Kate Garaffa

    Kate Garaffa ’14

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    2014

    Kate Garaffa headshot

    I graduated from Saint Michael’s in May 2014 and obtained a marketing position with Dealer.com in Burlington, VT. Having had multiple marketing internships throughout college, I thought that it was what I wanted to do. At Dealer.com I was introduced to the coding word with HTML/CSS and realized then that I wanted a career in website design.

    I moved out of Burlington and took a JavaScript development class through General Assembly and started to apply for jobs focused in website design. I then worked as a Website Designer with Propel Marketing in North Quincy, MA. Propel Marketing provides marketing services to small and medium size companies across North America.

    Currently, I am employed as the Integration Lead with SilverCloud in Portsmouth, NH. SilverCloud is a SaaS company that gives banks and credit unions the opportunity to self serve with our platform. At SilverCloud, I am responsible for creating the intranets that the banks and credit unions interact with to find their answers using HTML, CSS, React, and JQuery to make the pages interactive and functional. I thoroughly enjoy when problems arise, and I am given the opportunity to dive deep into the code to find out why.

    My time at Saint Michael’s helped me in many aspects of my career and who I have become. The connection with professors I created, thanks to small classroom sizes, helped me have a professional reference post-graduation. Although I do not use math directly in my day to day tasks, there are many positive takeaways from my degree in mathematics. The reinforcement of different computer programs in different courses helped me obtain an attention to detail necessary for coding. The rigorous curriculum the math department demands has helped me persevere through any problem faced at work by figuring out what the issue is and creating a step by step plan to solve/fix it. I owe a huge thanks to the Saint Michael’s community for giving me the opportunity to become who I am today.