Student Experience
Life Beyond the Redwoods: Allysa Kazhe at Apple
One year after graduating from UC Santa Cruz, Allysa Kazhe(John R. Lewis ’25, electrical engineering) is an engineering program manager at Apple.
Allysa Kazhe graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2025 with a degree in electrical engineering.
Allysa Kazhe (John R. Lewis ’25, electrical engineering) grew up in a three generation household in Elk Grove, California. From her grandma, who is a traditional Navajo beader and jewelry maker, to Kazhe, who is now an engineering program manager at Apple, Kazhe attributes her upbringing to how she exists in the world.
“My mother is Navajo (Diné) and my father is Mescalero Apache and though we lived far from both reservations, we found our community with the Wilton Rancheria natives nearby,” Kazhe said. “That connection shaped how I move through the world: always looking for belonging, always thinking about the people around me.”
Throughout high school, Kazhe took engineering and circuit classes, discovering her love for engineering. Beyond learning technical skills, Kazhe wanted to use her skills to give back to the Wilton Rancheria Community.
“I wanted the work to mean something beyond the classroom,” Kazhe said. “The drive to design with people, not just for them, has stayed with me ever since childhood.”
Kazhe came to UC Santa Cruz through the Bridge program under UCSC’s Education Opportunity Programs (EOP). Catered to first-generation and low-income students, the summer Bridge program works to be a transition for these students. Through EOP, Kazhe found the Mathematics, Engineering, Science, Achievement (MESA) College Prep Program.
A few months into her freshman year, Kazhe read about the Brooke Owens Fellowship in MESA’s weekly newsletter. The fellowship was for women and gender-minorities who wanted to break into the aerospace industry. Not long after submitting her application, Kazhe was accepted to the fellowship’s class of 2020. That year, she split her time between school and an internship at Maxar Technologies, where she worked on an all-electric spacecraft with an executive mentorship from SpaceX.
Once Kazhe’s fellowship completed, she interned for a year at Apple as an engineering program manager and followed with another year long internship at Tesla as a technical program manager. All the while, she was balancing her coursework in circuits, electromagnetics, and system design.
“My coursework gave me the technical foundation, but Baskin Engineering overall taught me how to navigate engineering ambiguity with empathy and agility,” Kazhe said. “I discovered that I loved collaborative engineering.”
To put theory into practice, Kazhe led as team captain for UCSC’s Formula Slug team from 2023-2024. During that time, Formula Slug created FS-2 which was the first car from UCSC to compete at the Formula SAE Electric competition in Michigan.
Coming to UCSC for Kazhe had many perks, including being near Silicon Valley. The proximity to the technological space served as motivation for her. But more the geographic piece, it was the environment.
“What I valued most was how approachable everything felt on campus: clubs, research groups, student organizations. The barrier to entry was low enough that I could actually explore. I didn’t have to have it all figured out to get involved,” Kazhe said. “That openness lets me try things as diverse as I am and follow curiosity without penalty.”
As an engineering program manager at Apple, Kazhe drives the design and development of camera and depth sensing modules for iPhone and Mac products.
As the primary lead for module development, Kazhe directs the efforts of the hardware, software, mechanical engineering, and operations teams, uniting their expertise to design, manufacture, and integrate camera and laser modules. She is responsible for keeping camera modules on schedule and driving build plans to completion across multiple international module integrators and component suppliers.
She is also a part of the Indigenous and Woman’s Diversity Network Associations at Apple. Recently becoming a lead for the Indigenous@Apple Team, she works to build an environment of inclusion and belonging for all employees.
Kazhe keeps growing in her field both technically and as a force of change. From her time leading her high school engineering projects with the Wilton Rancheria Community to now, she still wants to use her skills to grow with people.
“My goal is to keep the balance I’ve built between growing my technical skills and leading the kind of cross-functional collaboration that makes hard things possible,” Kazhe said. “That relationship is where I do my best work and I want to keep finding environments that demand both.”
Life Beyond the Redwoods features 10 Class of 2025 alumni who share how their time at UC Santa Cruz prepared them to launch their careers one year after graduation.