Meet Priscila Guterres

Priscila Guterres graduated with a Bachelor of Computer Engineering degree from UniCEUB, Brazil in 2005. She has also earned her MBA in Project Management from FGV, Brazil in 2007 and a Post-graduate degree in Project Management from Centennial College, Canada in 2018.She is currently a Scrum Master at Accenture Canada. In her free time, Priscila enjoys travelling (for now 19 countries, 106 cities), riding motorcycles, snowboarding, hiking, scuba diving, and participating in technology meetups.

When did your love of STEM begin?

Since elementary school, my favourite thing was mathematics but my real focus was to play sports. However, due to many injuries, I gave up to be a professional volleyball player. Then I started to focus on what I need to chose to go to university. As I loved robotics at that time, I decided to go to Computer Engineering. At the beginning of my major, I realized that I love coding due to all logic and challenges involved to solve problems. So, I started to work as a developer during the day, while studying at night. As a good team player since kid due to volleyball, a natural leadership started to show up at work, so at my 21 years old I became a team lead. One year after, I was chosen to be the project manager, which made me search for the best practices on project management. So, as soon as I finished my major, I decided I wanted to continue my education in this field when I started my MBA in Project Management. The more I worked and studied about technologies, and I was seeing the results of my work helping people and companies to solve problems, my love and excitement for STEM subjects were growing. Ah, do you remember about the robotics love?! So, I realized that I really love robots, but not to make them. :-)

What is the best part about working in the field of STEM?

For me for sure is the use of technologies to help people to thrive. I love to work on projects where the objective is to provide better solutions for complex issues. For example, I worked on a project where the goal was to apply 16 million paper exams for students that want to apply for universities. To apply this exam in two days during only one weekend at the same spread in so many different environments, it was very challenged. If I missed the deadline to deliver the project on time, the impact for those students would be huge because they will need to wait one year more to enter a university. It's was a lot of pressure, but everything went well as planned. Seeing people happy with the results of your hard work, it's a really good feeling of achievement and purpose.

What advice would you give young women interested in a career in STEM?

I would like to advise young women to never stop believing in your potential in a career in STEM. This is not an exclusive career for men, the number of women in STEM is increasing each year and I'm very proud of it. If you really like to be immersed in STEM subjects, go forward and deep on it! There are many career paths that you can follow, inclusive change your focus while on this career, as I did. And please, do not listen to people that tell you that you should choose another career. Always believe in your instincts and passion! There is a huge STEM community that can support you in this decision! You can start counting on me on that! #togetherwearestronger