Raised by a single mother, she was one of three children who shared two absentee fathers. To pay the bills and send her children to Catholic school, Burns's mother, Olga, ran an at-home daycare center and took in ironing. Although Burns didn't have many advantages as a child, she attributes part of her success to city housing, access to a good education and cheap public transportation. A summer internship turned into a full-time job in 1981, when Xerox hired Burns as soon as she completed her master's degree in mechanical engineering at Columbia University. When Ursula Burns started as an intern at Xerox more than 30 years ago, she had no idea that she would someday end up running the company
