5 Reasons You Don’t Need To Know ‘What You Want To Be When You Grow Up’
Katy Kasmai is the Founder of Team Exponent and a senior level engineering program manager at Google. She is passionate about moonshots, sustainability and the pursuit of change and innovation. Katy develops and executes strategies to solve complex problems using technology, with a focus on achieving product excellence. She shared with PowerToFly why she’s come to realize, “We need to stop asking kids what they want to be when they grow up.”
1. Because sometimes you find your purpose when you need it the most.
Katy Kasmai, a senior level Engineering Program Manager at Google, Inc., got her start in tech while she was still in high school in 1996. She needed a website, but didn’t know how to create one. She told PowerToFly, “I figured out how to view source on a website I liked, and I reverse engineered the code and used it to make my own site. After that I was hooked and found web development to be a highly useful skill. I eventually signed up for a Computer Science C++ course. I remember learning C++ and seeing the output “hello world” when I compiled my code for the first time. To see something I created on the screen like that was a really transformative moment. ”
2. Because life can be challenging. But overcoming challenges means that you’re actually finding your way.
When Katy studied Computer Science in college she was one of only a few women in her class. As a result, she didn’t feel like she belonged, saying, “During those days it was okay for people to say that women were not as good at math as men. I found it really discouraging, but I was determined to get through it and graduate. After college, I did IT consulting work for government contractor firms in DC, and I also got a masters in conflict resolution in search of a more meaningful and international experience. I did some peacebuilding and interfaith dialog work with the UN. But both of these experiences were very slow paced and bureaucratic. Again, I often felt like I did not belong.”
In a quest to answer the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” she became an entrepreneur hoping that starting her own company was going to be key to making a real impact. “I went back to school and got my MBA thinking it would help me be a better startup founder. My baby was born during midterms in my first semester and so I regretted joining the program at first because it was a really stressful time. When I turned 30, I started to think that I could never answer the question ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ At that point in my life I had a menagerie of degrees but still did not feel like I’d found my place. When I finally realized that I was never going to be able to answer that question and that I didn’t need to was when I really started to feel like I was discovering my true self. I started to see that I was all of the things that I had learned and experienced, and that ‘what I want to be when I grow up’ has nothing to do with college degrees or job titles — instead it’s about the impact I am having in the world and my happiness.”
3. Because what you want to be when you grow up will change, over and over and over again, and that’s OK.
After receiving her MBA, Katy stayed on the entrepreneurial path, continuing to run her companies. But when she unexpectedly got a job offer at Google, she made a tough decision that changed the direction of her career. Despite Google’s prestige, the engineering program manager admits that the shift from founder and CEO to an employee wasn’t easy. “I hadn’t held a full time position in 7 years or so. I was a stay-at-home mom running my own company. I’m currently on the Material Design engineering team focused on the UI/UX framework for apps, and open sourcing. A bulk of the work I do is coordinating the effort towards a product launch. It’s like conducting an orchestra, and I am really thankful for the great team I am working with now. The position at Google is attractive to me because I can explore and invent, and it’s more stable than startup life for me as a single mom. I enjoy the people, the community and the ability to experiment. I have a flexible schedule at Google, which I need in order to juggle everything, including my elementary school-aged child. But I am a startup addict and do continue to maintain a side organization as well.”
4. Because even when you’ve grown up, the best ideas still come from children.
“Last summer when my daughter was five, I signed her up for classes at the Brooklyn Robot Foundry. The classes are a combination of mechanical and electrical engineering, physics, robotics and art. They use standard commodity items such as popsicle sticks, foam, paint, battery packs, DC motor and wires. By the end of the week she had built 20 little robots, with the most sophisticated being a remote control car. They worked with about 30 kids each day. Looking at all of these amazing robots built by a 5-year-old, I started thinking, ‘What if their educational experience looked like this for the entire school year for 12 years?’ So I came up with a project that we are developing to answer that question.”
Katy’s “project” is a non-profit company that she founded called Team Exponent, Inc. where they build high-impact teams for 10x Moonshots. Their Moonshot Sprint events attract highly talented engineers, scientists, designers, PMs and founders who want to work on something truly impactful and meet like minded teammates. She says, “What really excites me is to witness the passion, creativity and drive that comes out from everyone during the events. There’s something about moonshots and working towards solving difficult challenges, like climate change, that pushes us to achieve our highest potential.
Currently, they are developing the Exponential Education curriculum to bring moonshot thinking and projects to K-12 schools and programs, starting with Moonshot Sprints. The curriculum is designed to inspire and motivate children to continue thinking big and realize that they can use their skills towards building impactful solutions for difficult problems.
Katy explains, “I did the first Moonshot Sprint with 5th graders at PS 290, located in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The curriculum is based on children ideating and prototyping 10x moonshot solutions, and then building prototypes like robots. I’ve also worked with high school kids and they perform just as well, if not more creatively, as the adults during the Moonshot Sprints. We are now looking to train as many teachers as possible to take on these sprints at their schools. It’s an open source curriculum that educators can adopt and contribute to. The great thing about Exponential Education is that it is retractable and expandable — highly flexible to meet varying teacher and school needs. It can be an after school class, taught on the weekends during a conference, a one time experience in the art class, or integrated into the core school year curriculum. Through this program students learn all the skills you need to build anything, including how to research, ideate, collaborate, project manage, pitch ideas and fundraise.”
5. Because instead of wondering, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” we should be asking ourselves, “What problem do you want to solve?”
“Computer science and coding are really important skills to know. But we need to teach kids to solve problems using coding skills as well as every other skill you can and should acquire. The reality is that in the industry, we are actively creating the artificial intelligence and machine learning that will eventually allow robots to do the coding for us — and so we really don’t know if the jobs of the 21st century will continue to be coding jobs. Coding and computer science are very important skills, but problem solving skills are even more important lifelong skills that go beyond industry and market trends. We need to stop asking kids what they want to be when they grow up and instead shift the question to ‘what problem do you want to solve and what do you want to build now?’ Because the former is like asking ‘how smart are you’ and ‘who do you want to work for,’ whereas the latter is asking ‘what skills do you need to solve that problem.’ What if the question was, ‘what college degree do you need to solve climate change’ — it doesn’t make any sense does it? Today, the Internet makes it easy to obtain pretty much any skill we would need to build anything. So this is about getting kids engaged and discovering their passion, and with moonshot projects you don’t have to convince them to stay focused because they are in the zone — building.”
Join PowerToFly today to become part of our fast-growing network of all-star women in tech. You can also learn about the best ways to hire and manage a distributed team by downloading our free e-book.
