- Lexisnexis Scholar and Engineering Mentee and Her Three Sisters Break the Mold
As we start Women’s History Month, we’d like to spotlight a family that’s making history by challenging the norm and embracing disruption, head on. Four sisters, four career changers to the field of software engineering – from marketing, from school administration, from member services, and from the insurance industry.
The Stewart family sisters – Jeanette O’Brien, Keanya Phelps, KarenElaine Stewart, and Shawna Cooper – have all taken part, or will be joining, in Shawna’s case later this month, Momentum’s immersive full stack engineering program to change careers to become full-time career software engineers. Momentum’s program offers those interested in a new career in tech the opportunity to undertake an immersive coding bootcamp geared towards the most in-demand skills and technologies in today’s market. Momentum has an all-female leadership team and is a recognized and well-respected source of technology talent and training for businesses and individuals nationwide.
The dedication to learning, development, and growth in the engineering field runs deep in the Stewart family. The only brother in the family, James Stewart, PhD, recently earned his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering and was awarded the Black Engineer of the Year (BEYA) as a Modern-Day Technology Leader after his nomination by the United States Navy, and their father is a retired software engineer.
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“As Black women ranging in age from 34 to 51, with different levels of education and diverse professional backgrounds, changing our careers at this stage in our lives is definitely risky and it takes courage. But my family and I support, challenge and inspire each other to continuously grow into our best selves and to be the best in our fields. We’re proud to be recognized as trailblazers, and we hope to encourage others to pursue their dreams,” said KarenElaine.
The Stewart sisters are already leveraging their experience with Momentum and software engineering, and writing their story for their futures in technology:
Jeanette O’Brien graduated from the second Momentum cohort in 2018 and is now a software engineer on the Ansible team at Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of enterprise open-source solutions. Prior to joining the Ansible team, Jeanette sought to pay her coding skills forward by teaching four Momentum cohorts and continues to play a role as a mentor for current students, including sister KarenElaine. Sister Keanya Phelps graduated Momentum in February and was immediately asked to join Caktus Consulting Group, an employee-owned web development agency based in Durham.
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A third sister, KarenElaine Stewart, is midway through the full-stack Momentum program as a LexisNexis scholar, mentored by engineering leadership of the foremost global provider of legal, regulatory and business information and analytics.
“We are enormously proud of Jeanette, Keanya, and KarenElaine and look forward to welcoming Shawna to the Momentum program! This extraordinary family is an inspiration to us all,” said Momentum CEO Jessica Mitsch.
As the fourth sister, Shawna Cooper, joins Momentum’s upcoming March 21st full-stack engineering programming course, the entire Stewart family is well-aware of the source of their inspiration. When asked about where she draws her inspiration from, Keanya shared, “We recently lost our sister, Kenyattah, to sickle cell anemia and our mother, Doris, to Covid. Both of them, in their own ways, constantly reminded us to aspire for better, aspire for more and to disrupt the norm! I can speak for all of my siblings in saying that our inspiration comes from them.”