Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / What advice would you give to an 18-Year Old at University? | 2022 Recap

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What advice would you give to an 18-Year Old at University? | 2022 Recap · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I would say be open, but also be careful about the inputs that you let in.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the people, the ideas, all of that kind of stuff.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the world is an amazing place.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think you know you want you want to do just one thing, that's fine.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Be focused, but also at least be curious about other things and have an awareness of other things because you you never know where you're gonna get your next big idea or your passion.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: So have a focus but also be open.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_04: The more technical skills you have, the more impact you can have on the world and the more control you have in your life.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_04: So uh data analytics, math, computer science, uh you need all those things.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_04: And and know something about humans.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's important.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_04: I think the humanities give us the why, and the technical stuff gives us the what.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_04: And together those are a pretty powerful combination.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_04: Take a literature class, take a take a religion class, take a um, I don't know, a psychology class, know something about the humans as well.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_05: So, what I would tell to an 18-year-old in that university is I would give that 18-year-old advice for both their time at the university as well as for afterwards, because now is a time that they could do a lot of things.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_05: So, in their time at the university, I would advise them to make sure that they try as many different things as they can, given the constraints, whether it's financial or the curriculum that they have to try, take.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_05: Because what I would tell them is there will never be an easier time for you to try new things, to experience new things.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_05: Everyone believes that this is the reason why you're at college, and all of these opportunities are being served up to you on a silver platter.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_05: It will never be as easy to meet remarkable people, it will never be as easy to try a new activity, and you should take full advantage of that.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_05: Don't just spend all your time taking classes doing problem sets.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, that's important, but you can do that on your own if you really need to.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_05: And part of that, what goes hand in hand with that, and again, this may or may not be true in all countries, but in the United States, one of the things that students completely fail to take advantage of for the most part is the fact that their professors have office hours.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_05: Now, this is a remarkable thing.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_05: These professors, these folks who at Stanford University are the leading figures in their industries, are forced to sit in a room for a couple of hours a week, and whatever students show up, get to talk with them.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_05: And what I would tell people is in many cases, depending on which department, like in my case in the engineering department, these are people who would be charging a corporation thousands of dollars for that time, and you, because you've paid the cover charge of your tuition, get to use it as much as you want for free as long as no one else is there.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_05: And very few students take advantage of this.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_05: And so one of the reasons why I developed these relationships with advisors like David Kelly and John LaRaw and relationships with other professors that I actually studied with is because I would go to office hours.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_05: And I didn't go to office hours because I had a whole bunch of questions, although I would bring questions with me.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_05: I went to office hours because it was a chance to get to know them.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_05: And I got to know them as human beings in a way that most students don't.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_05: Students just are like, oh, professors, godlike figures.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_05: I'm like, no, they're just people like you and I.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_05: And I want to learn more about them and get to know them and develop a relationship with them.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_05: And that's something that I was able to do that most other people don't do as an undergrad.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_05: So I strongly urge you to do that.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_05: The neck the last thing I would say is there are two things that you should be doing to really invest in yourself.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_05: And those two things are, first of all, to begin investing financially.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_05: At the age of 18, if you can begin investing, by the time you reach retirement age, whatever tiny amount you've set aside will have compounded to an enormous level.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_05: And it's a lot easier to get started early and develop the habit.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_05: And as I mentioned, money, while it is not the most important thing in the world, is still really handy to have.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_05: And you should probably make sure you set yourself on the path to having it.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_05: The second thing, and this is advice I give to people all the time, is you know, try to meet as many smart and interesting people as you can, and then also stay in touch with them.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_05: And many people forget that second part.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_05: You need to stay in touch with folks.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_05: And even today, people will say, Chris, uh, how do you know so many famous, interesting people?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_05: And I say, well, because I got to know a lot of unfamous, interesting people, and I stayed in touch with them.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_05: And they later became famous and important and prominent over the years.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_05: So just to give you an example, some of the classmates that I went to school with who are doing interesting things today.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_05: You know, maybe a month or two ago I had lunch with my old classmate from elementary school, Masi Oka, who went on to become a very famous actor.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_05: He was in the television series Heroes in the last decade.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_05: Now he's on the production side.