I'm now a Workmate! A note on opportunities and their influence on the course of one's life

 It’s crazy how your course of life, no matter where you begin, gets so highly influenced by the availability of opportunities (and your will to seize them.) Of course, there is a strong connection between where you start and what opportunities are available, but that’s a topic for another day. Today, I just want to gratefully focus on the fact that I stumbled upon the opportunity to join the Responsible AI team at Workday, pursued it, and ended up getting an offer! This note is gonna focus on this specific topic of how grabbing an opportunity changes life so suddenly in various ways and how I am super grateful for it. 

I am now officially a Responsible AI (RAI) research scientist at Workday and I am elated to be a part of this wonderful organization! I actually can’t believe I’m already a week in! There’s so much to learn and so much to explore. This is my first big corporate organization post-academia and it’s a tech company headquartered in the Bay area, California. The latter bit is important to mention because I am being pampered at this point and it’s just a weird reality to face (in all positive ways!) In the following, I am going to be penning down my experiences as a former academic experiencing the Workday hiring process and week 1 at a new job!

Let’s start with post-interviews where I learned that I got the offer and I accepted it. From that moment on, I became a new incoming Workmate and I was treated with a ball of a time following the “Congratulations” email. There were dedicated folks to ensure there was a smooth onboarding and then my new manager brought me the news that coincidentally day one of joining would also be the Workday Integrity team (WIT) summit where everyone from WIT, or the WIT nation as well call it, would be in the Pleasanton, CA campus. This coincidental opportunity helped me merge into the fast(track) lane by accelerating my networking (carpooling? 😜 ) with colleagues. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself weaving in the Bay Area / California way of work life.

I am gobsmacked by all the resources available to me as a Workmate. What’s even better is that Workday goes out of its way to explain to you that you need to use these resources! Haven’t we all been through situations where our realization of our lack of knowledge of the presence of a passed opportunity makes us filled with regret? It really felt like Workday is like Andrea desperately trying to let Miranda know what she doesn’t know 😂 (if you know, you know.)

So what are these changes, you may ask. Well, before Workday, I was working at a start-up called Fiddler AI focusing on RAI and I was there for two years. Since I was freshly leaving an academic environment and joining a start-up, I didn’t have much context on the employee perks and benefits of tech companies. Of course, a start-up cannot afford to spend its limited resources on much extravagance and so this baseline experience just further added to my surprise of how well employees get treated at big tech companies. And don’t get me wrong, even with Fiddler, I felt the surprise of the perks, with the lunches and dinners and the team-building events. Every experience is relative to your past ones and that’s the point: getting new opportunities shifts that relative scale for yourself and you can only just feel super grateful that you are experiencing that! So back to Workday campus: At every newly discovered corner of the Pleasanton campus, I was excitedly slacking my manager about the available perks and she couldn’t stop laughing at my kid-inside-a-candy-shop experience! Some of my exclamations to her were: “Oh specialty coffee machine!”, “oh flavored water machine!”, and “Unlimited peanut MnMs?!” c’mon! The Pleasanton campus also has its own gym free for Workmates via a wellness subsidy and a cafeteria with deeply subsidized food. The funniest part was how some folks were apologetic about not being as good as the “big players” like Google with its perks and benefits and here I was just grateful for all of these experiences! Talking about that relativity! 

Ok, so perks and benefits are just the cherry on top of course. The cake really is my team and my job remit which focuses on all things Responsible AI! As a research scientist, I am expected to focus on innovation and integrity the two pillars of Workday through which I hope to engage in thought leadership as well as do some cool applied research work in RAI. A sneak peek into this would be (I am also figuring it out of course - I’m just in week 1 for now) - deeply thinking about fairness and bias in the context of Workday products, developing a culture around the responsible development of AI along with my teammates who are already miles ahead in this endeavor, and ultimately contributing to workflows that help build trust in AI! I am super excited for this opportunity to build bridges across various teams and collaborate with engg and product in a way where we can all contribute to a culture for responsibly developing AI tech and independently concluding that it is indeed the optimal pathway for developing enterprise AI! 

