THE LANGUAGE OF BEING TRULY YOU
As Marsha P Johnson has rightly said, “History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable. It happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.”
One of the real-life examples of this statement is Megan Smith. She is a prominent personality of the LGBTQ+ community who has helped others from the community to come forward by being an inspiration and achieving what some could only dream of. As the country’s chief technology officer under the Obama administration, Megan Smith is a nationally recognized technology expert, entrepreneur, and activist. She is the first person from the LGBTQ+ community to hold this post.
Smith was raised in Fort Erie, Ontario, and Buffalo, New York. She spent several summers as a child at the non-profit educational resort known as Chautauqua Institution. The Chautauqua Children’s School was run by her mother.
Smith acquired her bachelor’s and master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She finished her thesis at the MIT Media Lab while working on the first cross-continental solar car race’s competing solar race car.
Smith then worked for Apple in Tokyo and General Magic in California as the product design lead for new smartphone technologies. She assisted in the 1995 founding of PlanetOut, a pioneering LGBT website community, and went on to serve as its CEO and COO until 1998. She played a key role in establishing alliances between PlanetOut and other industry leaders including AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and others. Smith assisted in managing Gay.com, an LGBT dating and social media website, and PlanetOut’s successful merger.
After joining Google in 2003, Smith worked her way up to vice president of business development for all of the company’s international relationship teams. She oversaw significant purchases of platforms including Google Earth and Google Maps and founded Google’s “Women Techmakers” project, which supports diversity and the advancement of women in the digital industry.
As the third chief technology officer and president’s assistant, Smith joined the Obama administration in 2017. Smith and her group concentrated on using innovation and policy to improve the White House’s technology prowess.
In order to encourage female and multicultural diversity in the American technology sector after her time in the White House, Smith assisted in the establishment of the Tech Jobs Tour. She established and assumed leadership of shift7 in March 2018, a business that employs technology to address social, environmental, and economic issues.
Smith is a member of the MIT Caroll L. Wilson Award selection committee and is on the boards of MIT, the MIT Media Lab, and Technology Review. She was recognized as a technology pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2001 and 2002, and in 2012 and 2013, Out magazine listed her among the 50 most influential LGBT Americans.
A person’s identity is defined by what they do and not who they are. Your determination, perseverance, and hard work are the true catalysts to success. Sometimes we are tested not to show our weaknesses, but to discover our strengths. Megan Smith is one such entity who is known to have achieved every height of success and still continues. We know that diversity can sometimes be more uncomfortable because things are less familiar — but it gets the best results.
References:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Smith
- https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/ostp/about/leadershipstaff/smith
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/msmith21/
- https://www.out.com/2012/04/17/power-list-megan-smith
Written by:
Aanya Khemani
Anushka Singh
