This week, we welcome Jennifer Reed, a Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to sit down and share her amazing story. After Jennifer graduated high school, she immediately went into Marine Corps training, which she shared was a shock to her because she was the only woman when she got out into the fleet and every single place that she went. She eventually moved on from the military after learning some programming tools, and went into the financial services industry doing systems engineering. She got called back to active duty, and then afterwards landed at AWS. She shares that being a woman in this industry can be challenging at time, but she says "I do feel, um, good about the things I've overcome, but I also don't want it to be so hard for the next person, if that makes sense. I don't want them to have to have those same struggles to kind of overcome any perceptions that someone might have due to their their gender or their background." We thank Jennifer for sharing her story with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices