How one ITS grad secured a job at Microsoft
Payge Winfield is a ’17 ITS graduate currently working at Microsoft as a security engineer. Sat in a Microsoft office in Seattle, WA, and using the Microsoft TEAMS interface, Winfield retells how she haphazardly made her way into the third largest technology company in the world.
Growing up, Winfield never thought that engineering or technology careers were an option. Her mother has a Ph.D. in pulmonary lung health, and other family members were primarily nurses or teachers. One of the first times Winfield was introduced to technology systems was by her great-great uncle. For kindergartners at a science museum, it isn’t likely to expect someone so young to figure out the intricacies of electrical circuits — but Winfield did.
By the time high school came around, Winfield was interested in the vocational programs’ presentation day held in her school’s auditorium. After listening to each presentation, Winfield was given a piece of paper and asked to check which three avenues interested her the most. She chose culinary, “because I like to cook”, “cosmetology because it sounds cool” and technology, because “I was in the auditorium with my boyfriend at the time…”
Her future teacher, Roy Pignatiello, encouraged Winfield to continue with the Cisco Networking Academy Program because she was an honors student enrolled in AP courses and also a member of the school’s robotics club. Cisco was a two-year commitment that Winfield decided she would complete because of her experience in mechanical building.
“I built things with my dad,” says Winfield. “We would put radio systems in the car, we would change brake pads on the car. So, we did more mechanical type stuff.”
The Cisco program courses taught Winfield the basics of technology and networking, and Pignatiello had connections at the McClure School and motivated his students to apply to Ohio University. Four out of the ten students in Winfield’s graduating class from Cisco went on to attend Ohio University.
Winfield is an avid learner, and she enjoyed making the most of the course offerings at OU which coincidentally led her to the security side of ITS. She wanted to add an economics minor on top of her computer science and business minors, but she also had to finish three electives for her major. With the semester coming to an end, Winfield was left with few course options and filled her two electives with a cryptography and a security course.
“That's where I discovered the security space and then realized I liked it,” says Winfield. “I didn't pursue it more fully until a little bit later, but it was always in the back of my mind after taking those courses.”
The collaborative-based courses the McClure School offers its students did not go without immense appreciation from Winfield.
“[I] got to engage with the students, which, at least for me, helps me learn by bouncing ideas off of other people, hearing what other people's train of thought is for particular problems,” says Winfield.
Winfield had a myriad of different internship positions at Rockwell Automation throughout her time at OU and beginning her senior year of high school. Her guidance counselor at the time, Karen, proposed Winfield gain hands-on experience at the company her husband, Marzell, worked at — Rockwell Automation. With her school days packed full of eight classes and a part-time after school job at Chick-fil-A, Winfield never finished the application.
Winfield was working the drive-thru line one day after school, a position she rarely had, when Marzell just so happened to have a craving for the beloved food chain. Winfield’s nametag caught Marzell’s eye because of its unusual spelling, and he connected the dots that she was the potential intern Karen told him about. He gave her his phone number and made sure she filled out the internship application immediately.
“[People] always ask ‘How did you get into tech?’ and I’m like ‘It’s a very non-traditional way how all of these decisions just so happened’ because I am a very go-with-the-flow person,” says Winfield.
The Early Development Internship Program at Rockwell Automation is multifaceted and offers students internships from late high school until their senior year of college. Winfield completed a six-month Co-Op her junior year at OU and had lots of different learning experiences on testing teams and customer response teams — where she found her passion in cybersecurity.
Upon graduation, she received a job offer from Rockwell and was a LDP Associate for five months until she traveled to San Francisco to attend the AfroTech convention. Winfield was interested in entrepreneurship and leadership seminars, as she was in the process of building her own startup company.
In between sessions, she found the Microsoft booth to enter a raffle to win the latest X-Box. Unknowingly, Winfield started talking to the General Manager of mixed reality at Microsoft and the two discussed her work experience, her startup and her interests in a technology career. They swapped contact information, and the GM sent Winfield’s resume to others at Microsoft. The GM also set up a “chat” for Winfield and a team member at Microsoft that turned out to be a phone interview. Two weeks later, Microsoft flew her out for another interview.
Now, as a Microsoft security engineer, Winfield continues her passion to learn and grow in her field — always eager to deepen her knowledge. She just recently enrolled in New York University’s cybersecurity master’s program and is interested in researching the applicability of a potential Ph.D. for her career.
The McClure School of Emerging Communication Technologies strives to offer the best academic programs in the IT (Information Technology), the game development and the Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) industries. Our programs and certificates cover numerous aspects of the rapidly changing industries of information networking, cybersecurity, data privacy, game development, digital animation and the academic side of esports.