Professional Background
For my fellow STEM graduates:
Provide a brief summary of your career highlights since you graduated.
I joined a startup where ambiguity is the common theme of every problem that I solve. For me, it has brought an immense learning opportunity and joy of incorporating creativity. It is unclear which theory/approach/model/tool should be adopted, and I have to come up with it fast. This is not just in the technical context, creativity has been essential in navigating working relationships, placing oneself in the right place and targeting the largest opportunities and the lowest-hanging fruits.
How have you overcome an obstacle or challenge you’ve encountered?
Communicating with co-workers with different fields of studies have been a challenge. In graduate school, I had very little concern about how to communicate my ideas and solutions. The same was true in writing a paper in my field or giving a technical talk which are a well-established practices. But working with business stakeholders, software engineers and specific-domain experts turned out to be wildly different and open-ended. I try to ask them for direct feedback on my progress. I also make sure to constantly express my gratefulness for their patience with me adapting to industry.
What from your Princeton experience (e.g. courses, mentorship, research, membership, participation in activities, athletics, etc.) do you find yourself drawing on most in your career?
Part of my research was on an applied problem with real-life data. That helped me examine my interest for working in the industry. In addition, it gave me a jump start to understand the imperfection of the real-world and being able to make peace with imperfect solutions.
With the help of my mentors and advisors, I was able to give a large number of public speeches. The resulting confidence prepared me for advocating my ideas in my current role.
My advisor allowed me to be fully independent in choosing my research and approach. Having experienced that has been instrumental to navigate the ambiguous world of tech startup where sky is the limit but nobody tells you how to get there.
What are your job responsibilities? What does a day look like for you?
It varies.
In the planning phases I work on large-scale strategic problems that need quantification of the opportunities. For example, how much more of a risky businesses can we accept for the next year in such a way that the expected profit margin is still positive. This requires me to scope the problem, define it and mathematically model it. Then I'll have to maximize some notion of happiness for the company.
Based on my answer to the strategic questions my team prioritize the product and engineering tasks. After the prioritization, I become more of a software engineer/data scientist. I develop algorithms, implement them, test them and finally productionalize them.
In general, about 3 days a week I work on my code, and the other two days I meet with my team members on a one-on-one basis to discuss the problems in depth. Also, everyday we have a 10-minute team meeting to quickly catch up on the latest state of the dependencies.
What are the strategies you’ve used that have been successful in finding jobs?
I did not limit myself to the exact qualification requirements.
I limited the duration of my job search but I took it very seriously in that period. That helped me to be hyper-focused on the job search. In addition, it resulted in receiving the offers around the same time. This gave me an almost dead-line free opportunity to compare and choose as well as a strong negotiation power.
(Acknowledging that superstars exist, but for the rest of us,) Some interview skills are acquired only by failing the initial interviews. I failed some of the first screenings (where the bar is as low as whether the interviewee is a sane person).
What advice would you give students interested in pursuing careers in your field?
Consider tech startup opportunities. There is a tremendous learning value in all kinds of technical skills ranging from the navigation of organizational earthquakes to discovering the most fundamental aspects of the business.