My New Tech Adventure: Week #3 Recap
Manifestation is Real.
Sorry for the delay! Let’s get into it. Note: Read and Part I and Part II first.
Week #3
The third week of my BrainStation course ended on a rather good note for the most part. We went over more Advanced SQL query concepts such as String Matching and the CASE clause, which for example, is used to extract or manipulate data under multiple conditions. My group was finally able to find a dataset on Kraggle for our final project, but I’ll talk more about that in my joint Week #4 & Week #5 recap soon.
A Big Announcement!
Last week, I started my new journey as a Program Manager @Microsoft! It has been quite a humbling experience. I have been waiting for this moment for the last 11 years. I always wanted to break into tech ever since I completed a web design project at my first job out of college. I networked through the New York tech scene in the beginning of my career to figure out who the major players were and which technical or non-technical fields would best align with my career goals and that I could fall in love with.
After Startup Institute, I thought I was heading down the User Experience (UX) Design track, but decided in 2015 that I would become a product manager. Then at some point, I figured that project management would be the best entry point to make that pivot since I didn’t have the technical background to begin with. I was so adamant about reaching this goal that I think I placed unhealthy pressure and unrealistic expectations on myself. I genuinely love coming up with new product ideas and helping teams succeed in their goals. In retrospect, I think I was a bit naive as time passed because the more I talked to companies and professionals, the more I realized that employers want to see true tangible product results and amazing ROIs. Before Microsoft, I was a writer and content marketing specialist, so it was an uphill battle.
So, I applied to a large net of jobs over the years that would help me pivot into the discipline — content strategist, associate product manager, business analyst, marketing project manager, Scrum Master, Product Owner, and so forth. I passed my resume along to recruiters and hiring managers from major investment management firms, Big 3 management consulting firms, unknown startups, unicorn startups, FAANG companies, non-profits, and everything in between. If I wanted to be in tech, I had to understand quickly that any organization that creates and then deploys new products and services to internal and/or external customers is a tech company, regardless of industry or business model.
But the universe had other plans and wanted me to continue my marketing path in the meantime. I took on several content-related jobs at places like Bank of America, Mixi, and The Muse. Then in 2021, I took a “little gap year” after being in “workaholic mode” for so long. That’s when I began to worry less about the grind and more about my mental health, new hobbies, and my true potential. When I didn’t have “looking for a job” on my mind 24/7, that’s when new opportunities start rolling in and I was able to finally pitch my unique background and tech insights confidently to potential employers. And then voilà, now I’m here.
In this new role, I will be implementing Microsoft’s Responsive AI principles into multiple internal projects that touch upon several stable Microsoft Office 365 products. AI ethics and data governance are still new concepts to me. I was recently exposed to the AI ethics side of things when world-renowned AI researcher and computer scientist Timnit Gebru was reportedly fired from Google in late 2020. It was all over Twitter at the time and so I was more in tune to the discriminatory aspects of the situation. However, Coded Bias opened up my eyes to how her sudden termination was almost like a slap in the face to those who are sounding the alarm of the growing sociotechnical dangers of inherently biased and unethical AI systems in modern human societies. When there isn’t a healthy discourse between tech companies, policy makers, and the AI community to define these safeguards and provisions, systematic societal issues such as an more unequal job market can manifest years down the road.
Maybe my calling is to help organizations succeed after all and I’m very eagered to learn more about the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning fields from a sociotechnical context at Microsoft.
