
Recently, a young professional asked about my career practices and decisions on my way to leadership roles. That question seems to come often lately, so I decided to write them down and share them. I am not a career expert, but I hope my career journey will motivate and inspire you to be the best at whatever you choose to do. I believe that we shape our Careers with the choices we make and the practices we adopt.
1. Work in many domains. My career has taken me from performing experimental work at Los Alamos National Laboratory to working in Washing to D.C. as a technical advisor to Wall Street as a Chief Data Scientist. In each of these transitions, I asked myself how much new knowledge would I gain if I take this opportunity because it is essential to separate opportunities from temptations when evaluating changing domains. Opportunities will help you grow as an individual and as a professional, and by growing, you can make more impactful contributions to any organization. Opportunities feed your internal drive to be a lifelong learner. They force you to examine your life and career goals because we all want to live a life of contribution. Contributions are how you find meaning in what you do and how you live a successful life. The most defining moments in my career have come when I have added a new domain of expertise to my tool belt. For me, life is more exciting when you are learning and being challenged.
2. Document your work. For all the years that I worked at Los Alamos, I documented every calculation, code written, paper published, or experimental design. Of course, these were 100% unclassified notes and destroyed those notes upon leaving my employment. By documenting your work, you will be able to recall the rationale for a decision, the assumptions made, the logic followed to solve the problem, or the reason for your modeling approach. You can review your notes when faced with failure to help you identify where your thought process failed or, more importantly, which assumptions were wrong. And when you are right, you can use your notes as a reference to take short cuts when you are doing something similar or need to recall why something worked. Nowadays, people document their lives on YouTube, blogging, tweeting, Instagram, and other platforms, but that is a different type of documentation that does not promote learning. If you are a data scientist or a quant and want to take one thing from this post, please document your code. Most people do not seem to understand the importance of good documentation. Make sure your code is readable, easily understood, and maintainable by others if you decide to leave the job. Someone paid you a considerable salary for your code, and they deserve to have adequate documentation of your work. No code is self-explanatory, as some may argue. Be a good citizen. Your colleagues and boss will appreciate and remember you for it. It is part of your brand.
3. Geography matters. To be the best at whatever you decide to do, you need to seek the best in that field. From the moment I decided to study nuclear engineering as an undergraduate, I wanted to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory because it is the birthplace of nuclear research and attracts the nation’s best scientists. Los Alamos has the highest number of PhDs per capita in the world. I met and I learned from the brightest minds in the field. At times, the work was hard and competitive, but it was always rewarding at the end. When I wanted to learn and be involved in policy-making, I decided to accept a change of station and moved to Washington D.C. I have always loved the energy and the sense of public service found in D.C. No matter the political leaning, I felt that most people in D.C. tried to make the best decision for the country. When I finally decided to go into finance, I moved to NYC to experience the epicenter of finance and markets. I was not too fond of NYC at the beginning because of the lack of space and privacy. Leaving DC (which I loved) to move to NYC was difficult. My first role in finance was humbling, and I had a lot to learn. I learned the importance of having a good boss. My second boss at JP Morgan was terrific, and I learned so much from him. I had led people before, but he showed me how to be even a better leader. He was technically knowledgeable, kind, funny, and supportive. So, geography matters if you want to be around the best.
4. Choose the hard path. When I was an analyst, and even now, I always select the most challenging projects. Those projects that are likely to fail. Why? Many reasons. First, difficult problems push you outside your comfort zone to learn more about the topic. Second, they facilitate the opportunity to grow your technical skills. Third, they force you to ask for help, advice, or mentoring. A well-meaning colleague advised me not to choose my dissertation topic, because it was an experimental dissertation and because someone had been working on the problem for some years. It made sense since experimental dissertations are known to take years and are likely not to produce the expected results. But by my logic, if I fail, it was expected because it was a complicated experiment dependent on many factors outside my control. But if I succeed, it will catch the attention of many inside and outside my organization. And that is what happened; my work led to national and international speaking engagement just as a newly minted Ph.D. graduate. On the other hand, when a project fails, I reward myself for trying something difficult, having the courage to fail and grow, and learning something I would not have learned otherwise. It is essential to push yourself to failure because it gives you the mental confidence and discipline to keep going when things are not working. I have learned that most bosses respect and appreciate those who take the bull by the horn. Remember, you only need one strike to have a successful business, find a loving partner, or become recognizable. As a manager, I encourage my employees to take challenging projects even when their capacity is at 100%. A recent employee spent late nights at work and weekends solving a problem that most peers told him it would not work. Guess who got one of the highest bonuses that year.
5. Learn outside your area of expertise. If you are a data scientist, pick some books in organizational management, behavioral science, or learn to dance. Just do something outside your area of expertise. Right after I defended my Ph.D. dissertation, I was invited to give a paper in Russia on delayed neutron measurements. I loved visiting the facilities in Dubna and Obninsk, but I was saddened by the number of scientists, some with two PhDs, struggling to find meaningful roles. This visit was a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the country was still struggling to find its place in the world. Anyway, meeting so many scientists unemployed or not getting paid, made me reflect on my education, and I decided to get an MBA at the first chance. I thought that with an MBA in addition to my Ph.D. would make me more marketable as compared to my colleagues who only had a Ph.D. Getting an MBA exposed me to different types of people and personalities than my scientist or quant colleagues. It exposed me to accounting, marketing, and books and people outside my area of expertise. One of my MBA professors exposed me to TED videos. This is in the early years of TED, and I consumed with delight the available videos on so many diverse topics. Of course, TED is now mainstream and not as niche as it was in the early years. By going outside your core skill, you can bring insights from other domains and look at problems from multiple angles. Note that I am not advocating getting an MBA, but the message is to learn outside your comfort zone and your area of expertise.
A final thought, we are all an experiment of one, so some of my career choices may not make sense to you. I suggest that you take the elements that fit your personality and your career aspirations. Those elements that genuinely resonate with you and ignore the rest of them. But do follow a path of purpose, because life is happening to you.