If Marangelis Uben could give her fellow Syracuse University students any advice, it would be that it’s OK to ask for help and take advantage of all the resources the School of Information Studies has to offer. She learned that lesson while working on a final project for IST 256.

Uben graduated from the iSchool this spring and majored in Information Management and Technology with a concentration in Cybersecurity. For her final project, she wanted to use an API, an application programming interface, to obtain data from the Spotify app. Despite her best efforts to learn more about APIs, she had trouble with her program. After hitting a wall and exhausting all other resources, she turned to her professor for help. 

“My professor was able to help me realize the issue I was having with code was not my fault. After this realization, I altered my project so that it could still resemble my original project but would not give me the issues I was having due to the bugs in Spotify’s code,” Uben said. “This project helped me realize a number of things: there is nothing wrong with asking for help, and I can persevere through any problem I have and will always figure things out no matter the problem.”

Uben became interested in information management and technology after taking a summer program called Kode with Klossy, a free coding camp for teenage girls. Uben was placed in the mobile application program and worked in a group to develop an application. 

“This program taught me how much I like technology and altered my career path,” she said. “I later found out about the iSchool and realized how much I could learn and combine multiple interests I had.”

“Some of my interest came from how technology affects society and how technology can be applied to society,” she added. “I became interested in cybersecurity because of the lack of women in the field and how many organizations suffer from cyber attacks. Cybersecurity is something that affects everyone, and it is such a broad topic that has so much information that needs to be learned.”

Since graduating, Uben is now working to complete a master’s degree in data science at the University of Southern California and plans to intern at Intel this summer. Last summer she worked at American Express as a product management intern.

While at Syracuse, Uben was president of BLISTS, the Black and Latinx Information Science and Technology Society.

“Our BLISTS organization is meant to help students of color interested in technology connect with each other while learning from each other,” she said. “We try to educate our students and offer them opportunities that they may not be aware are available to them.”

Uben is grateful for her time at Syracuse and credits many of her professors and other faculty for helping her succeed, including her counselors, academic advisor Christopher Weiss, HEOP and Trio SSS Programs Director Craig Tucker, Professor Bruce Kingma, iSchool Dean Andrew Sears and Associate Professor Renate Chancellor. 

“Syracuse is such a great place that offers their students amazing opportunities,” Uben said. 

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