So back to the crazy changes - An interesting and sudden change via this opportunity for me is how closely RAI at Workday works with C-level execs! Week 1 at Wday I got to meet several C-level folks including the CTO (tech), CLO (legal), and CCO (compliance)! This is an extremely important organizational structural design at Workday which, I strongly believe, is necessary because of the sociotechnical nature of RAI. Of course, as a new hire, this can also be very intimidating but I kept reminding myself about the awesomeness of this opportunity and that excitement helped me through the jitters! 

So there we have it, a new job, with a new set of talented individuals, in a new environment, and a sea of opportunities to make an impact and move the needle - all because I pursued an email. Super grateful for this and to the readers who read thus far -  go grab your opportunities! Cheers!

PS: these are my experiences and opinions not those of Workday as an org.

From earning a PhD to a postdoc to moving to tech industry - My professional experience

I wrote this on Nov 1st, 2022. Two years ago, I started as a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz during this fall season. That postdoc was the phoenix that rose from the ashes of a 2020 pandemic Ph.D. graduation and a series of failed applications for tenure-track faculty positions. The amount of labor that had gone into preparing those research statements and teaching statements paled in comparison to the number of hours I had spent imagining a research lab with my students to mentor and living academic life. That labor of academic applications may have been the fuel but the fire really stemmed from that vision that is fed to every Ph.D. grad that – academic life is the best life. I too was enchanted by that hope and tried with all my might to continue to keep that fire alive by telling myself that I was nearly there. All of this changed when I moved to California for a postdoc. 

You see, as a lower-middle-class Indian immigrant, who was really there in the United States of America because of merit, those 6 years of grad school made me forget that I couldn’t continue to be a nomadic man-child when there were responsibilities - financial, social, and personal - that I had been putting off until graduation. Suddenly, trying for one more year or publishing two more journal articles was no longer the hope I wanted to cling to while the rest of the world was moving on. This included the sticker shock of moving from Indiana to California. From the mid-west to the wild-west, this $24k per annum earning grad student had “leveled up” to $60k as a postdoc with a fancy Dr title. This 2.5x increase in salary, not gonna lie, did feel awesome when the first paycheck arrived but quickly fizzled away when 65% of that went away in rent! “Will I have to live with roommates, again?” I thought to myself. Each day in the Bay Area in California made me just feel like crap. The job already makes you feel like an imposter with immense pressure to continue to publish and little hope of relevant positions opening up. Add to that the misery of trying to make ends meet with a lack of financial support when the expectation in a typical Indian family really is that you should be the one providing the financial support. All of these thoughts were just crippling and suddenly the emotion of achievement of a Ph.D. didn’t really alleviate the emotion of dissatisfaction and frustration towards a system that almost felt like a pyramid scheme. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was failing on epic proportions. To make matters worse, I really thought it was me. I wasn’t putting enough effort, I wasn't publishing enough, I wasn’t committing all the time I could, and … maybe…I didn’t deserve this Ph.D.! 

Just when these thoughts were becoming more and more self-deprecating, my location change on LinkedIn resulted in a flurry of recruiters reaching out to me for industry positions. Initially, I was so entrapped with the idea of academic applications, that even reading those messages seemed like a betrayal to myself and to my dreams. However, when a recruiter from Google’s Behavioral Science team reached out to me, it was too hard to not entertain the idea of applying there. “How difficult could it be!?” my arrogant self thought. This arrogance was years in the making when all that you hear is constant industry bashing from ivory tower academics. When I actually did go through the interview process, it was eye-opening! This wasn’t easy! A 5 to 6 hour interview process with in-depth interviews and technical questions, sometimes on topics that you have long forgotten! I landed up not getting an offer from Google but I did go through the entire technical process that made me realize that my perception of the industry was far away from reality even for something as simple as the hiring process. 

