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“I enrolled at t �������� in 2020, right before the [COVID-19] lockdown,” she said. “I had decided to go back to school since my kids were getting older. I thought it was time to set myself up to do something of my own.” 

Arreola and her husband, a Marine who works in aviation supply and logistics, were stationed at West Point when she signed up for her first term at t ��������. She had barely started the semester when she found herself home-schooling her four children while juggling a Calculus II course. Less than a year later, in the summer of 2021, her husband received orders to move to New Orleans. 

“We arrived in July, but because of COVID and the shortage of employees to move our furniture, we didn’t get our household goods immediately,” Arreola recalled. “We were camping in the house for a month and a half. I was doing my classes and homework in a camp chair with a laptop.

“Then a week after our household goods arrived, we got hit by the hurricane. We were in the house and suddenly water started coming in through the roof and our ceilings were dripping,” she said.

Hurricane Ida’s Aug. 29, 2021, landfall went into the history books as the second most destructive hurricane to hit Louisiana, surpassed only by Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in the state 16 years earlier to the day. Ida caused an estimated $75 billion in damage.

“Fortunately, I was able to let my professors know ahead of time that the storm was coming. My teacher during Hurricane Ida was very accommodating with everything. Had it not been for that, I would probably have had to drop my class, which was Advanced Programming Languages C++,” Arreola said. 

“After the hurricane, we had no power for two weeks and so much roof damage that we had to move to Houston—along with our dog—to a hotel room for three weeks,” she said.

 Temporary repairs enabled the family to return to the home, although Arreola described the period as “stressful.” Now, just as they’ve settled all the insurance claims from the damage, the family has received word that it is being reassigned to Virginia.

Nonetheless, Arreola said that, in many ways, everything has fallen into place. An IT job with a government contractor as she was studying for her degree enabled her to land a remote software developer internship earlier this year. The internship has led to the offer of a full-time job with IT consulting and services company DXC Technology after graduation this month.       

Computer science was not a logical career path for Arreola. After her children became involved in Scratch, a free computer coding project for children funded by the National Science Foundation and developed by the MIT Lab, she found herself happily sucked into the IT vortex.

“I’d never thought of computers or coding but my kids had gotten into Scratch and to learn about programming, and I found that I liked it.”

During the COVID-and-hurricane stretch, Arreola said one of the drivers that kept her going with her studies was her children.

“I always tell them that they have to keep up with their studies and keep their grades up and that education is important. So, I had to follow through,” she said. She added that her husband supported her studies in important ways, even though “he does not understand anything about computer science—it’s another language for him. But when I was stuck, he listened and that was enough for me.”

When Arreola walks at t ��������’s Winter Commencement, her children and husband will be there. 

“With graduation close, it has become real to them. They see that I did it,” she said.