Jennifer Arnold ’20

My internship at the Minnesota Historical Society taught me how to work with databases, refine research results, and connect information into a narrative—and those are skills most fields need.

Jennifer Arnold ’20

I’m a front-end engineer for Slack, working as part of our Admin and Trust team dedicated to empowering our Enterprise customers with best-in-class, differentiated experiences for users, admins, and buyers—all without attending a big tech school or having a Computer Science degree. I do feature-development code, handle customer bugs or escalations related to our team’s services, and see features from planning stages to delivery.

The line from a history major at Mac to this job runs through my desire to pursue the skills needed in digital humanities. In my first year, I took a fantastic public history course that included a digital humanities project partnered with the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul. I loved learning history through digital tools and developed my skills as a historian with an oral history internship at the Minnesota Historical Society. There, I did transcription work and learned how to work with databases, refine research results, and connect information to make a narrative. I discovered that being a historian is all about self-learning and picking up new skills—whether that’s mastering archival software, learning new research methodologies, or adapting to different digital tools. Those same skills translate directly into software engineering.

Parallel to this, I actively pursued opportunities to improve my technical skills, picking up new programming languages through real-world application. A Mac Connect trip to the Bay Area put me in tech spaces where I could ask lots of questions and made my goals seem more realistic. I also attended conferences for women in tech; at one, I met a recruiter who had me apply for a software engineering internship at Apple that led me to the career I have today.

At the foundation of my time at Macalester was the Bonner Scholars program, which you apply for coming out of high school. The program gave me four years of great resources that I would not have found on my own. It’s mostly students of color and/or first-gen students, and is a supportive atmosphere where week-to-week you get to see each other grow. It was here that I had support pursuing everything I desired, no matter how unique or seemingly unrelated to one another.

I attribute my success to the Bonner Scholars program and Mac’s internship and career resources, which made me comfortable actively pursuing my ambitions. At Slack, I now participate in initiatives that build on the intersection of interests, values, and skills I gained in undergrad—such as bringing in speakers on issues for underrepresented minorities in tech and being part of executive leadership teams for our Women and Latinx business resource groups. Talking in community about being multiracial in tech: that’s collaboration, it’s networking, and it’s sustaining.

Last updated: November 2025