Alumna Develops Award-Winning E-Commerce Platform and Lands Job at Google
Fatema Janahi, E’22, computer engineering, MS’22, engineering management and Galante engineering business certificate, developed Palm, a fashion e-commerce platform in the Middle East and North Africa, received a 2024 Women Who Empower Innovator Award from Northeastern, and is working as a technical program manager at Google.
Growing up in Bahrain, Fatema Janahi, E’22, computer engineering, MS’22, engineering management and Galante engineering business certificate, was always interested in environmental sustainability. Inspired by dialogues on reforming economies to be less dependent on the gas and oil industry, Janahi believed she would pursue environmental science in higher education—therefore it was a surprise when she joined her after-school robotics program. Despite not being enrolled in her high school’s sole computer science class, Janahi recalls being drawn in by the Lego Mindstorm sets available to students in the lab. “It was more [of a] curiosity to begin with [as] you did not need to have [coding] knowledge,” explains Janahi. This accessibility for beginners led Janahi to attend her first local recycling-themed competition—where she qualified for an international round—and witnessed how her new hobby intersected with her primary passion.
This would not be the last time that Janahi’s curiosity and ambition would cause her to stray from an expected path. Despite not having any family who had studied abroad before, she chose to pursue her higher education over 6,000 miles away from home at Northeastern, without ever visiting Boston. She first heard about Northeastern when some representatives from the university visited her high school. After seeing photos of the Boston campus, she believed it resembled the colleges she saw in popular films growing up and instinctively knew Northeastern would be the ideal school for her.
During her first semester at Northeastern, Janahi realized she did not see herself pursuing a career in a lab environment, so she switched her major from environmental science to environmental engineering. While completing her core engineering requirements, she was enrolled in a class that included a robotics project. “I really liked the creativity that came with engineering…and I actually had to learn coding properly [which] was fun. I liked to see what I was doing move around.” Reconnecting with an abandoned area of interest caused her to make her final degree change by majoring in computer engineering. Additionally, she took advantage of a BS/MS program—today called PlusOne Program—that incorporated a master’s degree in engineering management, satisfying a collaborative aspect that was missing in her higher-level computer engineering courses.
From living in a shared space for the first time in Hastings Hall to navigating a new city, Janahi admits that she dealt with culture shock. To mitigate this, it was vital for her to find a sense of community on campus. She joined Northeastern’s Arab Student Association, which she later became president of, and the Women’s Interdisciplinary Society of Entrepreneurship, colloquially known as WISE. In WISE, she spent one semester in the WeBuild cohort. “I had an idea for a digital agency because I love marketing, and I wanted to build a platform for small businesses. Instead of people trying to find them on Instagram, I built a directory where businesses could sign up and…list their business” in a centralized place.
After she graduated from Northeastern, Janahi had to hit pause on her venture she started as part of WeBuild to focus on her first post-graduate role at Google. However, recently, she rebranded her venture as Palm with her Bahrain-based business partner. Today Palm is an “e-commerce website” where designers in the Middle East and North African region can sell fashion apparel with an emphasis on community building “to empower people to work together.” The benefits of having these businesses collaborate are that they “get exposure from each other’s audiences,” and consumers can buy unique clothing pieces. Janahi’s innovative venture that gives back to her community back home earned her recognition for a 2024 Women Who Empower Innovator Award.
With two Northeastern degrees and an engineering business certificate via the Galante Engineering Business Program, Janahi began a new chapter in New York City as a technical program manager with Google’s cybersecurity team. She believes that her two co-op experiences, one as an embedded software engineer at Emphysys—a company that develops technology for the medical, life science, and industrial equipment industries—and another as a software engineer at Motorola, enabled her to empathize and communicate with her team of engineers. “Having been a software engineer, I understand how [engineers] see things and I can relate to what [they] go through. A lot of project management is change management [and seeing] what works for your team.”
Janahi plans to continue her role with Google and invest in Palm for the foreseeable future. She shares that she has enjoyed her unique experiences with the tech giant. From visiting the famed Google headquarters to traveling around the world, she has come a long way from the young curious student in Bahrain. How does she juggle her jam-packed schedule? She says she draws on the lessons she learned from a mentor she connected with through WISE. She reflects that Tracy Fink, a proponent of mindfulness and fellow Northeastern alumna, came into her life at the right time. “She would help center me when I needed it [as well as getting] me into really good habits like journaling and just taking a breath. Equipped with all these foundational tools from Northeastern, Janahi is set to continue being a trailblazer in any industry she touches.
Source: Alumni Relations