2023 Speakers

Kimberly Brown is a career + leadership expert whose mission is to help women and people of color navigate the workplace, make more money and become industry leaders. Her leadership development company, Manifest Yourself, LLC, provides organizations with tailor-made solutions to engage, develop, and advance women and people of color. Her work has been featured on The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Forbes, Blavity, MONEY Magazine, Essence Magazine, Business Insider, CNBC, Fox 5, and more. Her bestselling book, Next Move, Best Move: Transitioning Into a Career You'll Love, was released in June 2021. She is also a bi-weekly career columnist for New York Magazines, The Cut.

Samantha Garcia (she/her) is a University Recruiter at Riot Games in Los Angeles, CA. Before working at Riot, Samantha worked for five years as a student advisor at UCLA and UC San Diego. Samantha is passionate about helping students connect their passion for video games with meaningful career opportunities in games and esports. Samantha recruits students for technical, creative, insights and production roles for Riot’s Summer Internship Program. Samantha also enjoys collaborating with Riot’s community partner organizations to host career and professional development programs to show students how their skills and passions can help create meaningful experiences for players across the globe.

Samantha is a California native and first generation college student. She earned her B.A. in International Relations at UC San Diego, and her M.Ed. in Student Affairs at UCLA. Outside of her role, Samantha also enjoys salsa dancing, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and is excitedly waiting for the release of Arcane Season 2!

Deitrick Franklin is a Manager, Engineer, Program Manager, Recruiter, Mentor and DEI Advocate. Leading the Emerging Talent team at Reddit, Deitrick partners with a recruiter and program manager to attract and retain exceptional and diverse early talent professionals into Reddit. Prior to Reddit, Deitrick worked as an Early Talent Program Manager at Lyft ensuring an excellent employee experience for incoming Apprentices, Interns & New Grads. His body of work includes inclusive recruitment, community engagement and retention strategies aimed at converting participants in Emerging/Early Talent programs into full-time employees. Deitrick proactively engages underrepresented / underserved communities within tech, particularly Black, Latinx, Women, and LGBTQ+ communities, to enhance the representation of today’s global workforce. A native of Baltimore, MD, Deitrick holds a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and Georgia Institute of Technology, respectively. In his spare time, he enjoys playing billiards, traveling, and having a good laugh!

Alison currently works at SiriusXM as the Associate Director, Early Career Program. In her role at SiriusXM, Alison is responsible for overseeing the internship program that runs year-around and hires approximately 250 students per year in all departments of the business. She also oversees the Demo Tape apprentice program & the Stitcher Breakthrough Fellowship. Prior to this role, Alison worked in higher education as a career counselor where she counseled undergraduate and graduate students on selecting a major, exploring careers, and in all aspects of the job and internship search process. She holds a master’s in Counseling & Counselor Education from Indiana University Bloomington and a BA in Psychology from University of Richmond.

Cortez is a university relations and human resources professional who has been working with Silicon Valley powerhouses for 19 years. He has served as a university relations and human resources leader for several organizations, including Hubspot, Airbnb, Zynga, Workday, Ericsson, Yahoo! and Cisco Systems. He currently leads the University Recruiting team at Hubspot, positioning the program to be best-in-class and expanding programing in the areas of early career.  Prior to his roles in the high tech industry, Cortez, built his experiences in the education sector as a teacher and administrator for both K-8 and High School.  This blend of education and high tech provides Cortez with a unique perspective to innovate and l lead his teams.

Cortez was born in Mexico; moved to the United States at the age of 10 and began working in California agriculture until he was 20 years old.  He received Bachelor’s Degrees in History and Political Science and a Master of Arts in Education Administration and Supervision from San Jose State University and a Master’s Certificate in Project Management from George Washington University.

Stephanie Tyler manages the global early career programs at Autodesk. With nearly 20 years of experience, she drives the early career talent strategy, manages a global team and has built a programmatic approach for early career attraction, sourcing and hiring for the organization.

