What I Wish I Knew During My College Career as an Aspiring PM
I improvised my way through college. After changing my major a couple of times, I stumbled upon product management sophomore year when I heard about the role at an entrepreneurship event in Lisbon, Portugal. At this event, the European Innovation Academy, I created a startup within 3 weeks while acting as the CEO of the team, leading the team to milestones such as creating a product roadmap and pitching to investors. While the startup didn’t take off, I knew I coveted a similar experience after I graduated from college and I wanted to create and work directly on products. After taking the intro Computer Science class during my first semester at Berkeley, I felt that I enjoyed the critical thinking skills that CS classes forced me to use, but I didn’t feel that being a software engineer was something I wanted to do as a career post-college. I always knew I wanted to work in the tech industry and work towards being a tech entrepreneur. The role of a product manager seemed perfect for me since it allowed me to develop a product from the ground up while combining my technical and soft skills. After a few semesters of experimentation, where I dabbled with classes in business administration, applied math, economics, and computer science, I ended up double majoring in Data Science and Economics, a combination that equipped me to think about products from a technical and financial perspective. If I could do it all over again, there are a few changes I would make to my college plan to best prepare me for a PM role post-graduation.
Classes Essential for Interviews
A few essential classes that gave me the skills to think from a technical point of view and create programs for other people to use are the Data Structures and Algorithms class and the advanced Data Science class at Berkeley. These classes enabled me to think from the end user’s perspective and empathize with them, in addition to helping me think from an engineer’s perspective, arguably some of the most important skills for product managers. Programming heavy classes pushed me to think about the customer’s needs first so that I could design a product specifically for their use cases, a skill that has helped me in every single product interview. If I could do college again, I would try to take these classes earlier, preferably before the second semester of the sophomore year since they helped me immensely during my PM internships and product interviews.
A Broader Perspective
Other classes I wish I had taken during my college career include classes on negotiations, marketing, social psychology, and product strategy. While technical knowledge is important to be a good PM, the critical aspects of the job, often tested while interviewing, relate to communicating ideas, influencing people, and translating technical ideas to a roadmap that can be understood in layman’s terms. All of these soft skills can’t fully be learned in a class, and there is no replacement for real-life experience. However, these classes facilitate an understanding of how people behave and how as product managers, we can better empathize and create products for the end-user.
I initially planned on majoring in Computer Science, switched to Economics, and then finally committed to double majoring in Data Science and Economics, all in a span of a few semesters. In my personal opinion, the combination of Data Science and Economics (or business) seemed like the perfect mixture of technical and financial knowledge to enable me to be a good product manager in the future. After talking to numerous product managers, I understood that product managers need to be technical but they very rarely write code at work.
Data Science as a major seemed like a better alternative to Computer Science since I wanted to be technical, but I also did not want to go down to the deepest depths of how computers function to understand how to think about products technically. Additionally, analyzing big datasets and building machine learning models helped me understand how people think about certain issues, react to certain circumstances, and question everything regarding human decision-making and behavior, something I constantly mentioned in my PM interviews.
This thought process was aided by courses such as microeconomics and game theory as part of my Economics major’s curriculum. Domain-specific courses such as economic analysis in city planning, and climate change economics, gave me domain knowledge in specific fields that helped me think of different products in those spaces, something that helped me while interviewing for Microsoft and Uber. For example, in an interview with Uber, I was asked to launch an eco-friendly car in the US and I had to figure out which cities and urban areas to launch in first. I decided to answer this question by discussing the most environmentally conscious areas in the country and the cities that have been most receptive to ridesharing services, essentially combining the knowledge I had gained in my city planning and climate change classes.
While I would not change my majors if I could do college again, I wish I knew the importance of some of these classes right when I started college instead of finding it through experimentation.
Find a Mentor
One of the best ways to create a college plan (or any plan in life) specifically for yourself is to talk to someone who has done something similar before you. I found it beneficial to talk to alumni who had graduated with the same majors as me and then worked as PMs post-college. These conversations helped me understand what classes and resources in college I could leverage to reach my goals and ambitions while making sure I enjoy the journey. Similarly, I made sure I kept in touch with the professors who inspired me and had similar experiences to what I was aiming for. Finding a mentor during college can be hard, but reaching out to people through LinkedIn and cold emails has helped me more than I could imagine.
Ultimately college is what you make of it, and I love the fact that I changed my plans multiple times, yet still came out happy on the other side. I hope my story helps someone aspiring to be a product manager but isn’t sure of what classes to take and/or what subjects to major in. Experimentation can be an anxious process, but at the same time, well-laid-out plans can be boring. Some of my favorite experiences in college came out of improvisation and following my heart, such as ignoring my college requirements and taking Spanish for a year just because I wanted to and working abroad twice. While there are some things I would change about my college career, I am confident that I made the right decision at every step of the journey.
