The Fake Map We Hand New Graduates
The best career advice for new graduates is rarely the advice we hear at graduation. Normally, in the days between receiving your diploma and starting your first job, someone will hand you a map. A fake map. A fake map. It’s colorful and clean, and it encourages the impression that successful women in tech are those who blindly trust the map. Before you start your standup or pull up to your code review or walk into your first all-hands, let me be the first to tell you: no map you’re given works ever, and it’s the women I admire who have dropped that stack of fake directions and replaced it with their own compass.
My Career Did Not Follow the Map
My own path has gone places the map did not predict. I started as a help desk technician answering calls about forgotten passwords at a public university, a young woman in a field that did not always make room for women like me, and I climbed from there through director, CIO, and CTO titles in higher education, often as the only woman at the table and almost always as the only one in the room who looked like me. The ascent was not the clean line the map suggests; it was made of detours and lateral moves, of rooms I had to talk my way into, of mentors I had to find for myself, of years that looked stagnant from the outside but were quietly building the foundation for everything that came after. The version of me who would eventually sit in those C-suite seats was not the version anyone, including me, would have predicted when I first moved to the US at 17.
I share this because I want you to hear, from someone who has been navigating this industry for over two decades, that the linear story is the exception rather than the rule. The women I know who are building real careers in tech have detoured into government, returned to school in their thirties, taken parental leave that turned into a pivot, left corporate roles to consult, left consulting to come back in-house, paused entirely for a year, switched stacks, switched industries, and switched their minds about what they wanted altogether.
What You Actually Need Is a Compass
If you’re a woman in tech, there’s this overriding pressure to know the exact direction you’re going, to know the exact niche you’re in, to have a five-year plan that makes it through contact with reality. You don’t need one. What you need is a strong sense of what’s important to you, the flexibility to update that sense when you learn new things about yourself, and the fortitude to let life shape your career rather than someone else’s idea of momentum.
Five Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me
A few things I wish someone had told me at seventeen, offered now in the spirit of that conversation:
Prestige Is Not the Same as Growth
The job that teaches you the most is often not the job with the most prestige. Pay attention to the rooms you are in, the problems you are touching, the people you are learning from, and weigh those more heavily than the title on your LinkedIn; a senior engineer at a chaotic startup may grow faster in two years than a peer who took the polished rotational program, and the reverse is also sometimes true. The inputs matter more than the label.
Choose the Manager, Not Just the Company
Your first manager will shape you more than your first company will, so if you have a choice, choose the manager; if you do not have a choice, find mentors elsewhere, deliberately and quickly, and do not wait for your company to assign them.
Being the Only One Does Not Mean You Do Not Belong
You will sometimes be the only woman in the room, and the only woman who looks like you almost always, and this is not a sign that you do not belong; it is a sign that the industry is still catching up to the people who are already in it. Take the seat, ask the question, write the document, send the follow-up. You do not have to be twice as good to deserve the space, even though the culture will whisper otherwise.
Rest Is a Professional Skill
Rest is part of the job, not a reward for finishing it. Burnout is not a personality trait, and the women who sustain long careers in this field are the ones who learn early that logging off is a professional skill. You are allowed to close the laptop. You are allowed to take the vacation. You are allowed to leave the Slack notification unread until Monday.
A Non-Linear Path Is Not a Failed Path
And finally, the one I most want you to carry with you: a non-linear path is not a failed linear path. It is its own shape, with its own logic, visible mostly in hindsight. The job you take next is not a verdict on the rest of your career, the title on your business card is not a measure of your worth, and the version of success you were handed at graduation is allowed to change as you do.
Welcome to the Industry You Will Help Rewrite
You are walking into an industry that is being rewritten in real time, by AI and by the people, like you, who are about to enter it. Bring your full self, the technical sharpness, the lived experience, and the questions no one else in the room thinks to ask. Take the long way when the long way is the right way, and trust that the path will make sense when you look back at it, even when it does not make sense in the moment.
The map was never the territory.
You are the territory.
Welcome!