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_05: He's actually bringing the movie Akira.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_05: He's Japanese American, so he brings Japanese IP to the United States, Akira being one of the most famous manga and then animated uh animated programs ever, and he's going to bring a live-action version of it to the United States.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_05: Well, he's doing fascinating things in Hollywood.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_05: One of my friends from Stanford, Michael Green, uh, is also involved in Hollywood.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_05: He was the screenwriter for Logan, right?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_05: The Wolverine movie.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_05: He's nominated for Academy Award, is involved in all these other fascinating things over the years.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_05: Also, Green Lantern, we don't mention that as much.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_05: But, you know, these are all people where it's I said out, you know, I would like to go ahead and meet a famous Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, or I would like to go and meet the producer of Akira.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_05: Well, that would be very difficult.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_05: But if I knew them when they were seven years old or 18 years old, it's a lot easier.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_05: And if you are in an elite educational institution, a Stanford and IIT or something like that, the chances that people are going to go on to become enormously successful is pretty high.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_05: And by the way, you won't necessarily be able to predict who's going to be the most successful and what they're going to be successful in.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_05: But if you stay in touch with smart and interesting people, good things will happen.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_07: Ah, so uh any 18-year-old university, I think, should get out of the bubble of just your individual um major, whatever it is, and expand beyond to understand what's going on into the world, right?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_07: And that includes obviously what's going on in economics but politics as well, and culture and so forth.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_07: Um always you learn, and particularly if you are going into business now, um, learn how to present.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_07: Learn how to communicate, right?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_07: You can have the greatest ideas in the world, but if you can't communicate or present them, then it won't matter.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_07: And that's something you can start in in college.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_08: Innovate.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_08: Innovate.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_08: No doubt about it.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_08: It's like I think uh uh you know uh part of the allure of your podcast, Contra Minds, Contra Minds is, I think, you know, like you know, different from the standard, right?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_08: As I would understand it.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_08: Like it's like, you know, thinking differently, just like the Apple tagline, right?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_08: Think different, uh, but like thinking differently, innovate.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_08: Um, you know, when I graduated from college, there wasn't no, the path to innovation wasn't available.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_08: You either kind of you either was were rich and you would take over the family business, or you would go get a job in a big company, IBM, Coca-Cola, Boeing, uh, Microsoft, all these things, and rise up as an executive.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_08: And I'm talking about undergraduate in business education.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_08: But the start-up path, mostly if you wanted to build a business, you would probably build like a restaurant or a hotel, something.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_08: It wasn't available now.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_08: And today I see the premium that markets and big companies are paying for innovation is sky high.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_08: You build something, the valuations are just dramatic.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_08: There's never, never that I can think of in the past, there's been such a premium to innovation as it is today.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_08: So I think as a young person coming out of college, you would be almost stupid to not want to try to come up with certain something innovative, an innovative product, innovative service, in an innovative business.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_08: Um innovation is at its highest uh price in the market today.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_08: So spending time with anything else to me is almost inconceivable given the energy, the youth, the desire for disruption, and the market will pay for it if you come up with something.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_08: You there either you IPO, investors are willing to bankroll it, big companies are willing to buy it at a premium.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_08: And so there's there's out there examples of small innovations that have gotten multi-billion dollar uh valuations or cash-outs.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_08: So, you know, I just say kind of if you're not if you're not thinking, going out there seeing customers that are unhappy and building something for them, I'd probably almost say you're wasting your time.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_08: You're wasting your 20s, so to speak.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_09: Ask yourself if you are entrepreneurial.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_09: If you are, don't miss out on being entrepreneurial.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_09: That's the first thing.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_09: If you are not the entrepreneurial kind, do what suits your temperament.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_09: Choose and align yourself correctly and early so that you don't spend too much time in discovering who you are and by virtue of that miss out on opportunities.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_09: I think that the time available for this is not very high, and you should be very, very careful about your time.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think uh the first advice, or I can't call it an advice, I don't know how capable I am of giving any advice, but one thing I would definitely like to share is that uh I went to university only once.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: I did my engineering and then after a few years I did my MBA, and that was the end of my formal education.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think the first thing he's got to be prepared is that this will be this will be his first, but definitely not the last time he's going to enter university.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: He will enter a different university once again, at least once more in his career, because I think the need to re-engineer himself uh is is going to be there, and he will have to be learning much, much more than what people of the past did.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: There's just too much happening, you know, to you know stay away.