From Rural Mexico to Cybersecurity Success: Estela Baca’s Inspiring Career Journey | Ep037

Episode Information Show Notes What does it take to transform from a farm girl in rural Mexico to a cybersecurity solutions engineer at a leading tech company? In this episode, Estela Baca shares her remarkable journey of defying expectations, overcoming setbacks, and building a thriving career in technology. Estela’s story begins in Teziutlán, Mexico, where she grew up with her grandmother in a family where education wasn’t expected for women. After moving to Los Angeles at 15 without speaking English, she navigated high school, earned a computer science degree (while pregnant), and eventually found her way into cybersecurity through marketing and technical roles. Key Topics Discussed: – Early Life and Foundation – Educational Journey – Career Development – Professional Growth Strategies – Cybersecurity Transition – Life Lessons and Philosophy – Networking and Community Key Quotes: – “Action conquers fear” – “Every time somebody tells me no, something switches in my brain” – “I refuse to call it imposter syndrome. It’s the real deal syndrome” – “You can literally start as a marketer and end up as a VP if you understand transferable skills” Resources Mentioned: – “The DevelopHer Playbook” by Lauren Hasson – “Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport – Google Analytics and digital marketing certifications – Local networking groups and tech communities About the Guest: Estela Baca is a Solutions Engineer specializing in cybersecurity and log management. She leads employee resource groups, volunteers in her local tech community, and mentors others looking to break into technology. Her expertise spans digital marketing, technical account management, and cybersecurity solutions. Connect with Estela: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estela-baca-07b02b6b/ Episode Highlights: This conversation offers practical insights for anyone considering a career change, breaking into tech, or looking to advance in cybersecurity. Estela’s story demonstrates that non-traditional backgrounds can become significant advantages when combined with determination, strategic thinking, and continuous learning. Whether you’re just starting your career journey or looking to make your next move, this episode provides actionable strategies for professional growth, relationship building, and turning challenges into opportunities. Subscribe to Career Downloads: Available on all major podcast platforms. New episodes release every Tuesday featuring real conversations with technology professionals who share their career journeys, lessons learned, and practical advice for professional success. Transcription Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their background and their experiences, to help uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Estela Baca and I had followed her on LinkedIn, saw a lot of the posts, a lot of what she was doing, kind of dug into her background. Eventually I reached out to her and she was very gracious and decided to come on and share her experiences. So I’m very excited, she has a very interesting background, there’s a lot of challenges there and there’s gonna be a lot of good information and a lot of good storytelling for you to kind of listen and learn along the way. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Estela. Estela: Hi, Manny. Manuel: Hello. Again, I appreciate you coming in and talking about your experiences and kind of how you’ve managed your career over time. So if you wouldn’t mind just telling us kind of what your current role is and some of those responsibilities and we’ll take it from there. Estela: Perfect, sounds good. Well, again, Estella Baca, I am currently a solutions engineer for a company that does log management or what some of the people call a SIEM. And some of the main things that I do on a daily is talk to our customers, find their pain points. And for those of you that don’t know what a log management tool is, everything that we use nowadays produces a log. There’s data everywhere, right? Or cell phones or a fit watches, even the TV shows that we watch, right? Everything has data. So the power of data comes when knowing how to leverage that data. So that’s where our SIEM tool comes in. And sometimes before you buy a product, you have to talk to somebody to kind of let them know exactly what is it that you’re looking for. And so that’s where my role comes in, right? My role is mainly talk to our customers and find out what is it that they’re looking for, what problems are they trying to solve in a day to day, how do they manage those massive amounts of data that they have. And in a nutshell, pretty much I helped them discover do they have a small problem, a bigger problem? And realistically, how do they turn their problems into nothing but solutions to get their data and do the most they can with it and grow their businesses, right? Or solve the problems in the long run. My specialty is in cybersecurity. Nevertheless, I do help a lot of our customers to bring in our data for business operations, IT management, application development, and even the IT of things. So it’s just the funny thing about data. You can bend it, twist it, turn it, whatever. It almost reminds me of that game we used to have back in the days, they bump it, twist it, turn it, bump it. And our platform is a lot like a Lego piece, right? So you have a big platform where you have your Lego sets and you can build whatever you want with it. You can have a big city or you can probably have a scene from Star Wars. It’s just what do you wanna do with that data? That’s the easiest way I can think about it. And so my job is to come in and talk to our customers, make them feel comfortable and make them feel like they can find a solution they need with our products. Manuel: I like the way that you kinda analyze it and kind of explain that for people who may, again, may not be familiar with what a SIEM tool or understanding that everything has a log, right? There’s data and everything. So now I’d like to go back and really kind of understand where you grew up and then eventually kind of what led you into technology and kind of what your first experiences were with technology and kind of made you continue on down that path. Estela: So I originally was born and raised in Mexico in a tiny town called Teziutlan, which I’m gonna say it in our language, Tesiútio te Petzintla, is in Puebla in Mexico. And so our town is a very small town, my family. I come from a very large family. The people in my family did not go to school. My grandmother doesn’t know how to read. I think my dad only went to middle school. My mom barely made it to, I think, like sixth grade, right? And so education was not a thing for us, especially being a female our role as being a homemaker and a mother. And so when I was growing up, I grew up with my grandmother, which was great. I think we call her, some people call her Dr. Grandma. But to the point, I grew up with my grandmother and my mom loved reading. My mom and my dad loved reading. And if there’s one thing I do remember for the short period of time that I lived with my parents is we used to always read at night. And I was a small, I was probably two, three years old. And I think very vaguely, I remember that the thing we used to do together as a family was go to bed and not watch TV because we didn’t have money for TV, let’s be honest. And so we will grab books, right? And I didn’t know how to read, but my mom had her book, my dad had her book, but I do remember seeing them reading all the time. And so when I moved with my grandmother, we had this huge collection of encyclopedias. Back in the 80s, encyclopedias were like that thing to have, right? It’s like having a dictionary, like having an iWatch today, everybody had one, right? It’s a need. And so my grandmother to me, because I was very hyperactive, I have always been a talker. And so if I didn’t have something to do, I’ll be bouncing off the walls. Or I’d be like, “Grandma, do this, do that.” She didn’t have the time for that. So she will say, or if she would find me sitting on the couch and I was bored, she’d be like, “Oh, you’re bored?” And I’d be like, “Yeah, okay, go pick up that encyclopedia and read something.” And I’d be like, “Oh my God.” And so I was afraid to ever say I was bored because either it was either you go read or you go clean something. And so I was like, “Oh, I sometimes have a much rather clean than read, but it will depend, right?” And so it was through that that my grandmother, my grandmother, my mom and my dad taught me that reading was a scape goat, right? Like if you didn’t wanna just do something bad, like I didn’t wanna do the dishes, I will definitely read that encyclopedia. But then if I didn’t wanna read that encyclopedia, I will go and clean up something. So nowadays if I’m really stressed out, I either read or I clean. (both laughing) I don’t know but it always happens, right? And so while I was growing up, I hear a lot of kids, their parents talk about when you’re gonna go to college or when you go to college. That wasn’t even in my books. I mean, first of all, I never thought I was smart enough. Second of all, female, like what am I gonna do in school, right? And so growing up with my grandmother, she taught me how to be a farmer, right? Like we had chickens and pigs and I was like, “Oh, my life is gonna be, I’m gonna be a farmer. I’m gonna have some chickens. I’m gonna have some pigs and children.” I don’t know. But I will be a really good farmer because I was really good with pigs, right? So a little did I know when my mother left me with my gran...