I wanted to design chemical plants when I graduated from college. I was affixed to learning about processes end-to-end and was drawn to the idea of building something that could last centuries from the ground up.
Then the start date of my first job was pushed back more than half a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic and I found out that I would be removed from the shrinking Global Projects division and placed into a state of limbo that would start with manual labor in a 100 year old oil refinery.
Current early-mid career professionals have been shaped by multiple crises: the Covid-19 pandemic, funding cuts, and the arrival of AI.
This was in 2020. In that gap of time I started playing around with computer programming again. I had a part time job at a summer camp where I taught kids computer and programming skills. It was a powerful experience. In sessions with different classes of students, I found unexceptedly vibrant community bonds pop up for just those short week-long camps. It was an online ecosystem for flourishing creativity and authenticity. Not only that, but I learned a lot of Minecraft memes, and as the summer progressed, I was growing more interested in a software-industry career myself and I found my next thing: working at a startup called Club Feast that was making food delivery more efficient.
I ended up becoming a go-to data person, writing scripts and compiling reports with the programming languages I learned. It was a new identity and a new meaning to enable others with the power of data at their fingertips. I decided this was what I wanted to do for the foreseeable future and I left the chemicals industry to work in tech.
Chat-GPT was first released months after I moved into a quickly growing company called Octopus Energy. Nothing changed at first. But I was slowly feeling like my skills weren’t the right fit for the work I was given and so I asked those in the company who were experimenting with AI usecases if I could work with them. It sounded cool to me, and I didn’t know it then, but it would lead me to Stanford with a goal of studying human-AI collaboration in decision making.
Current early-mid career professionals have been shaped by multiple crises: the Covid-19 pandemic, academic funding cuts, and the arrival of AI. A pandemic disrupted the career I had planned to enter. A few years later, AI helped me build a career that I found very exciting. For others, I recognize, AI is a disruption to their sense of purpose and fulfilment.
My career began with the hope of designing something that could last for centuries. I ended up building something quite different: a career that has changed direction several times in just a few years. Increasingly, the thing we are building may not be a particular career at all, but the capacity to keep building when the plans change.