I was privileged to attend Harvard from August 2018 to May 2020 for my Master’s Degree in Data Science. I learned a lot from 37 students in our cohort, but the biggest takeaway from my time at Harvard was about being able to explore different disciplines, especially about the world of startups: I participated in The President’s Innovation Challenge for startups and took a class for current or future startup founders at Harvard Business School (called “Field X”).
My friend Jaemin and I took a few computer science and statistics courses together and quickly came up with a business idea where we can apply our technical skills. We formed a company called “Diva”, which uses deep learning to analyze your pitches, tones, notes, etc from your singing and shows you the score. We formulated the problem statement and solutions, set up milestones, and implemented go-to-market strategies. We got accepted as a semi-finalist for The President’s Innovation Challenge and competed with fellow founders from various schools at Harvard. Although we didn’t pursue further with this idea at that time, this experience definitely affected our future: Jaemin is now a CTO of Silvia Health and I am now a co-founder at Sciontia.
Our successful journey at The President’s Innovation Challenge gave me an opportunity to work for an early stage startup called MarqVision (https://www.marqvision.com/) and take a course called “Field X” at Harvard Business School with the founder, Insup Lee. By working with him and other founders in the “Field X” class, I was able to learn about what founders should do to form a talented team, set up ambitious but well-planned-out goals, build a product, collect customer feedback, and iterate based on the customer feedback to make a better product. It was an one-of-a-kind experience that I could never have if I chose to work for a big tech company as a software engineer or a data scientist.
What I learned at Harvard was not just about becoming a good engineer and working for a big tech company for a great compensation, challenging work, and stable life. Don’t get me wrong — I have a huge respect for most students in our cohort who crushed difficult technical interviews for big tech companies and I also strived to become a great engineer myself. I just got more interested in knowing about people trying to have some positive impacts in the world with their ventures and pursuing with my own ideas to make the world a better place, and this is what I really learned at Harvard.