She fell into engineering by accident yet became the first African American woman to lead a Fortune 500 company.
Ursula Burns grew up in a pretend, sheltered world on the lower east side of Manhattan. A world her mother carefully controlled to hide their poor reality. Only when she got to school did Ursula realise her restricted circumstances. Equipped with her mother’s grit, and faced with walls of disadvantage, inequality and poverty, Ursula knew there would be no substitute for hard work.
As a child, Ursula thought engineers drove trains. She didn’t have any conception of what a career in engineering even was. When she scored unusually high on her math exams, she was urged to study engineering, and despite falling into the subject by accident, she fell in love with it. Through the love for her work, she got the attention of the right people along the path from summer intern to CEO of Xerox. People who always saw her potential, even when she couldn’t see it herself. Who always knew her next step, even before she could see it herself. Rising in the ranks, taking on assistant positions and managerial roles and everything in between, Ursula Burns, now on top, was asked to lead Barack Obama’s STEM Task Force during his presidency.
Although she insists on luck being a factor in all of her immense success, it all burns down to the engineer inside of her. Always striving to identifying problems and finding solutions. Experimenting, trying, and failing, but never giving up. And like her mother would say, “The world can’t happen to you. You have to happen to the world.” And that’s exactly what happened. Through persistence, stubbornness, and determination, Ursula Burns happened to the world.
