10 years
10 years ago, on 17 July 2012, I defended my PhD dissertation in the amphitheater on the top floor of the Media Lab’s new E14 building, on the east side of the MIT campus. My PhD advisor, Barry (who invented Csound), had retired the year before and moved back to his native New Zealand. He joined on Skype. Mitch (who invented Scratch) chaired the committee. My third committee member, Chris (who invented JackTrip), long-time collaborator and supporter from Stanford and advisor to my first startup, completed the panel. I call my PhD committee members by their first name because that’s how I addressed them. In my 7+ years at MIT, they came to mean more to me than just professors, advisors, and colleagues.
The auditorium was decently filled, and many more people joined online for what was one of the first live streamed PhD defenses at the Media Lab. I tweeted about it with hashtag #worldmusictech. I had a tabla, which I barely played, as a prop on stage. The first few minutes were a flop: Barry was supposed to say a few introductory words about me, supposedly also as a morale booster, but because of a technical problem (he was remote), his mic didn’t pick up his voice, and he couldn’t hear us either. We waited in silence with resignation until his lips stopped moving. And then I spoke about my research…
Since then, I drove cross-country (almost — but that’s a story for another time) and moved to California; worked for a startup in music education, which went bust after barely 3 months of me joining; co-founded my own startup in online music collaboration, which ran out of money and steam before we got any traction (or product for that matter); started another startup where my partners dissolved the partnership without my prior knowledge; interviewed for and received an amazing job offer only to be told they wouldn’t accept my O-1A visa; tried consulting without much conviction or success; worked for yet another startup that almost left me with mild PTSD; in the meantime, I moved back to Europe (and then left the UK post-Brexit); dealt with family, health, financial, administrative issues (partly, but not solely, due to being an alien in the US)… We moved, took risks, failed, got up, and we’re still getting up. At the same time though, I mentored, taught, discovered, learned, and continued to create…
This is about the invisible part of the iceberg. The part that eludes social media. The part that we barely talk about, not only because we want to show our best side to the world, but also because we rarely look back when we move on. When I moved back to Paris, I networked like my life depended on it (in some ways, it did!) I met and surrounded myself with people from different walks of life and different corners of the world who shared some similarities in their willingness to put themselves out there, to take risks, and to be vulnerable. I kind of found my tribe. I found people who shared similar (horror) stories of visa and immigration, of looking for a job after a career shift or a geographical move, of starting new ventures, of searching for likeminded people and making new friends. People falling and succeeding in their own way.
It can sometimes be hard to look at picture-perfect lives of peers on social media, especially when those peers are from MIT, Ivy+, and the French Grandes Ecoles (given that in some of those cases, fantasy does indeed meet reality) and wonder where we’re going wrong. I hope that this post and blog will serve as a reality check. A place to open up and talk about my experiences and share yours, to initiate discussions online and offline, and to show that you can be both successful and vulnerable. And that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
It took me more than 6 months to find a job in Paris after I moved back (and a lot more if I count the time spent looking while abroad). People here told me it was to be expected, but I wasn’t ready for it. Granted, I was changing fields and moving countries… but I had a PhD from MIT, innit?! My takeaway from that experience is that most recruiters minimize perceived risk rather than maximize potential for success. They’ll stick to known formulas, known schools, and known ways of thinking (a multi-cultural background? a transatlantic move? or, god forbid, a career change? 😱). At the end of the day, it’s another numbers game. You have to persevere until you find a recruiter or hiring manager who thinks outside the box. I was lucky, I finally did find someone (I suppose we found each other) who allowed me to work in a meaningful field and apply my background in AI and data to the energy transition.
So here’s to the next ten years (and more)! But this isn’t so much about that; this is, above all, about the past ten, a candid look-back on the experiences and hardships, the learnings and takeaways, not just for myself, but for all those — students, mentees, friends, colleagues, strangers — who can benefit from them. Because there are more of us than we think. And because social media, and the internet, should be about more than pretty pictures and the visible tip of the iceberg.
