My name is Corrina (she/her/hers pronouns), and I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. I attended the University of California, Berkeley where I majored in Computer Science and minored in Math & Science Education. During my undergraduate journey, I was heavily involved in student organizing within the Pilipinx* community. It was through this involvement, and my first Ethnic Studies course, where I learned more about educational inequity and systems of oppression in America. I became more passionate about education, especially through taking Education courses where we got to further examine inequities embedded into the secondary school system, which I got to witness firsthand while being a TA in various classroom levels around the Bay Area.

This led to my desire to pursue a career in edtech, and so I found myself at Beyond 12, an education non-profit organization headquartered in Oakland, California that supports first-generation, low-income, and historically underrepresented students on their path to college graduation. Beyond 12 was my first job out of college, and it's where I stayed for 6 years as a Data Engineer (and eventually Senior Data Engineer). Some of the work I did involved working with ML vendors to build predictive models that would help identify students to direct additional support to by predicting their risk of dropping out of school. Ultimately, I decided to leave Beyond 12 and pursue graduate school in order to learn more sophisticated technologies and machine learning resources that we didn't have the funds for at a small non-profit.

* Pilipinx is the gender-neutral alternative to Filipino/Filipina. Pilipinx makes room for people who are trans, queer, agender, non-binary, gender non-conforming or gender fluid. Switching the F to the P celebrates identity, as we learn about the larger frame of decolonization. Source