Lucy currently leads the Emerging Talent team at Dropbox. Lucy has been in the early career space for over a decade, but has committed to finding talent for Dropbox since 2017. Since her days of wanting to be a student counselor, she's always found early career recruiting and building early career programs a true passion of hers. One of the most fulfilling parts of Lucy's role today is being able to be a part of someone's career journey and watch them grow in their success!

Emma Surich joined Perpetua in 2022 to help build their global Recruitment function, since then, Emma is helping teach and mentor the next generation of Early Talent Recruitment to establish Perpetua's campus program in Toronto. Previously, Emma was with ecobee helping grow from 125 to just over 500, and building ecobee’s campus recruitment and new graduate program to 30 students per term. With a focus on great candidate experience and a strong employer brand, Emma has been involved in early talent recruitment over the last 10+ years and loves to see students bring their curiosity and drive to teams.

Charlene (Char) Delapena is the Sr. Manager, Early Talent at Ripple. and the Managing Director for URx, a community for University Recruiting and Early Talent professionals. Leading the early talent recruiting efforts for Ripple, she is responsible for executing strategies designed to attract early career talent across the organization while managing programs focused on providing real life work experiences and mentorship to ensure career success. Char is also passionate about diversity & inclusion and makes it a priority to not only increase the diversity within pipelines but encourages an inclusive environment for early career talent to excel in and feel a sense of belonging. Char has spent nearly 10 years within the university and emerging talent recruiting space managing programs at BitGo, Robinhood, Quora, Coinbase and Dolby Laboratories and holds a Bachelors degree in Telecommunications from DeVry University.

Brittany Mitlo is the Director of University Recruiting at Duolingo, which is home to the most downloaded education app worldwide. Brittany's main focus is on building Duolingo’s University Recruiting strategy and best practices, and has scaled the company by 10x since joining in 2017.

Katelyn has been working within campus recruiting for the last 12 years. She currently leads the Global Early Talent Recruiting Team at MongoDB, which hires Interns, New Grad and Sales Development positions. Our MongoDB campus team hires over 150 global Interns as well as 140 entry level positions.

Prior to joining MongoDB, Katelyn lead Protiviti's Global Technology Consulting, Business Performance Improvement and Digital campus recruiting efforts. She also lead Protiviti's Northeast Region Campus hiring team which included Toronto, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Metro DC offices.

Katelyn loves working in a team environment and brainstorming around strategy to come up with innovative solutions to bring campus recruiting to the next level. She has a passion for technology and streamlining processes to simplify to scale.

Sam is currently building out university recruiting at ZipRecruiter and has her first cohort of interns starting in May! She was previously building out programs at Coinbase and Robinhood, welcoming the first official class of interns at both.

Michelle managed and drove the strategic evolution of LinkedIn's Global Emerging Talent Programs and Pathways organization since the launch in 2014. She oversaw a team of managers and program managers leading various global and local programs including: Intern Program, Intouch, Year Up, HBCU and HSI partnerships, Emerging Talent Events as well as overseeing the launch of the Apprentice Center of Excellence (ACE). In recent years, Michelle also oversaw Campus Operations and Recruiting Coordination Teams. She has played an integral role in enhancing the foundations of LinkedIn's early in career and emerging talent strategies, having partnered cross-functionally with 25+ orgs at LinkedIn, as well as numerous partnering organizations like Edlyft and Thurgood Marshall College Fund. She has acted as a trusted advisor to emerging talent leaders. Michelle's advocacy for emerging talent space drives an inclusive approach and cultivates meaningful experiences for the talent served. Michelle is beginning her journey for a next play in where she can drive great impact.

