Bucking a Trend in Tech

At eight months pregnant, Rebecca Hanley moved north to Vermont, planning to raise her daughter on her own. “It’s very hard to navigate life as a young single mother, and I struggled a lot with just ‘how am I going to take care of this child?’” she shared. “But I had so many people within the community that just really came to my aid, and the opportunities for single mothers here were just amazing.” One of those opportunities was the chance to finish something she’d started years earlier: a college education.

“I’d always been extremely determined to go back to school, and it just had to come at the right time,” she said. When she moved to Vermont, Hanley had been three courses away from completing her bachelor’s degree. “For me, having a college degree, for a really long time it felt like something that just wasn’t going to happen. I had gone to school, I had failed, I was going to have this half-finished degree. For me it was more being stubborn, but I also wanted to get into a job field that not only needed a degree but needed a master’s.” Also, she wanted to be a role model for her young daughter. “I wanted my daughter to see how hard I was working.”

When COVID hit, she finally had the window she needed to return to school, and she started taking classes at CCV in the summer of 2020.

“CCV just was perfect for me,” she said. The online class format made it possible for her to continue working and caring for her daughter. “I had an advisor who was amazing. I don’t think I would have been able to finish CCV without her. She was one of my biggest cheerleaders.” Rebecca excelled at CCV, joining both the international honor society Phi Theta Kappa and CCV’s Student Advisory and Leadership Council, and was awarded one of the College’s annual Leadership Scholarships. She also discovered a new and surprising passion: IT. “I didn’t expect myself to be studying computer science—it was kind of out of left field. I did it to try to finish my bachelor’s degree and ended up really loving [it], and that’s how I got the job I have now.”

Today, Rebecca is a systems engineer at Middlebury College, where she spends her time working closely with faculty, students, and staff in the science departments, making sure everything is running smoothly and helping to troubleshoot issues as they arise. “I come from a philosophy background, where everything is very theoretical,” she says. “And with computers, there are a lot of different issues that I have to solve on a day-to-day basis, but they’re problems that have an answer. It’s like solving a puzzle, and it keeps my brain really active all the time. And I love that.”

And as a female computer scientist, she’s bucking a persistent trend in IT and across STEM fields. “I do think there is this stigma with IT, that it’s not a woman’s world,” says Hanley. “We’re trying to get a lot more women involved in STEM and we can do it. We’re just as good as the boys, if not better sometimes,” she says with a laugh. Importantly, she emphasized that she has felt extremely supported both as a student at CCV and an employee at Middlebury. “I have not felt that my gender has gotten in the way of how people view me professionally. The amount of support that I’ve received from classmates, teachers, and then coworkers has been incredible.”

Rebecca did eventually complete her bachelor’s degree in 2022, the same year that earned two credentials from CCV: an IT service desk certificate and an associate degree in IT. CCV has been expanding its IT programs in response to a growing need for skilled workers tech. One of those programs is a new certificate in data analytics & AI, which launched this fall. And where enrollment in CCV’s IT programs is traditionally only about 20% female, enrollment in the new certificate is 60% female.

Hanley is one former student who is celebrating that shift. “Women for so long have been confined in this box…like women are not supposed to work ‘male’ jobs; we’re not supposed to work with computers, not supposed to work with lab equipment. But we are supposed to do that. We’re supposed to fly rockets into space and write code, and I feel like there’s this kind of paradigm shift in the last few years where I’m seeing so many more women going into these fields and being really loud about it, and I love that.”

Learn more about CCV’s tech programs this weekend at the Vermont Tech Jam, an annual career expo that brings together hundreds of Vermonters who want to grow their knowledge and skills.