CRISTINA JOHN |
4/1/2021, midnight
Darlene Shamsid-Deen
Contributed
Darlene Shamsid-Deen knows what it means to balance family and work. As a woman who worked at IBM Corporation for 35 years, Shamsid-Deen created a life for herself, one where seeing a Black woman working at a corporation was still a surprise.
“First, let me say that I have been very blessed by our Creator to have had many extraordinary experiences in my life,” says Shamsid-Deen. “Working for IBM was one of them. In the mid-1980s, I was married with children when I started at IBM.”
Shamsid-Deen worked as a secretary, which she mentions was her strongest skill set at the time. However, she didn’t stay in that box for long. Shamsid-Deen dropped out of college in her earlier years, but she had the resilience to go back and take college courses at night and weekends to work on her degree in Management Information Systems. This type of degree at the time was new as computers were just beginning to take hold in society.