That lack of an offer from a place like Google made me feel like I was being presented with a new and exciting challenge - applying to the industry and getting an offer! I chased this feeling and focused on keywords such as human-AI interaction, human-centered AI, cognitive modeling, etc. since that is my area of expertise. Through this, I stumbled upon Fiddler AI - a start-up focusing on Responsible AI. Mind you, this search process resulted in a lot of failures as well, but somehow here the feeling of rejection was less painful than in academia. Perhaps because the amount of time you spend personalizing and tailoring your academic applications is absurdly high as compared to the one in the industry. After going through the super thoughtful interview process at Fiddler, I landed up getting an offer! In my heart, I had already made the decision to move. I had a chat with my postdoc advisor and she was just super happy for me either way. That kind of support is so helpful and considerate and I am grateful that both my Ph.D. and Postdoc advisors ultimately advised me to choose a path that works for me. 

Well, I joined Fiddler on Nov 1st, 2021, as this clueless Data Scientist who continued feeling like an imposter in his initial days wondering if Fiddler made a mistake and whether I tricked them. Today is my 1 year anniversary at Fiddler AI (we call it Fiddlerversary) and I couldn’t be happier! In this one year, I have published a paper at The 10th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, a workshop paper in ICML22, and a workshop paper in NeurIPS22 focusing on human-centric challenges with ML model monitoring. I have published a blog series on intersectional fairness, launched a new product feature, understood how startups work, improved my coding skills, and improved product quality through testing and documentation.  I can’t believe I have been able to do so much! Needless to say, I am continuing to gain knowledge on human-centered, responsible, and ethical AI - an area I am so passionate about thanks to my journey with engineering design, decision-making research, and human-centered design roots. I feel blessed to have traversed this unique path and to be where I am now.

This transition from academia to the industry has been an awesome one for me. Here is my experience over this one year at Fiddler -

• Getting to see an immediate impact, and being able to delight customers is very exciting to me. In my first year at Fiddler, I was able to launch a new drift metric called Population Stability Index (in general this is termed a new “product feature” in the industry when your work results in being able to do something new on the software). This work gave me the opportunity to go above and beyond and work with a machine learning engineer and a front-end engineer and convince them to just get this feature launched. I did this two quarters earlier than what higher-ups were anticipating! That feeling of overachievement was so sweet and when a fintech customer started using it within weeks of launching the feature it was just a cherry on top to see my work contributing to the bigger organizational goals.

• I was no longer working in isolation. There are dedicated teams for jobs that I used to have to do in academia all by myself while constantly being aware that the job I’ve done, in an area I am not an expert in, is subpar and feeling like an imposter. That feeling hasn’t gone away completely but it’s not as loud as it used to be. 

• I felt like I was getting paid more than just to make ends meet. You obviously make a lot more money in industry than in academia and as an immigrant coming from a lower middle-class family, it absolutely matters! Don’t let anyone tell you not to worry about money. It’s generally said by those who are in a different phase of their life, who have accumulated wealth only to realize they don’t know what to do with it and it doesn’t motivate them. Context does matter. Being in a phase of life where you are trying to just survive - you can think of a lot of things you can do to bring comfort in your life through that extra income. Of course, money is not everything. I don’t think a majority of the folks think that way. However, it is a disservice to the impressionable people who look up to you to say that you shouldn’t worry about money and finances. 

Having said all of this above – here are some of the things that are a part of my professional experience by being in the tech industry 

• There are luck-based factors even in industry and not just in academia. For example, getting the job itself has a lot to do with luck and timing. Other luck-based factors include - 

• the organizational culture, 

• your manager’s emotional intelligence, 

• your starting projects (are you being set up for failure)

• economic conditions

• The things in your control - 

• being a lifelong learner - which means being curious, asking questions, getting to know the sociotechnical aspects like the right people for the right questions, creating a mental map of various subsystems of this large organization that you are part of, acquiring intelligence through “transfer learning” == not having to reinvent the wheel, when you have the feeling that you have free time at work figuring out how to make it productive instead of secretly feeling happy about having free time during work hours and whiling away your time. - a lot of this I learned through my grad school life and mostly because I had an insightful Ph.D. advisor who forced me to think and justify every decision I took about the next steps for work. For that, I am super grateful to academia and my advisor. 

