Age Should Not Hold You Back: Jacqueline Berger on changing careers at 35, from drilling engineering to AI and cyber defense
What does it take to walk away from a career you've already conquered and start over? Hlulani talks to Jacqueline Berger, who spent six years as a directional driller on oil rigs, including a seismic field internship in the Sahara, before reinventing herself at 35 as a data scientist now working in AI and cyber defense.
Inspired by Michelle Obama's Becoming, Jacqueline went back to school for a computer science degree as the oldest in a class of twenty-somethings. She talks about why motherhood, not the work, became her breaking point, and the part-time fight that followed. She also challenges the \"AI or die\" narrative head-on, making the case for small language models, for protecting junior developers, and for the diversity that guards against the blind spots behind faulty facial recognition.
And in a letter to her 10-year-old self, she lands on the line that gives this episode its heart.
In this episode: Vienna childhood and the chemistry lesson that started it all, the Sahara shock, life on the rigs, motherhood as the turning point, going back to school at 35, breaking into tech, challenging the AI hype, and a letter to her younger self.
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