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Claudia’s first reaction to the Serverfarm office wasn’t about the work. It was the snacks.
“I was like, wait, I can just have one? Are you sure?” she laughs. “It’s a whole different culture you have to get used to. A whole different language you have to learn.”
It’s a small detail, but it says something bigger. Claudia is the first in her family to graduate college. She grew up in a low-income community in Los Angeles, and the version of a corporate office she’d built in her head – distant executives, rigid hierarchy, a place you don’t quite belong unless you already know how it works – wasn’t what she found when she walked in.
“Everyone’s kind of put their head down, they’re busy,” she says. “But then at lunch, everyone would just come together and talk. It didn’t feel like scary corporate. You didn’t feel out of place.”
That mattered more than it might sound. For a first-generation student, showing up to any office for the first time comes with a hidden syllabus nobody hands you – how to talk to senior leadership, what “networking” actually looks like in practice, what you’re allowed to ask for. Claudia didn’t have that playbook walking in. She built it at Serverfarm, one conversation at a time.
The moment that stuck with her most wasn’t a project or a presentation. It was meeting Liliana, a woman on the accounting team.
“In the accounting field, you don’t really see a lot of women, if I’m being honest – it’s a very male-dominated field. And on top of it, you don’t really see a lot of Hispanic women,” Claudia says. “So when I first saw her, I was kind of shocked. I was like, there’s a Hispanic woman in a position I’d want to be in one day.”
She told Liliana as much, and the two ended up working closely together for the rest of the internship. Liliana would block out time for her every week – not because it was part of anyone’s job description, but because she remembered what it felt like to be the only one.
“Especially as a woman, stepping into a corporate office is scary,” Claudia says. “With my background, first-generation, you’re kind of like – I don’t know the protocol here, I don’t know what makes me stand out. It was a lot of honest conversations, and I’m glad I got to have them with someone I could relate to, and who could relate to me.”
It’s not just her impression. Women make up just 20% of the workforce across the tech industry overall, according to CBRE’s 2025 Scoring Tech Talent report. And Hispanic and Latino Americans – now roughly 20% of the U.S. population and the country’s fastest-growing demographic group – account for just 10.8% of certified public accountants nationally, per industry workforce data. Seeing someone like Liliana in a senior accounting role wasn’t just encouraging. It was rare.
Claudia is currently a senior at California State University, Dominguez Hills, studying accounting and business. She got there by a longer road than most of her peers.
She was accepted to schools she’d dreamed of attending, but the cost put them out of reach. Instead, she started at community college and transferred into a four-year program – a path that saved money but added an extra year before graduation. Even the smaller costs added up: campus events that cost money to attend, transportation, books, the basic math of showing up and being able to participate.
Access to financial support for students like her has also narrowed in recent years, making the path even harder for the next wave of first-generation and low-income students – particularly those hoping to continue on to graduate school.
None of that is background noise to her story. It’s the reason the internship mattered as much as it did. “A lot of first-generation students – it’s already hard just to get your foot in the door,” she says. “It’s a challenge to even get to school, let alone graduate. There are already obstacles built against you.”
When Serverfarm offered her a full-time role, her first call was to her mom.
“I didn’t believe it until I had it in writing,” she says. “I kept thinking I just got lucky – I was at the right place at the right time. It took me a while to realize, no, this was actually your hard work.”
But the story doesn’t end there. Before she signed, she received a competing offer from another company. Rather than quietly walking away, she went back to her manager, Chris, Serverfarm’s controller, and asked to reopen the conversation.
“I told him, I got another offer, I’m considering it, but I really like it here – can we talk about what full-time could look like,” she says.
What followed wasn’t a counteroffer negotiation in the usual sense. “He sat with me and talked to me like a mentor, not like someone trying to influence me,” she says. “He asked what I wanted my career to look like, what spaces I wanted to be in. He talked to me like a person, not a number.”
That conversation is what kept her at Serverfarm – not the compensation on the table, but the sense that someone was actually invested in where she’d end up. She signed, called her mom back, and took her out to celebrate. “I was like, Mommy, whatever you want, it’s on me.”
Claudia is now working full-time in accounts payable, with a clear path toward a staff accountant role in the coming year – a transition her manager has already agreed to build a training plan around.
“What excites me most is being trained by my own team,” she says. “I feel like I can ask questions that maybe aren’t so dumb, and I don’t feel judged. I’m not restricted in the time I get with someone. I just turn around and say, I need support, and they say, okay, what do you need?”
She’s also become an informal ambassador for the industry itself, even outside the office. Living in Los Angeles, she’s used to hearing skepticism about data centers from friends and peers – concerns about water use, environmental impact, and community disruption.
“I completely understand the worries,” she says. “But I think we do it in a very ethical way. We’re not constantly using new fresh water for our data centers – we’re reusing our own system. We’re thinking about the communities we go into, like creating local employment in Arkansas.”
Her advice to any student considering a path like hers is simple: take the internship, even if it’s unpaid, even if it’s only for a few months. “You just need the experience,” she says. “And whatever company you choose, research who you’re working for. You need to have a good conscience going into it.”
For Claudia, that research led her somewhere she didn’t expect to find both a career and, in Liliana, a piece of herself.
Claudia Vazquez is part of Serverfarm’s ongoing internship-to-full-time pipeline. To learn more about the 2026 Serverfarm Internship Program, visit https://www.serverfarmllc.com/blog/serverfarm-2026-internship-program/ or follow along on LinkedIn.