• Finding mentors. This is super important. Knowing which person in the organization can help you is crucial. PS - It may not be your manager but rather your coworkers.

• You can be the source of fun and happiness for others.

• Make sure to have meetings with others across the organization and not just your team

• Take control of your calendar! Block chunks of time as focus time for yourself. Do not let anyone schedule meetings in those blocks.

• Politics is everywhere. Knowing which fights to fight and which to let go of is crucial across all phases of life. 

• Your manager cannot be your friend but needs to be friendly. 

• Taking an initiative does not mean you forget about the weekly priorities set for you. So don’t get lost/aim for heroics if you aren’t keeping up with your weekly targets. 

There is obviously a lot more but I wanted to pen this down before I forget. I hope this helps someone who is currently a grad student and thinking about the academia vs industry debate. There is no right or wrong answer and the path totally depends on your context and your personal journey. If you wanna chat more, shoot me a message on LinkedIn!

My academic journey: Reflections as a first-generation kid

Part 1: The path to graduate school

I earned a Ph.D.! It’s almost unbelievable to the present postdoctoral scholar me. It’s certainly an unimaginable reality to that first-generation kid who had no clue about the future. Unbeknownst to me then, my defining moment was when I decided that I wanted to get into an IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology). The very idea of getting into an IIT was not mine (or my family’s). I owe it to my high school friend Pratik who started talking about the IITs and the Joint Entrance Examinations (JEEs) and how he wanted to pursue it. It was almost like an act of rebellion for me. To dream what Pratik was dreaming. To be able to dream big, to set myself apart, to not follow a path some loved one told me to, to be able to claim independence of thought and to be...different. I am writing this for all those first-generation kids who realize that their world is imposing restrictions on them, who realize the idea of boundaries is just a perception, who are thinking of breaking those boundaries and are setting goals to pursue dreams no one near and dear to them pursued. Obviously, in retrospect, putting it all this way seems very heroic. Seems very courageous. However, life unfolds gradually and not all days for a first-gen kid are an “act of rebellion.” It’s all about opportunities and being able to pursue them. A majority of the first-gen kids don’t have the privilege of being presented with opportunities like I did. Being in a big city like Pune, with friends such as Pratik who enabled me to think beyond my own boundaries of my own thoughts then. As I started writing, I realized I couldn't possibly finish this in one sitting. Neither do I have the time to be able to dedicate all my hours to this. However, I feel like I owe this to those unseen, unknown fighters and rebels who are, in the very now, striving to do something for themselves. 

 

As a kid who was bullied in school for being different, I got immense pleasure in aggravating those bullies by being weirder and more daring with every new goal I set for myself. I owe this attitude to myself. I have always had a loud personality. So, when I was bullied in school, I was lucky and blessed to have had it in me to give it back to my bullies. Not by physical force but by excelling in academia. It’s hilarious to me now how the little kid me thought I could own my bullies by being a nerd. Like who thinks that way?! I am so glad I did. Of course, I can't say if I owned my bullies or not, but it turned out to be quite advantageous and positive for me. All of this bullying and my reaction to it continued even after getting into an IIT. But before I talk about my IIT days, I want to mention my pre-IIT days when I was working extremely hard to prepare for JEE. 

I prepared for JEE for two years during my ten plus two or junior college as we called it. (The 10+2 system is a part of the K-12 education system, and equivalent to the International Baccalaureate and GCE Advanced Levels in the west. -Wikipedia). This was considered, back then, an appropriate amount of time to prepare for JEE. I won’t digress with how people have started preparing for JEE for 5-6 years in advance now. Wild! Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, two years seems like a very small amount of time. Even though JEE preparation time was just for two years, I lived a “mini-life” as our JEE mentors used to call it. I had started dreaming about this ideal world called an IIT and how life would be amazing. So from that standpoint, I had created a vision of the IIT world for two long years. That view was shattered when I went to college (IIT Guwahati). Turns out, when you put something or someone on a pedestal, chances are you will be majorly disappointed. I had this idealistic view of how an academic world would be full of bullied nerds like me and we would all live on one big happy island. To my disappointment, there were bullies in college too. That same rebellious kid came to life and I decided to "own" those bullies by pursuing higher education. Of course, that was not the motivation or the only factor that helped me pursue higher education. There was also a sense of pride, reinforced by the Indian culture aka Indian uncle and aunts who made me feel like a hero. There was also ego, arrogance, and an inflated sense of self all while I continued working hard and having the privilege of being presented with opportunities. It’s amazing how once you have even a little privilege, it snowballs into more and more opportunities. So that decision of the kid-me to get into an IIT, and my hard work to actually get into one, paved the way for another pivotal moment in college. My second-year internship!

