Ursula Burns: From summer intern to chief executive of the same firm
Raised by a single mother on a housing estate in Manhattan, she joined Xerox as a summer engineering intern in 1980. In 2009 she became its chief executive.
The Lower East Side
Ursula Burns was born in 1958 and grew up in public housing on the Lower East Side of New York. Her mother raised three children alone, running a home day care and cleaning to pay for Catholic school.
An intern at 22
She studied mechanical engineering in Brooklyn and in 1980 took a summer internship at Xerox, which then helped pay for her master's degree at Columbia. She joined full time as an engineer.
Speaking up
She became known for asking blunt questions in meetings. One senior executive, instead of being offended, made her his executive assistant, and she spent years learning how the whole company worked, not just engineering.
What came of it
In 2009 she became chief executive of Xerox, the first Black woman to lead one of the largest 500 companies in the United States. Her memoir is called Where You Are Is Not Who You Are.
She stayed with one employer for nearly three decades and kept taking on work outside her original role. Internships and assistant jobs can be a route to the top, not a dead end.
Where the facts come from: Ursula Burns, Where You Are Is Not Who You Are (2021); Profile, Xerox press releases, 2009.
