanese agreed that contrary to popular belief, coding knowledge is not a prerequisite for entering the tech world. A basic understanding of design and understanding the infrastructure behind the technology sector one is interested in is as important as the coding aspect of tech.

The panelists encouraged audience members to not be afraid of risks. Someone always must be the first to pursue something and will be the one to pave paths for those who come after them.

Technology is a fast-growing and always-evolving field. Success comes to those who can stay on track with all the vast changes and to those who are able to take risks.

USG will be hosting similar career-orientated events in the future, which can be found on its Instagram.