Coffee chat with Nitah Onsongo

This week I had a coffee chat with Nitah Onsongo, currently working as a Project Manager at Microsoft. Nitah joined Microsoft as a software engineer then transitioned into a data analyst role before joining the current team where she works as a Project Manager.

During our coffee chat, I wanted to learn about the day to day experiences of a Project Manager at Microsoft and how to utilize school experiences to prepare for a Software engineering career.

Nitah explained the role of a project manager as all responsibilities relating to developing a suitable product that will satisfy a user's need and supporting the entire product life cycle from ideation to shipping of the product. Her day-to-day experiences as a Project manager range from analyzing how users interact with different products to planning out how different product features are implemented.

With such a diversity in the tasks, Nitah emphasized the importance of taking courses outside Computer Science in other fields like Business, Mathematics, and other fields. The choice of these courses taken outside the specific field of study should be based more on how curious a student is to learn about a particular topic than on what course sounds good or taken by many students.

Since Berea College is a liberal arts college that mandates taking courses outside the major, I can utilize this opportunity to take courses in different areas that I am curious to know more about in addition to courses that directly relate to the Computer Science courses.

Furthermore, Nitah emphasized involvement in different projects that will provide long-lasting hands-on software development skills while working on projects that I am passionate about. Working on such projects also poses new challenges that I will learn to resolve, which is training for the work environment.