Chance Encounter Leads to Career of Growth

Sara Scotto d’Apollonia’s determination led her to CSC. And it was a chance encounter at the YMCA that started her 14-plus-year career with the company that is the business behind business.

The CSC user experience engineer was working at the YMCA after college and had applied for several jobs. A man came in wearing a sweater with the logo of a company Sara wanted to work for but had never heard back from after applying. “I yelled, ‘Hey, sweater guy, I have a bone to pick with you,’” she recalls. “I used those exact words like I owned the place. I wanted to know why I hadn’t heard anything.”

Sara Scotto d’Apollonia
User Experience Engineer

The man explained he didn’t work at the company whose logo he was wearing, but rather “at a much better company called CSC,” Sara says. He gave her his card and told her to send her resume. “And because I interacted with him, I had my foot in the door. A month later, he called me and said there was an opening. So that’s how I got into CSC.”

Sara’s career started with the Litigation Management Services (LMS) Team, one of several teams within CSC’s Corporate and Legal Solutions business unit. Responsible for supporting the registered agent service, team members analyze and extract pertinent information from legal documents. Sara was charged with notifying customers that they’d been served. “We’d process a summary that included who’s being served, the plaintiff, the kind of document—a subpoena, a summons, a complaint, or child support papers—and a deadline.” She says it was important to notify the customer as soon as possible, especially if the court date was close to the date they were served. Direct, open, and honest communication is one of the core values at CSC. The company continues to build trust through open dialogue with both internal and external customers.

After a little more than four years, Sara moved into the tech sector, helping CSC employees with computer issues. “It was simple things at first, like people being locked out of their accounts or applications crashing while clients were calling.” Even though she didn’t have a tech background, Sara’s drive to learn propelled her forward so she could make a more meaningful impact. “I took a couple of online classes for fun, to get a general idea of how computers work. I came in with more curiosity than knowledge,” she says. CSC paired her with a more senior colleague who trained her and took calls with her to walk through solutions. “The people I was helping were wonderful—they understood I was still learning. I had support from teammates who would answer my questions if I got stuck along the way. It was a beautiful transition. I couldn’t have asked for a better training experience.”

Two years later, she was back at LMS as a project manager, working on system upgrades and user stories to see how the applications function. Sara is now a user experience engineer, helping people who work with new equipment or applications. “I won’t tell someone they have an upgrade. I tell them there’s an exciting new feature that will benefit them,” she explains. In just nine years, Sara went from someone without a technical background to an engineering position. “CSC is amazing like that. They love when people are hungry for knowledge,” she says. “Knowing the business is one piece. The other is being willing to reach out and ask for help. They support people who want to grow. And that’s what I love about this company. I came in thinking I wanted a communication role, but my career ended up going in a direction I didn’t expect—one that fits me even better than I could have imagined. And that was because of CSC.”

As Sara approaches her 15th year with CSC, her career possibilities are endless. When the timing is right, she says, after you’ve met your goals, you can approach your leader about moving on to bigger things. “You tell them that you’re interested in something and ask to work together to get there. That’s what’s so great about CSC. You can grow in this company. There are no roadblocks. You’re supported in the process to advance—and you don’t find that in a lot of places.”