An Engineer Making an Impact in Education

Jennifer Yu Cheng BS‘03 believes in the crisis of opportunity. Many of her career movements were born out of challenging times, which ultimately led her to a successful career in education. 

After graduating Columbia with a degree in industrial engineering and operations research and a minor in economics, Cheng worked for seven years in finance. She has since switched careers after serving as Executive Director of Fixed Income Currency and Commodities at Goldman Sachs Asia. 

In the midst of the financial crisis in 2008, Cheng found her passion in the education sector, co-founding ARCH Education, ARCH Community Outreach and now serves as Group President and Deputy Vice Chairwoman of CTF Education Group. She continued her impact in education by founding the JYC Girls Impact Foundation (JYCGIF), an initiative that educates and inspires teenage girls to become “future ready leaders” by empowering students to be proactive, digitally savvy women leaders who leave a major local and global footprint. 

We talked to Cheng, who is a member of Columbia Engineering's Board of Visitors, about her time after Columbia Engineering, and what led her from a leadership position in finance to her passion for education and supporting the next generation of women in STEM.

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How did your time at Columbia Engineering impact your career?

Looking back, my entire career has been about turning challenges into opportunities. As a rising sophomore, I was really lucky that I had a summer internship at Goldman Sachs, which got me interested in finance. The internship propelled me into the industry at a time where many students in engineering, regardless of what major they pursued, were going into finance or management consulting. 

The first “challenge-to-opportunity” happened while I was a rising senior year and looking for internships. 9/11 happened, leading me to pivot and relocate to Hong Kong. I found a finance job, which ended up being a wonderful experience, and I spent about seven years in finance.

You went from an executive director in finance to becoming an educator - why the career shift?

My second “challenge-to-opportunity,” which led into my current career in education, would be the 2008 financial crisis - the credit crisis - which literally happened overnight.

That’s really when I paused to think about my career. I just happened to get a finance internship my freshman year at Columbia, and that started my finance career path up through 2008. However, I never paused to really think about whether this is the industry for me. 

I took some time to think deeply about what I like to do and enjoy doing; this brought me to teaching. I like education; I think it creates a significant impact. So it became a nine month journey in 2008-2009, to think about how I want to make that impact. 

At that time, due to the nature of the trading floor in finance, it became pretty evident that there’s a need for a very adaptable workforce. I felt that high school students coming from the education pipeline, especially from where I’m from, could have more support to bridge into the workplace. I became really interested in how to enrich students' learning, and build their capacities and skills.

What is the mission behind the JYC Girls Impact Foundation?

With the backdrop of COVID, it again became really evident how fast and how rapidly industries transformed, and that the current digital era is going to change jobs. 

I know that great strides have been made in terms of women in STEM, and women in leadership, but there's still a gap. And in Hong Kong, many of the top universities are still only seeing about 20 - 30% girls in STEM majors. I felt compelled to start the foundation because there was urgency to bridge that gap. 

My team and I decided to target teen girls rather than outreach to university students because that's the opportunity to make the greatest change. As a high school student, if you’re not picking some of these more advanced math and science subjects, it would preclude you from even meeting minimum requirements to go into STEM at a university. We commissioned a research survey to understand why these girls were not pursuing some of these subjects: it came down to confidence and not seeing other role models in these industries. It also came down to not understanding these job opportunities that might be out there in the future, so they gravitate to pathways that they were more familiar with. 

So with that information, I started the JYC Girls Impact Foundation, by really looking at the first step of intervention: inspiration. We needed the girls to start believing in themselves by meeting women leaders that they may not normally have access to, and help them build that confidence. Seeing is believing! 

Tell us more about the foundation.

We start with summits or talks in schools, but inspiring the students isn’t enough - It follows with other programs that they can take part in. Digital readiness is a core of what we do, from workshops to multi-session programs on coding languages students should at least understand. From there we have girls coding “plus” programs - “plus” being the competencies that our future talent would need to navigate the digital AI era. Some of these competencies that we're talking about are collaboration, communication, leadership, and problem solving. 

We have very strong partnerships and work with about 60 schools in Hong Kong on our different programs. We've reached over 3,000 students so far.

What inspires your work to empower young girls in Asia to become future leaders in STEM?

I remember one of the students I met, who was one of the first students in our pilot summer outreach program. A year later, I got to meet her again at our second stage follow-up programs. It was so wonderful that, because of our summer program, she had opened up her perspective on the possibilities. The following fall at school, she was inspired to start putting herself out there and to try different things at school, whether it was clubs or leadership roles. I could really see by the second year that the program gave her the confidence to step out of her comfort zone, and do a little bit more in science and engineering. 

I've also heard stories where students went back and started their own STEM and coding clubs at their schools. It really is the interaction of the students and seeing that, it could just be one summit, one workshop, one event that is that spark for them to make that change and to be able to continue to develop on their future ready journey. That is what inspires the work that we do.

What advice would you give to our students?

Don't be afraid to explore and to do something that's not the originally planned path. 

You never know where life is going to take you. I would stay positive, but also, don't be afraid to take that road less traveled.