Alumni Spotlight – Mohamed Warsame ’09

Tell us about your college experience and career trajectory.

I went to Bentley University, which is a business-focused school, and majored in economics. I chose economics largely because I was at Waynflete during the 2008 financial crisis. Watching the global economy collapse made me want to understand how money moves, why systems fail, and who gets impacted. My curiosity solidified when I took the Business and Finance class with Steve Kautz my junior year.

Waynflete prepared me academically in a way I didn’t fully appreciate until I got to college. The expectations around writing, discussions, and critical thinking were already high, so the transition to college-level work was not overwhelming at all. Additionally Waynflete’s small class sizes meant you had to participate, defend ideas, and be able to explain your thinking clearly. This is a skill I use so often in my career.

I’ve held various roles in IT over the past ten years, from analyst to software engineer, and everything in between. I am now a product owner at CACI in the DC Metro supporting federal government clients. 

What do you love most about what you do? 

I like solving problems. I like taking something complicated and making it clearer, easier, faster, and more efficient for the people who use it every day.

A lot of what I do makes our government more efficient. When you improve those systems even in small ways, you’re improving something that impacts a lot of people.

I get to sit in rooms with senior stakeholders, listen to what they’re trying to achieve, and then turn that into something engineers can actually build. I enjoy being the person who can speak both languages. I also love the variety in my work. The problems are never the same for long. Every project forces me to learn a new process, a new business area, or a new technology.

What advice would you give seniors who are trying to figure out what’s next for them? 

You don’t have to know exactly what you want to do yet. What matters is choosing a path that gives you options. When you get to college, use your first year to try different subjects instead of locking into a major immediately, and get your general requirements out of the way early so you can change direction later if something else ends up being a better fit. Lastly, if you have the chance to study abroad, take it. Being in another country, even for one semester, can completely change how you see your future in a way that a classroom can’t.