 

During my second year when I was looking for internships, I landed up getting an internship opportunity at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). In retrospect, that opportunity was 90% luck and 10% my GPA, my persistence in applying/spamming to 100s of places, and my fear of missing out. In fact, some of the things that I was doing as a part of that 10% were actually hurting me. I was not personalizing my applications. I was applying to places that had no connection to what I was doing or wanted to do. I didn’t bother to ask how to frame things. I may have also blatantly copied the structure of the applications that were examples from seniors who bagged internship opportunities. I want to write it out there because I know there will be first-gen kids like me who will be doing the things I did and it's only because they don’t know better. I just got lucky. Most might not. Notice that I now have the ability to acknowledge my dumb luck and my mistakes while maintaining the stance that I worked very hard in doing the things I was doing. Life was not black and white, it was all gray. This is especially true for first-gen kids who are sometimes taught to push walls as a part of work hard exercise only to be rewarded with nothing. If you are first-gen reading this, don't hesitate to ask around. Moreover, after you have asked and worked on something, be unabashed about seeking critiques and feedback. I also know the dilemma of whom to ask. Go to the people in positions of power. This includes not only your immediate seniors who are themselves figuring things out but professors. So many of us first-gens don't think of asking for help. Do it! It's not a sign of weakness. It's the exact opposite. Can you believe I got a KAIST opportunity just by sending an email with my CV? There was no posting. No ads. I just enquired. 

The KAIST opportunity helped me in more ways than I thought it would. I realized it became easy to apply for internships in my third year. From then on, it was mostly a privilege to bank on previous credentials to continue seizing one opportunity after the other. KAIST internship led to Purdue Internship led to study abroad in France led to understanding the “first world” led to wanting to pursue higher education. (Of course, all while I continued to study for exams and continued getting good grades and playing the number game. I could write a whole new blog about how hypothetically all of that may have not mattered or how it was stupid etc. but I will know whether all of that helped create a perception of me in someone else's mind that lead to the opportunities I got.) Little did I know, a Ph.D. was going to yank me into an environment full of uncertainty, self-depreciation, feeling stupid, and feeling alone. In retrospect, I can’t be more thankful that I got the opportunity to experience graduate school!

Part 2: The Ph.D. Experience (work in progress)

 

The thing is, I was so used to riding on my privilege by the time I graduated from college, I had forgotten what it was to struggle. A Ph.D. is about struggle. Academia provides opportunities for you to think about the topics you really enjoy and plan things in that direction. Such an opportunity is both a gift and a curse in the academic world. A first-generation graduate student may not know how to think and plan. In fact, I didn’t realize this until I was too deep into the I want to be a faculty member dream. By that I mean when I really understood the academic hiring process and the factors that influence the possibility of you getting a tenure track position, I realized all the things I should have been doing during my Ph.D. including reading more, publishing more, strategizing more, writing more, and working more. The problem with such a realization is that more is a relative term, and rarely something is discussed in absolutes in graduate school. This is primarily because even professors may not know what research results they will find as such is the nature of research only to be exacerbated by the capitalistic nature of American academia. This bears a huge implication on the growth of a budding graduate student, let alone a first-generation kid, who may not understand the intricacies of the academic world. A few of such intricacies are listed below based on my experience and understanding of the engineering academic research world.

