官员 attributes her career success to the educational foundation she built at GBCC from 2005 to 2007.
It didn’t take long for Katrice 官员 to go from feeling helpless to feeling hope, 感谢冰球突破豪华版试玩.
官员, 34, was recently hired for a Senior Manager position overseeing cell therapy manufacturing at biotech giant Bristol Myers Squibb in 质量achusetts. She attributes her career success to the educational foundation she built at 冰球突破豪华版试玩 from 2005 to 2007.
官员 was not a great student in high school and came from a family without a background in education. Her primary responsibilities growing up involved helping her single mother, 他打两份工, 抚养她的两个妹妹. 在高中时, her family moved from apartment to apartment almost every year, and 官员 worked outside the house to earn money.
“高中对我来说真的很难. I didn’t have a sense of focus and wasn’t held accountable until the teachers started calling home and said, “卡特丽丝没有做作业.’ But I didn’t see the value of doing homework or being present,”她说。.
That changed when a chemistry teacher at Newmarket High School identified 官员’s aptitude for science and encouraged her to participate in pre-college biotechnology science program presented by Great Bay, enabling her to take college-level classes as a high school senior.
She enjoyed the class and enrolled at Great Bay after graduating high school, becoming the first in her family to graduate from high school “at the right time and go to college at the right time,”她说。, noting that her mother earned her GED in her late 20s.
Great Bay changed her life and her ambitions.
Prior to Great Bay, she worked as a camp counselor and in the fast-food industry. “Great Bay gave me the real-world view of what was available locally. Plus, I didn’t have to live on campus in a different state or have to travel very far,”她说。. “Great Bay introduced a lot of life skills I wish the high school would have provided me.”
She quickly understood that success in biotechnology would mean a career with a good salary and the opportunity for a quality of life that had once felt unattainable. At Great Bay, she said, “they explained biotech is such a way that showed me the light. 我已经迈出了第一步, learned the basics and then realized the future could be anything I wanted it to be,”她说。. “他们描绘了我的职业道路.”
有动力把事情做好, 官员学会了有效的学习习惯, 取得好成绩, and landed an internship at international bioscience company Lonza, 在佩斯贸易港附近. At Lonza, she worked in every department two weeks at a time. “I saw everything from the bottom up at age 18. I was introduced to a whole world of possibilities. I made it my mission to get hired at any level I could after I finished my studies.”
她做得比那好. Lonza hired her as a nighttime operator before she graduated with her associate of science degree from Great Bay in 2007. “我每个星期五都工作, Saturday and Sunday night and did school during the week so I could finish school and get hired full time. None of that would have happened if not for Great Bay,”她说。.
两年后, 官员 progressed from feeling hopeless in high school to feeling enthusiastic about her life and career, 她从未回头. 她在龙沙工作了12年, moving through the ranks from “doing everything on the floor” to writing and editing technical documents that made the floor operations run more smoothly and then into supervisory and leadership roles.
In 2018, she left Lonza and followed her dream to California for a job as manufacturing supervisor at Kite Pharma, and came home to the East Coast with the onset of the pandemic. She continued her career as a project lead and manufacturing manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific in Cambridge, 质量., and joined Bristol Myers Squibb in Devens, 质量.， 2021年11月. At Bristol Myers Squibb, she is the senior manger in charge of cell therapy manufacturing.
在一份责任重大的工作中, her primary focus at the moment is working as project manager for a new building that is coming online at the Devens site and supporting all floor operations associated with it.
现在完全呈现在她的成功中, 官员 looks back at her life and how far she has come with both pride and amazement. “I had no stability growing up, but now I own my own house, I own my car, and I support my daughter. I never would have thought 15 years ago that I would be where I am now, 我有机会做得更多.”
事实上, 官员 is a young leader on the rise in the field that is developing answers to the pandemic and curing people of cancer at the same time.
“我的事业有保障. It’s not going away anytime soon,”她说。.
因此, she thanks 冰球突破豪华版试玩 — and one very persistent high school chemistry professor.