Sarah has been in the early career space for almost a decade touching every stage of the process from sourcing, closing, strategy, programming, intern management, and events.  She is currently a University Talent Scout at Meta focusing on the Front End pipeline, though throughout her career has worked on roles from hardware to front end engineering roles. Sarah was first introduced to the early career space at Microsoft where she led their intern programming. She spent the bulk of her career as a full cycle recruiter at Redfin, positioning Redfin as a competitive force in the industry. Right before joining Meta she spent a year at Rockwell Automation helping their UR program update their recruiting philosophies and transition their strategy from local to nationwide recruiting efforts.  Sarah is most passionate about equipping all students with the skills and information they need to navigate the recruiting system and land  their dream opportunity. 

For last year, Sarah has been involved with the URx team helping put together conferences and marketing.

Bridget is an experienced University Recruiting professional focused on building out HubSpot's intern, co-op, and entry-level programs. Having started her career in the not-for-profit government sector before transitioning into tech, she has developed and led innovative university talent strategies tailored to the needs of organizations that are both high-growth and mission-driven.

Over the past 5.5 years Bridget has been at HubSpot, the student programs have grown and scaled significantly. Focused on inclusivity at every level of the programming she and her team run, Bridget is passionate about creating communities where everyone belongs and is empowered to do their best work.

My name is Juan Sebastian Acosta, I am a proud first-generation Colombian American. I have always been passionate about helping others friend their dream job. Over the last 8 years, I have worked with GEICO, Meta and now Puget Sound Energy and have placed candidates in positions ranging from entry-level to senior roles.

Caroline Cunningham is a Global Early Talent Acquisition Leader with over 20 years of experience in multiple Fortune 500 companies. Having just left Workday as the Director of Global Early Talent Acquisition and Programs, she is currently taking some time off and exploring options for her next adventure. Prior to Workday, Caroline held Early TA leadership roles at Intuit, GE Digital, and Chevron as well as managing both early talent and experienced hiring for a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Caroline is an active member of NACE (National Association of Colleges and Employers) and has served two terms on the NACE Board of Directors as the VP Employers and as an Employer Director. She has presented at several national and regional conferences and events on a variety of topics related to early talent recruiting and programs.

In her spare time, Caroline explores her love of family, food and cooking in her blog, Findingcaroly.com. She lives in Danville, CA with her husband Rob and daughters Morgan (20) and Kendall (19).

Carolynn is a NYC-based early career recruiter at Figma, where she focuses on hiring technical talent invested in making design accessible to all. As an early member of Figma's recruiting team, Carolynn has assisted in building a strong foundation for early career programs and events that have led to impactful outcomes for the business. Carolynn started her recruiting career at Square & Cash App, where she helped expand the early career program across multiple offices in the US & globally.

In addition to her involvement in URx, Carolynn is a member of the NYU Alumni Association Board of Directors, where she helps develop strategies towards the advancement of NYU and its alumni.

Monica Ipong leads the Global University Recruiting Program at CrowdStrike, the leader in cloud-delivered next-generation endpoint protection. Monica has a passion for working in the cyber security industry and helping university students launch their career.

Andrew is the University Recruiting Program Manager at Sigma Computing. Andrew previously spearheaded university relations and recruiting partnerships at Jam City, a mobile game publisher based out of Los Angeles. He has spent the last 6 years at the intersection of entertainment and tech. His passion for representation in tech comes from his personal upbringing in a Mexican-American home and in his experiences in being the first person from his family to work in a corporate role. Prior to joining Sigma, Andrew spent time recruiting at EA (Electronic Arts), Netflix, and Apple. He recently made the move back to San Francisco and is excited to try all the new restaurants and continue building community in the industry.

Christian Rafael is an Associate Program Manager for Innovative Employee Solutions (IES) at Riot Games. In his role, Christian Rafael is responsible for supporting the recruitment, branding, and overall summer internship program at Riot Games. Prior to his current role, Christian worked in professional development and coaching at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), and George Mason University (GMU). Christian is currently a Ph.D Candidate in Sociology at George Mason University where his research focuses on internship access, equitability, and outcomes. Christian holds a Master’s in Sociology from George Mason University and a Bachelor's Degree in Sociology from Michigan State University.

Dr. Monique Ross is an Associate Professor, Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. Dr. Ross has a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University, Master’s in Computer Science and Software Engineering from Auburn University, and Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Engineering from Elizabethtown College. She has 11 years experience as a software engineer in industry and six years as an academic formerly of the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences and STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University. She currently runs an impactful computer science education research group that aspires to broaden participation in computer science to ALL.

Blake Jackson is a Recruiting Manager at Amplitude leading a team supporting G&A and People team hiring, as well as overseeing University and Early-Career programs. He is spearheading Amplitude's Employer Brand & Recruitment Marketing initiatives and is the Founder of the BLACC employee resource group. He is also an Amplitude Star Wars trivia champion.

Angie is an Early Career Recruiter at Figma. She helped bootstrap Figma's early career recruiting strategy and summer and winter internship programs. She has spent the past four years assisting Figma in expanding and building its early career employer brand through various creative outlets. Her experience includes collaborating closely with recruiters, designers, engineers, and executives to establish Figma as a first employer of choice.

Gillian is the Senior Program Manager of University Partnerships on the Emerging Talent recruiting team at HubSpot. She started at HubSpot in 2019 as a recruiting co-op during her last year of university. After graduating from Northeastern University, Gillian started full time with the team as an Associate University Recruiter, focused on software engineering internships and co-ops. In 2021, she transitioned into her current Program Manager role, focusing on the go-to -campus approach and strategy for the team. Gillian is passionate about early talent, DEI, as well as her Jamaican heritage, dance, music and faith.

Jennifer Schwab is the head of university recruiter at Navan, the only all-in-one travel, corporate card, and expense management company based in Palo Alto, California.

With a career spanning more than 18 years, Jennifer has a wealth of experience in early career hiring across a range of industries. In her current role, Jennifer leads Navan's efforts to hire interns and recent college graduates.

Jennifer's diverse experience has provided her with a broad understanding of the campus recruitment process and a comprehensive understanding of the needs of different industries.She has experience in managing university recruiting programs, attracting top talent, and building strong relationships with academic institutions.

Jennifer holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from California State University, Chico. When she's not working, Jennifer enjoys spending time with her family, hiking, and painting.

Isabel is a Recruiting Operations and Programs Associate at NerdWallet. She is responsible for managing university relationships, developing campus recruiting strategies, and creating programs to enhance candidate experiences. Isabel is passionate about promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace and developing programs that support this goal. She graduated with a Bachelor’s in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In Isabel’s free time, she enjoys running and hanging out with her Sheepadoole Azula.

Kate Kryder has a passion for the early career talent space helping young professionals navigate their path. As a University Programs Recruiter at The Clorox Company, Kate supports summer internship recruiting, early identification programming and equity and inclusion efforts. Kate also spent over a decade on college campuses working in leadership development roles. Kate lives in Hillsborough, NC with her partner and pup. She is an artist, amateur gardener and national park seeker.

Carmela is a University Recruiter at SentinelOne, where she is helping develop and scale its university programs. Carmela comes from a background of student programming, career advising, and mentorship programs. Prior entering the University Recruiting space, Carmela advised and supported first-generation students from underrepresented communities go to and through college by connecting them to resources and networks.

She broke into the UR space joining the Robinhood team and joining the URx community. Carmela is extremely grateful to be in this community and continue providing opportunities to students to break into tech. Outside of recruiting, Carmela is extremely passionate about holistic wellness, reading, and good food + good company!

Daniel is a Human Resources professional who supports high growth, innovative technology companies. Throughout his career, Daniel’s relentless dedication and passion for early career talent has enabled him to build and scale global, innovative strategies for Apple, Tesla and Intuit.

Daniel currently leads the Global Early Talent organization at Align Technology, makers of Invisalign. His focus is on transforming early career talent strategies to bring value to the business through an academically diverse and innovative workforce. Daniel takes pride in building global partnerships, while delivering best practices to regional Talent Acquisition teams.

