SWE scholarship recognizes WSU Everett student’s leadership
After returning to college at 32, software engineering student Camille Orego discovered an unexpected talent for connecting people
For nearly 20 years, Camille Orego has supported herself as a waitress, a job that rewards top-notch interpersonal skills and adaptability. At WSU Everett, she discovered those talents weren’t just useful in a hospitality context. They would become central to her success as an aspiring engineer.
Now a senior software engineering major at Wahington State University Everett, Orego recently received a prestigious $10,000 Motorola Solutions Foundation Scholarship through the Society of Women Engineers, or SWE for short. It’s an award that recognizes both her academic achievement and leadership experience, and it arrives at a pivotal moment. After years of balancing college coursework with weekend restaurant shifts, Orego says the extra funds will allow her to step away from waitressing during her final semester next spring as she works toward her capstone project and graduation.
“When I got the email, I thought, ‘This is spam. This is not real,’” Orego recalled with a laugh. “There were only 10 of those scholarships available, so it felt pretty special.”
A change in direction
Orego was 32 when she made the decision to go back to school for a bachelor’s degree. Having worked in food service for more than a decade, she says she had long felt ready for change — but for what, she wasn’t sure. Eventually, a fellow restaurant coworker who had been going to school for nursing convinced her to take action.
“He said to me, ‘Go home. Look up the next big jobs for the next 20 years. Look at what’s going to be growing, and see what catches your eye,’” Orego said.
After finding and looking over a list of in-demand professions, it was software engineering that piqued her interest. Having taught herself HTML, CSS and graphic design as a teenager, she wondered if those early interests would translate into a technology career. When she discovered WSU Everett offered a software engineering degree close to home, she decided to give it a shot.
Looking back, she says, returning to school offered a sense of newfound momentum she didn’t even know she needed.
“I am a person who likes to grow, and I’m a person who likes to learn,” she said. “When I stop learning and I stop growing, I become miserable.”
As a working, part-time student at both Everett Community College and WSU Everett, Orego’s route to a bachelor’s degree will have taken seven years by the time she wraps up this spring. Although she once viewed the longer timeline as a setback, she has since come to appreciate being able to go at her own pace and take full advantage of the student experience.
“Because I’ve been going to school for so long and taking my time, it does create different opportunities,” Orego said. “I’ve had more of a chance to get to know more people, do more networking.”
Stepping into leadership
Many of those networking opportunities came about through her longstanding involvement with SWE, one of the defining pillars of her college experience. Orego first connected with the organization while attending Everett Community College, where a physics instructor encouraged her to attend a SWE conference. Although she was hesitant to travel with a group of strangers, she decided to go. The experience introduced her to a network of women pursuing engineering careers and provided an immediate sense of belonging.
Orego hadn’t planned on becoming a student club leader, but when she transferred to WSU Everett in 2023, those plans quickly changed. With the former SWE club officers having just graduated and no other student members available to step up, the club’s faculty advisor personally invited Orego to take over leadership duties right away — that or risk not having a club at all.
“That’s kind of how I got involved is I was thrown to the wolves a little bit,” Orego said. “I had to build that club from the ground up, basically.”
As SWE president, Orego hit the ground running. She organized networking events, coordinated company tours, expanded outreach to future transfer students and strengthened relationships between WSU Everett and regional employers. One of her proudest accomplishments was growing the chapter’s annual Evening with Industry event. For that, she reached out to regional companies such as Fluke, Verathon, Zap Energy and Helion, sometimes leveraging contacts she had made at national SWE conferences.
Rather than simply bringing recruiters to campus, however, Orego focused on creating meaningful connections between students and professionals. She helped organize company site tours, community-building activities and hands-on engineering workshops. She also kept other club traditions alive, such as seasonal soldering events for Christmas and Valentines Day that were open to students at Everett Community College.
When she stepped down as club president at the end of last year, she made sure to leave behind ample documentation and helpful resources for the next up-and-coming chapter members.
“My biggest goal is I never want to hear a student say, ‘I didn’t have that opportunity. I didn’t get that email. I didn’t have access to that,’” she said.
Bridging the gap
That commitment to creating opportunities for others slowly led her to an unexpected self-realization. Despite entering college determined to leave customer-facing work behind, Orego kept gravitating toward people-centered roles and responsibilities — scheduling group meetings, connecting students with employers and managing events. Simply put, she had a natural talent for bringing people together.
“I did not realize that I had this skill until I got to college,” she said.
The discovery has influenced how she thinks about her future career. While she still enjoys software engineering, she’s become increasingly interested in finding a career path that takes equal advantage of her skill and experience in project management and communication. Speaking of the latter, she’s even planning to graduate with a minor in communication, on top of the math minor she’s already completed.
“Maybe this is my strength where I’m going to bridge the gap between technology and people,” she said. “That’s kind of where I’m ending up towards the end of my journey here — not so much in software engineering specifically but the intersection where people and technology meet.”
In terms of her technical interests, Orego has gravitated toward front-end mobile development and user interface design. She particularly enjoyed one web design project that allowed her team to develop a community-focused online platform. She’s also developed a strong interest in an emerging engineering and design framework known as agentic artificial intelligence.
“When you do it correctly, it feels really cool, because you’re just having AI agents talk to each other and handing off context to one another,” she said.
Leaving a legacy of opportunity
As a first-generation college student, Orego understands how difficult higher education can be to navigate. She credits her mentors, scholarship programs and organizations such as SWE and WSU Everett MESA for helping her find opportunities she might otherwise have missed. At the same time, she’s also made a point to hold the door open for the people behind her.
“I am passionate about having students have access to things that I had access to — and even more,” she said. “You want to leave the world a better place than the way you found it.”
In addition to the SWE award, Orego also received the 2026 WSU Alumni Association Leadership Scholarship. Both awards will give her some extra breathing room as she heads into her final WSU semester next spring.
“I already told my job that I would not be there next semester,” Orego said, adding she might also take advantage of a study abroad trip at the end of spring — a last hurrah to her WSU experience. “I’ve always wanted to study abroad, so now with these scholarships, I’m hoping I can manage it.”
While she looks forward to finishing her degree, she says she’ll also miss the tight-knit campus community she’s gotten to know so well.
“After one year at WSU Everett, you know everybody. You know the students. You know students who aren’t even in your classes,” Orego said. “It really is a great school, and I’m very happy I chose to go here.”