Growing up, Lena wanted to change the world. It’s no small ambition, but it’s always good to dream big. The daughter of doctors, she was given a mini-laboratory set aged 10 and would spend hours growing crystals and watching colored liquids change hues in glass test tubes.
Keen to move beyond the realm of child’s play, she’d listen intently when her anesthesiologist father discussed his working day. “I became very aware of all the problems presented by disease and how, sadly, medicine isn’t all about being happy and healthy,” she says.
Getting to the root of a problem
This early introduction meant she quickly realized that happy-ever-after endings were all too often unrealistic. As a result, she didn’t simply want to make people better when they were sick, she wanted to stop diseases from taking hold in the first place. “When you think about infectious diseases and how much of a burden they are, the easiest course of action is to not make them happen in the first place,” she says.
Again, it’s a bold ambition, and it meant embarking on the exact same route she’d envisioned so many times while playing with her toy laboratory set. In the pursuit of becoming a medical academic, she enrolled in a Biochemistry and Cell Biology degree at Jacobs University Bremen, in Germany, before moving to America to embark on a Microbiology PhD at the University of Chicago.
As time passed and her experience grew, she progressed from being a generalist to really drilling down into the detail: “First I studied all of biochemistry, then I chose infectious disease and, within that, chose one bacterium. Within that bacterium, I chose one protein, which I understood better and better. I think in the end I was the world expert for this one protein within this one bacterium.”
Learning everything she could about the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, and its protein coagulase, was all part of her mission to prevent bloodstream infections like sepsis, which can lead to organ failure and death.
Pursuing practical solutions over white papers
After years of study, she was armed with the knowledge to make a difference in the real world. But there was a problem: “I quickly realized that the impact of our work was measured by whether or not it was published in a scientific journal, it was never about whether our inventions actually made it from the laboratory bench to the patient’s bedside,” she says.
They were working on a vaccine that could potentially help thousands if not millions of people, but it would take time for this cutting-edge research to make it into the healthcare system. Lena grew increasingly disappointed that her efforts weren’t making a difference and instead were simply sitting on the pages of a textbook, and began to reconsider her chosen career path.
“I’d spent nearly 10 years at universities and in academic settings, and now I wanted something that would guarantee me real-life impact,” she says.
Making a real change in the world
Wanting to make a change, she applied for a role at Siemens. “The company has this really long and successful record of making a difference through technology and innovation in many of today’s most challenging topics,” she says. “I felt it was the perfect starting point for my professional career outside of academia.”
She was accepted and joined Siemens Management Consulting (SMC), where she’s called to diverse departments across the company to help them fulfill their potential. It means that, on average, she moves every three to four months, learning everything she can about the given sector and always ready to consult with colleagues about how to make improvements.
It turned her previous experiences upside down. “The thing about consulting is we are generalists, which is the exact opposite to what I was used to as I find myself suddenly being thrown into new contexts,” she says. It’s a huge shift from knowing everything there is to know about one particular protein, to having to educate herself on an industry and being ready to educate and advise others.
She’s honest and says that, at first, it was difficult to make the adjustment.“The biggest problem,” she says, “was I was so used to being the one with the expertise. When I went into my first project, I wanted to talk to all these engineers and computer scientists, but I was a little bit at a loss because I didn’t speak their language and I wasn’t one of them.”
She simply needed to change her approach, and admit that she was no longer the expert or needed to be. “I think what helped me overcome that was the realization that the role of a consultant is really different, in the sense that you are not providing knowledge, but you are the one who gathers it and then turns it into something implementable, into something that can be used,” she says.
A multifaceted career
Lena’s life was mapped out from a young age, but she wasn’t afraid to make a change when aspects of her plan weren’t playing out as she had envisaged. “If you look at our parents’ generation, people studied something and then basically did the same job all their lives, I think nowadays everything is moving so much faster,” she says.
And this rate of change is more than just anecdotal. In 2018, the average person changes jobs three to four times before they’re 32, whereas people born between the 1960s and 1980s averaged just two job changes.
It can help to have a plan from a young age, but if it doesn’t quite work out it’s not a disaster. Lena believes you can still learn from the experiences and take on new opportunities as they present themselves. “I think this will be what our careers are going to look like. I don’t think any of us will do the same job for our entire life, and I think the big benefit of changing careers is you get exposed to a lot of different things and you keep learning,” she says.
Currently, she is working within the Siemens Digital Factory division to help colleagues envision, and prepare for, factories of the future. “We look at production and production design in the future,” she says. “We consider: Will there be robots? How about digital twins? Artificial Intelligence?”
That might sound like a lot of buzzwords, but these trends are already having a very real impact on everyone’s lives. And so, she is finally in a role where she is able to make things really happen.
“We’re very cautious to make sure the results of the solutions we suggest are fully implementable,” she says. “We don’t come up with any concepts that maybe work in theory but could never be put into practice.”
Lena Thomer graduated from her Biochemistry and Cell Biology degree at Jacobs University Bremen in Germany before completing her PhD in Microbiology at the University of Chicago in the US. She is now based in Munich, Germany, and works as a Consultant at Siemens Management Consulting (SMC). Find out more about working at Siemens.
Photography: Unsplash
