If you connected the dots leading from a Longwood Alumni Happy Hour in Arlington last fall to the three Longwood students who interned at an innovative Northern Virginia IT company this summer, you’d have a straight line of many points, each one an example of the power of the Lancer network.
The first dot would be Mya Souvandara ’22, who attended the happy hour in Arlington soon after being laid off from her first job. She struck up a conversation with Dan Hughes ’13, an Alumni Board member, telling him about the layoff and asking for his help.
Next, Hughes reached out to the IT company Plus3 IT Systems (P3), which was co-founded by fellow alum Chris Isaacs ’02. Isaacs received his Longwood degree in business/information systems and now serves as the company’s chief technical officer.
Just a week or two after the happy hour, Souvandara was contacted by P3 and introduced to Isaacs, and, in December 2022, she started her new job as a recruiter at the company. This spring, she attended a career fair at Longwood, where she met the three Longwood computer science students who interned at P3 this summer.
This goes to show that I stand by what I say: The Longwood network is so powerful, and it’s true that once a Lancer, always a Lancer.
Mya Souvandara ’22 Tweet This
“This goes to show that I stand by what I say: The Longwood network is so powerful, and it’s true that once a Lancer, always a Lancer,” said Souvandara, who majored in psychology at Longwood.
Among the many people who have benefited from that network are the three Longwood students chosen for internships at P3: Louis Iampaglia ’24, Andrew Taylor ’24 and Jacob Rowland ’23 (graduating in December). They got hands-on experience with some of the primary services offered by the company, which include expert-level Cloud adoption, Cloud security, Cloud-enabled data analytics, Cloud native application development and other innovative technology solutions. They also worked on projects that will directly benefit the company and were mentored by some of P3’s brightest Cloud engineers, developers and data scientists.
It was no accident that P3 looked for and found their summer interns at Longwood, Souvandara said.
“I have seen that Longwood students have the drive, curiosity and willingness to be leaders, and those are things that are beneficial for our company,” she said. “We are very open-minded in recruiting interns, but Chris and I both want to continue to build a strong foundational relationship with Longwood. Whether it’s recruiting interns or full-time employees, we always turn to our Longwood connections first.”
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