Born in Brussels, Belgium and raised in Pennsylvania, Daniel attended Albright College on an NCAA swimming scholarship and graduated with a degree in Digital Media and Marketing.

Angela is a creative problem solver who is passionate about amplifying underrepresented talent. She has a background in Digital Media and African American studies and has been awarded several scholarships and grants for production of art exhibitions and their impact on young people of color in NYC. Her commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion calls her to continue to lead community initiatives, build internal talent programs, and organize events. At Humane, Angela is able to bridge all her passions as a Talent Programs Partner.

Makeda Hope-Crichlow is a lifelong DEI professional - which begun well before she knew it was a career path! As a first generation immigrant with a community focused mindset, she has always gravitated to work that allows her to advocate for and empower historically excluded groups to elevate themselves to accomplish their goals, as advocacy is a core personal value. Makeda supports Early & Emerging Talent Recruiting at Zillow, embedding equity and inclusion principles into every component of the process, from application to full time offer acceptance post-internship.

With 6 years of experience in the Diversity Early Talent space, Makeda has worked to become an expert in creating dynamic, intentional pathways to create opportunities for students to enter into their field of choice that incorporate solutions to macro-level systemic problems, on an individual micro level to drive long-term success.

Erin manages Talent Attraction Programs at Snyk which encompass the Emerging Talent Program, Internal Moves, and Referral Program. Starting with Snyk in 2021, she organized the first official Summer Internship Program and brought structure to an existing co-op program. This year, Snyk will welcome its largest class of interns and co-ops to our Boston office.

Erin started in the University Recruiting space hiring Software Engineering Interns, Co-ops and New Grads, and eventually took on MBA Intern and Full-time hiring.

Dalia Shehata is a Senior University Recruiter at Duolingo since 2021. Dalia has prior university experience in the electric utility and casino industries before transitioning to tech. Dalia enjoys practicing her stand up comedy routine with her team, watching old egyptian movies, and trying every variety of popcorn. She has a bachelor's degree in creative writing and a master's degree in organizational leadership.

Isaac Hanson is a Bay Area native currently working at Figma as an Early Career Recruiter! After being in the recruiting for nearly five years, Isaac remains passionate about diversifying tech one hire at a time.

Diana Ogbevire is a proud first generation Nigerian-American from Chicago, IL. She is currently a University Recruiter at IMC Trading and has previous experience in early talent at Gem and Airbnb. Her 5+ years of experience in higher education shaped her passion to increase diverse representation in the workforce as well as aim to provide thoughtful and human-centered recruiting experiences. In her free time, Diana enjoys opportunities to give back to her community and help elevate the voices of those unheard.

Natalie Chwalk has built her professional career around the pillars of authenticity and impact. Currently, in her role of Senior Program Manager, she specializes in creating and managing programs to empower and enable early talent at MongoDB. Natalie graduated from Rutgers University where she studied Human Resource Management, Organizational Leadership and Labor Studies. Outside of work, you can find Natalie spending time with friends and family, attending the latest live concert, and capturing life’s most precious moments through photography.

Amanda has spent the past 5 years managing intern programs at Uber ATG, Aurora, and Airbnb. Driven by the challenge of building new things, her proudest achievements include developing Uber’s approach to virtual internships, building and launching Aurora’s intern program, and scaling Airbnb’s intern program processes globally. Amanda’s passion for the early career space comes from a desire to help individuals overcome barriers and to level the playing field.

Hi all! I am currently a Programs Manager at Duolingo on our University Recruiting team. I have been working here for a little over 2 years and have a background in recruitment. I focus heavily on our sell programs for interns & new graduates, conferences, external summits and backend team data. I chose to work at Duolingo because of the amazing culture and mission to always offer fun + free education.

Brittni Lundie is an Early Career and D&I leader that has spent 15 years working with companies such as Twitter, Uber, Tesla, Boeing, Deloitte and the Department of Defense.

Most recently, she served as the Senior Manager of Global Early Talent Recruiting for the cyber security company Palo Alto Networks.

