Brenda Najjuma

“Ambitious” and “overachiever” are words that have been used to describe Brenda Najjuma. They’re also traits that have gotten her where she is today. Brenda is a computer science student at Wilbur Wright College and a summer intern at Fermilab. She’s been accepted into the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Engineering Pathways Program for the fall 2023 cohort and one day wants to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Brenda says Wright College has played a role in her success thus far.

Brenda arrived in the U.S. from Uganda in September 2018. She enrolled in a program that promised her a job, but that job didn’t align with her future goals. A friend of Brenda’s suggested she try Wright College and told her the staff there would help her enroll. Brenda has always loved math, science, and computers, so pursuing computer science was a perfect fit.

At Wright, Brenda found support that made her journey to success a little easier. Professor and Dean of the Center of Excellence for Engineering and Computer Science Dr. Doris Espiritu and the engineering team at Wright provided Brenda with guidance and tutoring. One Million Degrees, a student support organization, paid for tutors and connected her to life coaches and professional networks. The college’s Wellness Center offered support and counseling, and her professors were constantly supportive. Networking and internship opportunities were also readily available to Brenda.

“I opened my email, and it said someone from Fermilab is going to talk to you about the internships available there, so I applied,” Brenda said.

For her application, Brenda wrote about how she balances life and school with her son, why she went back to school, and how an English paper helped her discover her passion: AI and machine learning.

Brenda’s essays and letters of recommendation from her professors secured her spot in the summer internship at Fermilab, a United States Department of Energy laboratory. She’s spending the summer learning from accomplished physicists and engineers from around the world who have decades of experience. She’s tasked with upgrading, fixing bugs, and designing new features of a system physicists use to store and retrieve data from experiments.

“At Fermilab, I have met geniuses,” she said. “These people are so intelligent. Sometimes I get imposter syndrome and think, ‘These people are too intelligent. I don’t belong here.’ But they looked at my application, and they knew I belonged here.”

It was also slightly intimidating for Brenda to enter a field historically populated with mostly men. But Brenda’s internship supervisor is setting a strong example in her department of what knowledge and hard work can bring.

“I’m learning HTML and JavaScript from my supervisor,” she said. “I am building my resume and confidence, and I have strong references and recommendations from this professional network.”

Eventually, Brenda wants to focus on AI and how it can help doctors and patients. She discovered doctors don’t always have easy access to data to help treat patients with rare or serious illnesses. It’s her goal to use AI to create a central database to store medical plans that would save lives. She also wants to serve as an inspiration for other Black women in science, technology, engineering, and math.