In a podcast first, we begin today’s episode with a poem by our guest, Anita Balaraman. The poem is called “Doubt” and you can read it on Medium.com.
Anita is a technology product leader with more than 10 years of experience in building technology products that delight the customer both in the B2B and B2C domain. She is also an adjunct faculty at UC Berkeley, teaching and coaching hi-tech product management. She is currently the founder of an early stage ed-tech startup. Most recently she led the digital customer experience practice at Cisco Systems, designing and launching enterprise solutions for customer experience. Prior to that, she led the product team at WalmartLabs launching products that combine machine learning, predictive analytics and personalization. She consults independently and on the board of technology startups in the advertising, ecommerce, and ed-tech space. Anita received her MS in toxicology and applied statistics, and an MBA, both from the University of California, Berkeley.
Links:
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Berkeley College of Engineering
Doubt, by Anita Balaraman
An obedient child
Never wild
Begged to be schooled
Never one to do, what she wants to.
Somewhere in my teens I grew
To my parents, a quarrelsome, defiant point of view.
Aspired to cross the oceans blue
To America for graduate school to pursue.
Girls can’t be safe, outside of parents’ purview
Unless she has a husband, never mind she is just twenty-two!
In Berkeley, I was told you can be what you want to
Even a brown girl with big starry eyes, can dream one day
to be a researcher, a professional, or a professor someday.
Worked hard, very hard, or at least I thought,
For I’ve been given a chance, a really long shot.
But told that I may never be a researcher sought
There must be more than just the grades, I thought.
Despite how hard I fought…
Hiding my feminine brownness was like adding a nought[*].
Perhaps they are right, went my train of thought…
Why else would I not see someone like me in doctoral gown?
Oh don’t be sad, said my loved ones around
You can be happy, rich, and successful without a doctoral gown- hands down.
Look at the valley of silicon and sand
A dreamland of success, prestige and wealth
For those that are committed to technology at hand.
Yes, but my mind wandered…
Where did I lose the defiance in my view?
I really care about children and leukemia
And I can build risk models that I learned in academia.
But can you blame them if they did not trust
The models I built that needed their process to adjust.
I don’t look like them, or speak like them
The assumptions in my models are hard to trust.
I found my kind, the brown variety,
Who spoke bad English with no anxiety.
The friends at home and those at work
Looked and spoke like they belong to the same network.
No apologies for being a vegetarian during team lunch
Who clairvoyantly knew that salad wasn’t a good munch.
This must be beautiful- to feel like you belong
Without having to rehearse your lines so I don’t say something wrong.
To work with the bunch where I hoped I belonged,
I got another graduate degree, not the Ph.D. I longed.
A business degree, hoping to correct the wronged.
A Mom twice over, a wife and an employee,
‘you can’t get promoted if you leave at 5’, would annoy me.
Benevolent prejudice, paternalism, and sexism:
Belonging, I understood, with deep skepticism.
A misfit perhaps, have always been
A toxicologist, but not the wet-lab kind
A technologist, but not an engineer’s mind
An entrepreneur, who venture capital declined
An educator, living the adjunct grind
A researcher, without the terminal degree- unrefined.
Seeking belonging, but always unaligned.
Perhaps down in my subconscious mind
the fringes appeal more than the straight jacket kind?
The fringes feed concern for mistakes,
Suspended between two or more contradictory states.
An indecision between belief and non-belief
Hiding, somewhere, is a fictitious fig leaf?
Belonging requires suspending the lunatic fringe
To honor and reflect the collective doubt.
But that is harder to live, day in and day out
Easier it seems to simply not honor their doubts?
