Moonshots: Take the Road Less Traveled
At this year’s virtual Grace Hopper Conference, vGHC 2020, I attended a session titled: Building Your Path to the Moon: Kickstarting a Career in Taking Moonshots. I anticipated a session about taking risks to boost your career outcomes. This session became something more than that, and it surpassed those expectations.
What does it mean to take a moonshot, anyway? Taking a Moonshot means to tackle problems that don’t have clear solutions. Though all these women were currently taking their moonshot, this panel discussion evolved into a conversation about the value of of non-traditional career paths. Advice was given on how to find your way when you are unsure where your career lies, and we were encouraged to view career steps as mini experiments, and take that moonshot if that’s what’s calling to us.
Building Your Path to the Moon Speakers:
- Daphne De Jong, Technical Program Manager, Waymo
- Kathryn Zealand, Project Lead, X, the moonshot factory
- Niyati Parikh, Thermal Mechanical Engineer, Loon
- Tara Rezvani, Tech Lead, Software Engineer, Wing (Alphabet)
All the women on this panel had different paths they followed to get to the point they’re at today, trying to solve seemingly insurmountable problems. For example, the moderator, Tara Rezvani, got her start conducting research focused on human computer interaction, and how it could inform UI design in autonomous vehicles. Tara, now works on software products that help drone users plan flights safely. Niyati Parikh, on the other had, got her Masters in Chemical Engineering from UC Irvine, and now works as a thermal Engineer, ensuring that Loon electronics and components operate within the recommended temperature range while conserving precious battery capacity. Before that, Niyati was responsible for thermal design and management of High Performance Computing at Intel. Daphne De Jong, an aerospace engineer by training, currently works on self-driving technology, but has also put in her time developing Amazon Prime Air, and has recently summited Mt. Everest.
Though all the women were working on disparate paths to their moon shot, Tara observed that they all had one thing in common. Throughout their careers, they had all been guided by the same “north star,” the goal of having an impact. She recommended that the audience, “think big, and [not to] be afraid of tackling the worlds biggest problems.” I took that as a reminder, that the tech space is broad, and there are many ways you can be a part of it. Therefor, we might as well do something that gets us excited to go to work.
During the discussion, the women touched on lessens they learned from different phases of their career path. Kathyrn Zealand’s story in particular really resonated with me. She told use there could be great value in pivoting. She made two major pivots in her career path: one was deciding not to complete her physics PHD. She realized the problems she was tackling in her research, were not the kind of problems she wanted to be solving. She wanted to create solutions that would be more immediately applicable to our day to day lives today, not off in some distant future of applicability. She didn’t feel like she would get to her true goal of immediate impact with her physics career. So she pivoted.
Kathyrn then “worked extensively in sub-Saharan Africa, developing an economic development strategy in Nigeria and starting multiple agri-businesses from scratch throughout the region for an investment fund.” The project she was involved in there felt satisfying, and she was making an impact on people’s daily lives but she was lonely due to a slight language barrier and some other factors. She decided to pivot again.
This part of her story touched me in particular, because I too have worked aboard in a small town where I felt isolated. I worked as an ESL teacher for a year in the small rural town of Obanazawa, situated in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. I loved being in Japan learning about Japanese culture, but I was lonely due to my low level of Japanese. I had to come to terms with the fact, that that job, did not make me happy in the way I thought it would. In short, I had to pivot.
From her experience, Kathyrn learned that sometimes you can figure out where you want to be, by trying a lot of different things. She “currently leads an early-stage X focused on improving mobility,” and sounds like she couldn’t be happier. She’s going to impact in peoples’ day to day lives through this technology. But she wasn’t able to see this point in her path, from the start. It was through various baby steps, and sometimes missteps, that she found her way to a place that suited her, and that she was truly passionate about.
My career path has also been a bit indirect; I got my BS in Philosophy, then I worked aboard as an English teacher, followed by a discovery of a passion for programming and a masters in Software engineering. Though my path is definitely the road less traveled, I have felt enriched by each step. As Robert Frost said,
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
I want to take Kathryn’s message to heart. I will remember her encouragement to not hesitate to pivot and to try new things and view them as experiments to find your dream career. I know I love programming, but I haven’t yet found my favorite application of it; I still have a journey ahead. With her words in mind, I’ll confidently continue to stand up to bat, and be willing to strike out, with my end goal in mind.
