Diana is currently a software engineer at Tumblr. She was in the founding class of Girls Who Code in 2012, a hackNY fellow in 2017, and was recently featured in GWC’s Sisterh>>d campaign for Day of the Girl. She has previously interned at Adobe, Qualcomm and Gilt Groupe. Last May, she became the first person in her family to graduate from college. She was born and raised in Jersey City, NJ to an immigrant single mother. She attended grade school in Westchester New York to stay with her mother who is a live-in housekeeper. She is now 22 years old and lives in New York City.
“In the 2nd grade, I was forced to move from Jersey City to the house of a wealthy family in Westchester, New York, where my mom worked as their live-in housekeeper. My life turned upside down. I was suddenly living in this huge house that my mom worked in, and we’d take the train back to Jersey City every weekend. I did this until I was 18 years old. I went from an elementary school in Jersey City where most of the students were Filipino, Black, or Latinx, to Siwanoy Elementary School, where I could count the number of non-white students on one hand. Needless to say, I didn’t fit in. I was bullied and excluded. Parents knew me as “the girl whose mom’s a housekeeper.” I actually wasn’t even allowed to go to that public school, but my mom’s boss pulled strings. What got me through it all was my mom. Every day she’d remind me that this was temporary, and that one of the ways I could get out of our situation was doing well in school. And that’s exactly what I did. I took several AP classes, got straight A’s, and landed high school internships. I clawed my way out. I’m so grateful for my mom. She taught me how to deal with people. She taught me empathy. She taught me how to work.”
