Marisela Cerda
Principal Engineering Manager
Microsoft Corporation
Mexican-American Marisela
Cerda, a mentor, and coach to
many women in engineering,
is the Principal Engineering Manager at
Microsoft Corporation.
For the last 17 years, Microsoft has
provided Cerda with a wealth of resources
and opportunities, and she has made the
best of it. She has worked in many roles
while at Microsoft, including Product
Marketing, Program Management,
Business Management and Service
Operations. Over the last year, Cerda stepped away from engineering to spend 12
to 18 months in developing Microsoft’s pipeline of diverse talent and helping to
evolve the culture of their division. She has been working on engineering several
solutions including an internal Rewards and Recognition program, and executing
Employee Hiring and Recruiting processes. Cerda’s next role will be working to
improve new employee onboarding for new engineers and program managers, an
opportunity she is very excited to work on.
“It has the potential of touching lots of people and helping our employees
to feel more empowered in their first 90 days at the company,” she states. “In
my spare time at work, I have been co-leading our organizations’ Women’s
community this year. This work involves providing opportunities for women in
engineering and friends of women engineering to connect, network and learn new
skills together.”
Raised in a northern California farming town to a Mexican immigrant father
and first-generation Mexican-American mother, Cerda developed an interest in
math in 4th grade. She grew to love mathematics, challenging herself to learn
more and more advanced topics and tutoring her friends and family.
“I remember watching 3-2-1 Contact, a PBS show about science, during
the summers and being inspired by the stories of astronauts and captured by the
logic of science and technology,” she shares.
At 14-years-old her parents
purchased a Windows 3.1 PC for
her studies which ignited her
curiosity and eventually led her to
choose Computer Science as her
area of study at California State
University, Chico. She graduated
with a Bachelor of Science,
Computer Science in 2001 and
began her professional career at
Microsoft Corporation. In 2008,
Cerda received a Master of
Business Administration from
Seattle University.
Other events and individuals
also drove her to pursue a career in
STEM, specifically her mother. “I
grew up hearing the following
words from my mother every day as
I left the house, “you can do anything you want, never let anyone tell you, you
can’t.” Those words stuck with me and helped me overcome any embedded
stereotypes in our society about women, math, and science,” she shares as she
recounted a few events while growing up.
“There was a family in our small town who had a son that had majored in
Computer Science and my mom talked very highly of him and his job at Hewlett
Packard. It made me think that if he could do this, so could I,” she shares. “Finally,
I noticed throughout my childhood and into my teenage years that girls and women
were not as present in my advanced math and science classes. They opted out
of physics for example. The teachers were also mostly men. I wanted to change
that and I also saw an opportunity. An opportunity to be different from the rest of
the engineers, because I am a woman and I am Latina and I can offer a unique
perspective.”
Today, Cerda is most proud of the partnerships built with Microsoft’s diverse
recruiting programs and the impact that hiring from those programs has made in
their teams.
“At Microsoft we have access to many channels of diverse candidates,
coordinating the programs with managers that have opportunities is more
challenging than one would think. It’s been hard work, but the reward is seeing
more diversity in our teams, on our campus and hearing feedback from
employees on how much value the increased diversity is adding to their teams.”
With three children under the age of nine, you can find Cerda volunteering
at local public schools or at her son’s 3rd-grade class providing coding lessons
using Code.org’s learning platforms.
“I think it’s important that girls and Latinos in the younger age groups see me
talking about computer science,” she shares. “I was raised by very traditional 1st
generation and Immigrant parents who lived the values of hard work, humility,
generosity and getting an education every day. Even though my dad did not have
a formal education, he was always learning and testing things and building. My
mom, an elementary teacher, was always making an extra effort to help the
families and kids at her school that were most in need. I carry these important
values with me every day in the work that I do at Microsoft. As a peer and
manager, I am generous with my time and make an effort to lift others up even if
it means putting some of my own work aside temporarily. While not perfect, I do
the best that I can every day; working hard and doing your best is still a highly
valued trait of any employee, manager or peer.” LS
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Marisela Cerda.
10 LATINAStyle www.latinastyle.com Vol. 25, No. 5, 2019
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