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: So more opportunities for formal education and lots of opportunity for continuous informal learning uh that will um that that is going to happen uh in his or her career.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: Second thing is I think uh I would really like them to focus on the basics.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think today the you know the moment uh you know, for example, uh when I when I for example I start teaching and they hear that I'm coming from so-and-so company, the immediate default mode is okay, you've got to tell us something about digital marketing, right?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: But my subject is called uh integrated marketing communication.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't use the word digital anywhere.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: It may be an expectation that since I'm coming from that company, I will probably accentuate that part more, which I do, but definitely I think to keep an open mind about what it is and learning the basics of that subject without jumping and coming to pre-conclusions about what it is, uh are the two things that I'm going to definitely say.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: Third thing I'm I'm I will also say that I think start building a good professional network, right?
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: Start now, don't start, you know, when you are 45, and you know, one of the unstated KPIs for any professional is what is the professional network he has, and this is not told in any B school, there is no uh you know course which says networking, art and science of networking.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: There is no such thing.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there are a lot of interesting articles though, and people have seen the value, so one can learn from there, uh, but it is something that one has to do very naturally.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: If you're going to a new city, don't sit at home and don't sit in your hotel room alone and have your dinner.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: You can as well spend it with somebody from another industry.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think what is important is to learn uh from another industry, not just from your place, but also learn from other sources.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: Also learn and hear people who are very different from the way you are.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: You may be in for many many surprises.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like, for example, I learned that about music, like since we talked about it, that there are other forms of music which are equally melodious and which are which can capture our mind very different.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I had the opportunity to meet uh MS Mulakshmi once, uh, the famous um uh Carnatic singer, and I went into her house and somebody was trying to play uh uh an African you know beat in front of a percussion instrument that he had recorded in Africa and it was being played in front of her, and you should have seen the delight with which she was enjoying it.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: Imagine how different karnatic music and you know African percussion instrument can be, but she saw something in that you know that fervor which was there.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I think we can all learn from other sources.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: So don't be with people who are exactly like you since you're getting into a new college.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: Try to network with people who are very different from you, from whom you can learn.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's not easy because we all have our comfort zones.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: So if we can find another clone of ourselves, we feel very happy.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I've heard not a manager say this.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: I heard that person because he's exactly thinks like me.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: I said, good, wasted talent.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: Two people are in the meeting are gonna sit, and you're gonna tell, and that fellow is gonna listen.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Might not as well have actually.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I think uh these are three things that I would say, in addition to, of course, the lovely learnings that they are gonna get out of that institution.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_10: I think the first one I would suggest is uh mathematical rigor and no compromise on you know the uh mathematical content in whatever they are studying.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_10: That's uh number one, because mathematics is behind almost everything these days, and sound mathematics will give you sound solutions.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_10: That is number one.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_10: Number two, problem solving.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_10: Don't focus on you know all the textbook type of things, uh don't read just the theory part and not solve the problems, solve the problems, try to solve the problems first and then study the theory, right?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_10: So, problem solving is very important.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_10: Um the third thing that I would uh say is that uh instead of uh watching the TV and looking at the mobile phone, read a non-technical book, read some nice novels, and uh for example, read Wodehouse that will go a long way in elevating the quality of your life.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_10: That's the third thing I would uh like to advise them.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_10: And uh the fourth thing that I would uh like to tell them is that you know there is a place for non-technical things in life, and uh they should also try to do many non-technical things and try to implement things rather than imagining you know how to do things.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_10: They should actually try to implement things even if it is very, very small things, and uh the best way to do that in the house itself, you can start that in the home itself.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_10: So I have personally found that uh I get a lot of uh delight, a lot of satisfaction by cooking in the house, which I will not do every day, but I think uh this is a beautiful diversion that uh one can have.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Be practical, understand uh that you have a real opportunity while you're in school to learn and to grow as a you know, not only learn a subject matter, but also grow as a person, take advantage of that.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but be pragmatic and understand that those four years they go by awful fast, and you have to you have to you know support yourself and your family, and you have to be marketable when you get out.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if I had to do it all over again, I would not have majored in history, but I would have taken as many history courses as I could as as electives, and I I would have spent a lot of time following around history professors asking them questions.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um universities, I you know, I know in the US I don't know what it what it's like anywhere else, but there's a lot of degrees that universities offer that uh you really got to scratch your head when well, I mean, it's interesting knowledge and it's it's it's good to have, but how are you gonna utilize that when you know when you're when you graduate?
