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Kate Agnew ’11
Kate Agnew ‘11, Senior Director of Engineering at Marriott International, leans against a dark concrete wall with her arms crossed, smiling brightly.
Kate Agnew ‘11, Senior Director of Engineering at Marriott International, leans against a dark concrete wall with her arms crossed, smiling brightly.
The moment I’m most proud of is graduating from Mac. Growing up, I saw firsthand a path I didn’t want to take, and Mac helped me find a way to make a new path for myself.
Karintha Lowe ’16

Math Major
Senior Director of Engineering, Marriott International
Women in Tech • MBA • Government • Internships • First-Gen

Growing up in really difficult circumstances, I saw firsthand a path I didn’t want to take. I knew I wanted to work up to the C-Suite in a corporate career, for the financial security, but I also wanted to make an impact for good. Mac prepared me for the kinds of interactions that would help me do both, and my Mac connections have not just helped me shape a career, they’ve helped me make a difference in my own community.

At Mac, I was involved in student government and did Study Away at NYU, which gave me work experience in New York. Internships were pivotal for me because they allowed me to sample things, and I had an internship in event planning at Best Buy my senior year. I realized that I didn’t love working in the nonprofit space, and that event planning didn’t challenge me in the ways I wanted. I got my first job after graduation through the Target rotational leadership program—in part because I could see the relationship between a math systems mindset and tech. 

I have an MBA from MIT, with a focus on data analytics. My current job involves infrastructure engineering. I manage the platforms for Marriott’s online, international network: the cloud environment for all of the infrastructure apps that make Marriott.com run.

I worked at United Healthcare during the pandemic, but I struggled with what it meant to be at a large corporation that could profit from what society was going through. I thought: how will I tell my kids or grandkids how I made the world better? That’s when I realized that one of the things I learned from Mac is that you don’t have to have all of your needs fulfilled by your job. 

Early in my career, I had joined Girls in Tech, which provides mentorship and professional career opportunities for women in technology fields. This gave me a strong feeling of giving back and making working in technology more accessible for girls. While with United Healthcare, I was invited by a Mac connection to join the Board at Laura Jeffrey Academy, a St. Paul middle-school that focuses on girls in STEM, which continued my passion of infusing technology skills into the next generation. I also got involved in local politics about ten years ago. My current project on the City Council is to create a pedestrian underpass at a very busy intersection. Success to me is not just a stable career; it’s knowing that I will have done something to make my neighborhood better, safer, and more walkable, and that impact will last for decades.

Last updated: November 2025