She has a bachelor’s degree in communications from Grambling State University, a MPA in HR Management from Texas Southern University and is a huge proponent of HBCU’s and diversity hiring and retention. She is new to the Atlanta area after spending a few years in the Bay Area and enjoys cooking, home projects and hanging out with her soon to be 6 year old daughter Charleigh

Alyssa Cole is an Emerging Talent Recruiter at HubSpot who focuses on hiring non-technical talent within Marketing, Legal, & Finance. Prior to joining the Emerging Talent Team at HubSpot in 2021, Alyssa worked in the areas of Higher Education and Ed Tech assisting college students with career and academic planning. As a First-Gen and HBCU graduate, she is deeply passionate about DI&B and assisting with event programming for underrepresented populations.

Alyssa holds an M.A. in Higher Education Administration from LSU and a B.S. in Criminal Justice from the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore. Outside of her role at HubSpot, Alyssa is a Career Workshop Facilitator and a Certified Professional Resume Writer. In her spare time, she enjoys trying new coffee shops and restaurants, watching all things home decor on TV, and spending time with family.

A strategic and forward-thinking builder of People programs, Cheri has spent her career working with students and developing UR strategies. She has worked across a number of industries and companies, including Philips Healthcare, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Chewy, and most recently Atlassian. She is passionate about leading teams, developing talent, and crafting efficient, strategic, and sustainable processes for scale. Cheri lives in Boston with her partner and pup, but will soon be heading to the midwest!

Sophia has contributed to the tech industry as a program manager, technical recruiter and technical talent sourcer. She has worked with top companies like Microsoft and Meta. She consults on how to pivot into the tech industry as well as how to network to land the role of your dreams. Sophia has over 15 years of professional career advising experience with 5 focused on the technical industry. Her expertise is in technical recruiting for software engineers, data scientists, front end engineers, as well as Machine Learning and AI. When not recruiting Sophia is active in the Latinx community promoting women empowerment with her business Chingona Art of Living (chingonaartofliving.com) She resides in the PNW with her two children.

Sophie Novati is the CEO and Cofounder of Formation, an A16Z-backed adaptive learning platform helping engineers from non-traditional and underrepresented backgrounds break into top tech companies. Sophie originally started her journey with a degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Over the next 6 years at Facebook and Nextdoor, she became a staff software engineer building product and product infrastructure. After struggling to hire great engineers for her own teams, she explored mentorship programs and discovered that programs today get nowhere near the engineering rigor that her teams were looking for. She founded Formation to combine modern adaptive learning technology with a top tier mentorship network to help solve this problem at scale and to fill the over 400,000 open computing roles with a more diverse workforce.

Kate Beckman is the Executive Manager of Community & Insights at RippleMatch, a comprehensive platform for early career hiring. In her role at RippleMatch, Kate leads content, research, and events, facilitating conversations and community among talent acquisition leaders and publishing data-driven insights on the next generation of talent. Prior to her role at RippleMatch, Kate was the founder and Editor of a national online publication for college students and a writer for Cosmpolitan.com's 'Career' section.

Stephanie leads the University Talent & Programs team at Rubrik, Inc. Prior to Rubrik, she has managed university and diversity hiring programs and spent some time in the college admissions space.

Incoming Technology Investigation Intern @ Apple || Full Stack Developer || Global Hackathon Winner || TMCF Scholar || AWS Business Case Champion || Computer Science major at Morgan State University || Tech Enthusiast

Information Science

Student Athlete at Haverford College | Incoming TREx Associate at Capital Group

Engineering @ UC Berkeley | Data Intern @ Rewriting the Code

John Armstrong leads workshops on personal and professional development worldwide, and for the last 6 years taught in Stanford University’s Life Design Lab. He is also a meditation instructor featured on the Calm app, and has facilitated workshops on mindfulness, stress, and focus for Calm’s enterprise clients. John is passionate about creating meaningful learning experiences and working with groups to create more connected, engaged, and productive cultures.