Before America
Katrina came to the United States on a three-month work-and-travel program. She fell in love with the U.S. Ten years later, she is an HR generalist at an AI startup, a business owner building her own HR consultancy, and living proof of one idea worth carrying with you: the biggest risk to an immigrant woman's career is not the visa, the accent, or the missing credential. It is the moment she stops trusting her own heart.
In Belarus, she was Katya to her family (Katya Ryna, her full name, is nearly impossible for English speakers to pronounce). She was studying to become a translator or school teacher at a competitive language university, learning English and Spanish, and already earning what felt like good money tutoring students for their final exams, about ten dollars an hour. The path ahead was clear: finish school, teach, maybe tutor on the side. She had visited English-speaking countries through her university, so travel was not foreign to her. Staying, though, was never part of the plan.
Then she and her best friend signed up for a work-and-travel program, expecting a three-month adventure before returning home to Belarus. They landed in California, and everything about it (the mountains, the city, and yes, the guys they met) pulled at them. What was supposed to be a summer became a decision neither of them had prepared their parents for.
“We were young, we were like 20 something years old, so the whole world was in front of us. We were reckless, I would say. And honestly, ten years later, no regrets. I would choose the same path over and over.”
Arriving
San Francisco became home almost immediately, but the reality of staying set in fast. Katrina's translation and teaching background didn't translate to a city where everyone already spoke two languages as a matter of course. She had to ask herself, plainly, what she was actually going to do with her life in a place where her original plan meant nothing.
Hospitality had always been a quiet dream of hers, so she applied around and landed a job at the Four Seasons Hotel. It turned into an unofficial crash course in professional English how to email clients, how to speak to demanding guests, how to carry herself in a room, all without the shortcuts a chatbot might offer today. It was there that a manager, watching how she worked, told her she had the personality for something else entirely: human resources. She had no idea what that meant.
“He was like, you're like your personality, I really feel like you could be a great HR. And I was like, HR? What is that?”
She signed up anyway, enrolling in a one-year human resources management certificate program at San Francisco State University. On the first day of class, she sat among people who were already HR managers and directors, googling under the table what HR even meant. She stayed in the room, and she stayed with the plan.
The hard middle
Certificate in hand, Katrina still had no job and no obvious way into the field. Her break came through a Russian-speaking social circle in San Francisco, people who met up for the opera, the ballet, nightclubs. She got to talking with a man who turned out to be a co-founder of an early flying-car aeronautics startup in the Bay Area. She asked him plainly if his company needed HR help. Two days later he texted back: his HR director could use an extra hand. That conversation became an internship, and the internship became her way in.
From there she moved into office management, a role she credits as the real training ground it put her in contact with every department, every colleague, every open door in a company. That's how people started introducing her around, promoting her, offering her the next thing.
The climb wasn't just logistical, it was psychological. Working at an AI startup meant being surrounded by engineers from top-40 schools and executives with Stanford pedigrees, including a boss she describes as undeniably brilliant. For a while, Katrina found herself shrinking measuring herself against her boss's intelligence and concluding she'd never measure up, forgetting that her boss had chosen to hire and work with her for a reason.
“I kind of started thinking that, hey, I'm not that good, I will never be that good. I stopped believing in my own skills, that I have something she doesn't have. It took me a while to realize we're just so different.”
Her mother, back in Belarus, added another layer of doubt for years always asking if Katrina had thought this through, whether she had a real plan, whether it wasn't time to come home and build a career there instead. Katrina says that voice, and the ones like it, were the hardest challenge to overcome, harder than any interview or job search.
“I really learned how to listen to my heart, because only your heart knows what you want. Don't listen to anyone else my mom, at the end, she's so happy, and she's telling me, you were so right, I'm so glad you didn't come back.”
Where she is now
Ten years in, Katrina works as an HR generalist at an AI startup while simultaneously running her own HR consulting business on the side. The dual role is demanding, but she describes it as the natural next step of a decade spent building expertise the long way through an internship that almost didn't happen, an office-management job that taught her the whole company, and a boss whose intensity forced her to grow instead of shrink.
She's candid that corporate life still has real advantages steady pay, clear benefits, a known structure for moving up. But she's chosen to build something of her own alongside it, because the freedom of naming her own price, choosing her own clients, and putting her full creative energy into her own product has become impossible to walk away from.
“The amount of freedom that you get with having your own business is just incredible. Even if you work crazy hours, it's yours; you don't even feel tired. It's just very fulfilling.”
What's next
Katrina's consulting business stays close to what she already knows: helping small business owners build out real HR departments policies, procedures, operational guidelines so their companies can run without the owner being pulled into every decision. It's the same field she stumbled into a decade ago through a chance conversation at a nightclub, just now built on her own terms.
She's also watched colleagues get laid off from the startup world and, after a painful stretch, land somewhere better often doing something they'd only ever treated as a hobby, like yoga or stretching, until it became their livelihood. She holds onto that as proof that a closed door is rarely the end of the story.