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This spring, Liz Bennett ’13 was hired by LinkedIn, the Silicon Valley company behind the professional networking webpage. She’s working with a team that adapts the homepages of LinkedIn and its sister program, , for mobile devices.

Bennett applied to LinkedIn at the , which provides networking and mentoring opportunities for women programmers. A double-major in bassoon and computer science, Bennett says that she’s drawn to challenges like working in this male-dominated field. “I like to defy people’s expectations,” she explains.

While at 91ֱ��, Bennett received guidance from another woman in the field: 91ֱ�� computer science professor . She took Taylor’s , and says it got her interested in the kind of work she does now at LinkedIn. “She was a big inspiration to me,” Bennett says.

Bennett also credits her success to 91ֱ��’s commitment to helping her explore her interests outside of the classroom. A co-founder of , the student-designed program that helps students navigate the course catalog and Presto, the course registration service. “I think only at 91ֱ�� would I have received so much support from the faculty and from the administration [at 91ֱ��] to allow me to make such a full-fledged website with lots of users,” Bennett says. “If it weren’t for that, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the job here.”