Ursula Burns

My name is Ursula Burns and I was born on September 20th, 1958 to i grew up in a housing project in Manhattan's Lower East Side. This particular area was filled with gangs. I was raised by a single mother who was a Panamanian immigrant. She ran a daycare center at our house. She also ironed shirts for a fee so that I could go to school at Cathedral High School. I earned my Mechanical Engineering degree at NYU. I then became an intern at Xerox. I worked my way up the company from then on. I became executive assistant, then vice president for global manufacturing, senior vice president, and I am currently the chairman and CEO of Xerox. I became the first African-American woman to ever lead a Fortune 500 company and the first woman to succeed another woman as head of a Fortune 500 company. I am currently the 14th most powerful woman in the world.