Did you know the first Black woman to run a Fortune 500 company started there as an intern?

Her name is Ursula Burns.

Burns, 64, was once told she had three strikes against her: that she was Black, a woman and poor. She was raised by a Panamanian immigrant mother of three on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in public housing.

Her journey to the top

Burns studied mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU and later earned a masters degree in the subject from Columbia University.

She joined Xerox in 1980 as an intern, working her way up to the helm of the company. She started as a mechanical engineering intern. Burns became senior vice president, Corporate Strategic Services, in 2000 and president in 2007. A 2003 New York Times profile of her called Burns an “apparent heir,” pegged as the successor to Anne Mulcahy, Xerox’s first woman CEO.

She became CEO in 2009 and chairman in 2010. Burns was also the first woman to succeed another woman in the top job.

President Barack Obama named her to lead the White House’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Coalition from 2009 to 2016. She also served on the President’s Export Council as vice chair from 2010 to 2015 and chair from 2015 to 2016.

“For women and women of color, if you walk into a STEM environment, you will be the minority in the room. Everybody has their eye on your work,” Burns wrote for Time magazine. “Instead of your differences becoming a burden, it should be an opportunity for you to distinguish yourself. That’s what I turned those two ‘strikes’ into.”

In 2016, she stepped down as CEO for Xerox when the company split; in 2017, Burns retired as chair.

She’s sat on the boards for companies such as Uber and is chairwoman of Teneo.

In 2021, she published her book, “Where You Are Is Not Who You Are.”