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I I guess it's the same way I look at knowledge management, like I mentioned earlier.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's a ton of information out there.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: I can't catalog all that information.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: I have to be able to define what my long-term goals are.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: My long-term goals at NASA were to educate the National Technical Workforce.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that makes it a whole lot easier than siphoning through and filtering through all that fast knowledge to come up with, or all that fast information to come up with critical knowledge.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess I would take the same outlook if I was in a university.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a lot of a lot of interesting stuff out there.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it you you gotta determine what your long-term goals are for yourself and for your family, and how that information and uh what those courses and what that experience of the university, how is that gonna help you in the long term.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: The first thing I would say is that uh you know try to discover what your real interests are.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_03: And again, I uh uh piece of advice is that if you have access to the internet, the internet can be an amazing medium in terms of helping you that.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_03: Because if you can actually figure out what is it that you are really driven by, if you can identify that, I think that is a really powerful situation to be in.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_03: Because then it kind of makes sense that once you have identified that uh that area of uh interest, you know it it makes sense to focus your professional career towards that direction.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: Unlike a lot of and and if you look at my own uh professional career starting from my educational background, a lot of things I realized that I was just running myself on defaults.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_03: You got to first do your engineering and then got to do your MBA, and then uh good MBAs went uh went in a certain direction.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_03: So I just kept on choosing the default things that came around.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: It was only when you know, at a certain stage you kind of asked yourself, was okay, what is it that you really want?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: And that was the shock that you know uh when I made that switch to and startup and entrepreneurship.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: So that is one piece of advice I would give to an 18-year-old.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_03: Try to discover what you are really interested in, what you are good at.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_03: I would say it's good if you are, you know, uh you know, top of the class in academics, but uh you know, it is also true that academic brilliance is useful in some ways, but it should not be the be all and end all.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: Uh in in the Indian uh educational context, you do see you know families uh pushing their kids uh you know no end for academic excellence.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_03: And that is one another change that has happened to me is that I am a less believer of you know academic excellence and brilliance than I was when I was growing up.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_03: I think yeah, it might it it does have some role, but if you look at the world around you, you don't see a very high correlation of people who are successful and you know how good they were uh academically.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_11: One is all topics are interesting, it's just you need to find out what is what you what is what interests you and identify your passion and work hard.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_11: There is no escape route.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_11: Hard work is the sole answer, everybody's working hard.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_11: So you have to work hard, be passionate about it, and challenge yourself.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_11: Hard work is important, challenge yourself.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_11: Once you start feeling comfortable and uh you are uh able to do it, that means you're not challenged.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_11: So find something which will challenge you.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_06: I I think at any university, the the value of universities is that they have time-tested curriculums.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_06: They're going to teach you what you need to know about accounting and marketing and business.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_06: But I encourage anybody at the university level, I say the first thing is you need to get out and understand areas outside of your core discipline.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_06: So we even spoke about you may learn in your coursework how to do a business presentation.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_06: But it's also helpful, and I've seen business leaders, I've even been through courses on improvisational comedy, and I'm not a comedian.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_06: Perhaps it's even more important that I take classes.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_06: But to build ancillary skills that are going to differentiate you outside your outside of your peers.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_06: Or if you assume everybody has these same skills, what does that leave you to compete with?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_06: It leaves you to compete with really those same skills to say, I'm better at mathematics than everybody else in my class, which could be hard, especially for me, or you go outside and you say, I'm gonna have other skills that people don't see.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_06: In my case, I was also involved heavily in computer science while I was also learning business.