Isabelle Rogner grew up in the small town of Lewisburg, West Virginia. In 2016, she was about to graduate from Marshall University with a degree in international business and happened to attend a small meeting with a couple student leaders and Brad Smith, who at the time was the CEO of Intuit. The meeting ended early and as people filtered out she noticed that Smith wasn't in a rush to leave and was "kinda standing around". Not really knowing Smith, or the size of the company he ran in Silicon Valley, Rogner asked him if he needed any directions or help. He said since their meeting ended early, he was just killing time until his next meeting.  In Isabelle's words, "So being the hungry college student I was, I told him I was going to go get a burger in the dining hall and asked if he wanted to come along. He said sure."  Before lunch was over, Smith asked Isabelle to come work for him at Intuit. The company's recruiters called for an interview a few days later, and after graduating in May, the girl from small-town West Virginia started at one of Silicon Valley's most respected and successful companies.

Today, Isabelle is one of five product managers for Intuit's flagship program, QuickBooks.  She recently did a Zoom video-conference with fifteen of our students.  This is what she had to say.