 

• Graduate students are expected to be independent without little explanation of what independence means.
•  Independence means you are free to search for theories from any area which can be relevant to answering a research question and you are free to propose a path to solve the problem with a logical explanation of that path. You are also free to use up all your time and efforts in doing so. In your early academic years, chances are however that you don’t know how to search for theories and how to choose a research methodology. Mind you, it's a methodology and not a method which in itself takes a long time for a graduate student to figure out alone if you do not have the right guidance. 
• If you can’t be your own teacher and student, academia is not for you.
• The academic world lives off of academic underachievement anxiety.
• So, given that you will feel the struggle of a lack of knowledge not only about the content but also the research strategies, you will not be able to progress in the earlier years of your Ph.D. as quickly as you thought you would. This results in a downward spiral given that it's highly likely you were an overachiever in academics.
• Ph.D. advisors are not incentivized to be good mentors.
• I was extremely lucky to have had an advisor who knew how to mentor well. Most graduate students aren’t fortunate to receive a good mentor.  Mentoring is an art and very few people know how to truly mentor someone even if it means they may not be able to achieve what they set out to achieve from you given that they had hired you in the first place.
• The weird part about academia is once you get a Ph.D. you have the power of giving PhDs to others.
• Data-scarce Academia is trying to compete with the data-rich Industry to make advancements in data science of course in the context of your research area.
• If you are a non-CS student, you will hear about the enigmatic AI/ML terms thrown around in your department and you will be mesmerized by the knowledge being thrown around casually in conversations without realizing that most of the people in your own department may not know about AI/ML as much as you think they do. 
•  CS knowledge is an implicit expectation without the path provided or resources made explicitly available to acquire it.
• You will notice that professors use academic terminologies that impress the vision of Program Directors and expect students to truly decipher the meanings of those terminologies.
• As an academic, you will always be underpaid but after a point, you won’t be hand to mouth.
• Every Ph.D. is different and not everyone puts in the same amount of effort to achieve the “Dr” title.
• A Ph.D. can make you feel very lonely as you are deciding to take on a path where you would want to claim you know the most about a topic which also means you will only find ears to listen but no mouths for words of advice except your advisor who may be a nice person if you are lucky like I was.
• Conferences initially seem like an opportunity to travel and visit a new place. However, it should be mostly treated as an opportunity to meet people and discuss ideas with them as a part of your job. 
• Reading is different from reading right.
• There is just so much to read! This feeling can be crippling when you come from a zero state of knowledge about the very area that interests you. 
• The way to deal with this feeling is to initially read your advisor’s work to try to get on the same page with them. However, this also needs to be balanced with reading about the things your advisor is currently talking about in the context of the current project that is funding you. Chances are your advisor is also relatively new to the current project from the perspective of not having answers to the problems (because that’s why they are interested in exploring the area!) 
• So, the key is to read about gaps in knowledge which means understanding what is currently known and what is not known in the current project.

Integrating Gradescope and Blackboard (Purdue)

So if you're looking for how to integrate your roster from blackboard to gradescope, here's what to do:

1. Go to Blackboard
2. Select the course
3. On Course Content with edit mode on (for instructors) go to Tools
4. More Tools
5. Gradescope
6. It will take you to a page which creates a gradescope link
7. Create that link 
8. Now go back to course content page and you should see gradescope link.
9. Click that link, it takes you to gradescope. (You may have to "launch" that)
10. Integrate the course!

Uncertainty

You lay in my arms,

conflicted and troubled;

Is this is how it's supposed to be?

Your inner voice mumbled.

I heard that voice,

loud and clear;

Before your lips,

even moved my dear;

I know how it feels to be uncertain,

to live in that moment of unsureness;

All I'll do is play my part, 

and build us a founded love fortress.

Impenetrable it will be,

to uncertainty first of all;

Honesty guards it strong,  

and looks after the walls.

Your eyes would be,

it's opening gates;

Straight to my heart,

that path would take. 

When you reach there,

you'll have a smile;

That'll last forever, 

This is worthwhile.

I look in your eyes,

and they speak to me,

as my lips they see,

Yours I wanna be...

I understand that uncertainty,

but I'd love to love you indefinitely.