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_06: Not because I was a great programmer, mind you, but because I knew how to communicate and understand the people that were programming, which is something that my peers didn't have.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_06: That's why I have more of a technical bent in my career, simply because I know how to engage with those people where others don't.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_06: And so when we talk about three to four things, I say one is look for diversity in terms of not only what you're studying at your core, but how you can look at other skills and capabilities to bring them in.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_06: And it doesn't have to be all business related.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_06: Some people, it's graphic design.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_06: So they're not not only masterful at understanding marketing analytics, but they also know how to create creatives, which shortens the time for them to deploy tests.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_06: Second thing, learn wherever you can how to bring it out into the real world.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_06: So there's that disconnect where sometimes marketing case studies in particular, I think when I was in school, they were still doing technical case studies from ten years ago.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_06: Like, wow, that product is already obsolete and we're studying about it.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_06: Because it takes time and there's still value in those cases, but make sure wherever possible that you do have tie-ins to the real world.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_06: Third thing, even though you have these tie-ins to the real world, be very clear or at least open to what you might learn.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_06: So oftentimes I do data science projects with students, and students come in and they actually get a little bit frustrated.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_06: They say, I'm like, well, how's the project going?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_06: And I say, Well, not well.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_06: Well, why not?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_06: And they're like, Well, we can't actually get to the data science stuff because there's no clear agreement on what we're trying to solve for.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_06: And they're like, Can you help to fix this?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_06: Like, this is what makes a successful project.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_06: We want to do this data science.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_06: And take a step back and I'll say, no, I said, this is the reality of the world.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_06: If you think you're gonna get into an organization where everyone's gonna be aligned on your objective, I was like, the reason why you're going through this project is because this is the same frustration that data scientists have.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_06: Nobody's gonna come through, and if they do, it's a boring job to say, solve for this.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_06: Everybody's perfectly aligned and we're ready to take action.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_06: It doesn't happen that way.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_06: And so what you're seeing for those real worlds, and this is why I say be open to it, a lot of people, especially in marketing, get frustrated.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_06: They're saying, I'm not able to do the marketing stuff because there's disagreements and there's politics and there's bureaucracy and there's unclear objectives.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_06: Say, no, this is this is marketing.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_06: Welcome, this is business.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_06: Let's let's move back, let's move past that.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_06: So those those are the three that I look for is I say, look, a diversity of experiences, I say get real-world application and then be also open to what you're learning.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_06: That is not always the direct lessons and the direct application of marketing, as fun as that may be, and you'll be ready to be like, I can't wait to run my first test.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_06: This reality.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_06: Even, you know, I I work with some of the most brilliant machine learning um engineers on this side, and some of them spend 80% of their time not building models, but cleaning data.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_06: And you think about how frustrating that is.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_06: You come out, you have a master's or a PhD in a quantitative field, and you're like, I'm ready to build some models.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_06: It's like, wait a minute, you mean this company didn't properly format all this data, and now I have to clean several million rows before?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_06: This is not why I went to school.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_06: I should be building models.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_06: True, but this is the reality of the world.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_06: And so just being accepting of that allows you to say, look, I don't, I'm not trying to say you need to build tolerance for this.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_06: I'm saying that if you look at the problem you're being confronted with, you don't have organizational alignment on your project.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_06: The learnings are how do you build organizational alignment?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_06: How do you work through that?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_06: So when you do get that job, when you do get into the real world, how do you build that?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_06: As opposed to running away from it and saying, I want to find a company that doesn't force me to confront this challenge.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_06: Because then you're going to be looking for a role for quite a long time.