Geoff
Welcome to the first episode!
Update:
This was recorded in Fall 2017 and much has changed since our conversation here! Geoff will be starting his next adventure on the West Coast studying for his Master's in Data Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. Geoff will still work part-time at the position he has held at the time of this episode as a Data Scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
This is the inaugural episode of The Meaning of Success and I have Geoff as my guest to kick off the show!
Geoff is on the Strategic Analytics team at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. He has primarily lived on the East Coast, growing up in Jersey, attending college in Philly, and ultimately, working in NY.
Geoff majored in bioengineering (BE) at Penn, where we both went to school, and saw realistically 3 paths from his major:
med school
grad school in BE
consulting.
He chose the consulting route as he didn’t really know what he wanted to do long-term and the choice seemed to offer him the most options later.
Being in consulting allowed Geoff to then pursue actuary (including all the required exams), but he found that the analytical work was very repetitive (read: no longer challenging) and he decided to pivot to data science, what he calls “the perfect blend of analytical rigor and creativity.”
For Geoff, who did not take the typical professional route, defining his career path meant asking yourself: what do you personally want out of your own life?
What do you find satisfaction from?
What are your objectives?
How do you then construct that as a path?
Part of this was from the freedom his parents offered him: Geoff’s Chinese immigrant parents did not push him toward the defined doctor and lawyer path like perhaps most stereotypical Asian Tiger Moms. Nevertheless, his parents did influence his interest in the sciences.
Geoff brings up one instance of this: at age 10, his father brought home a computer programming textbook for him to play around with.
Part of their (mainly his mom’s) push for him to look at more “practical” careers was due to his parents having taken a risk to leave China and start a life in a new country. They wanted to make sure the risk was justified.
Even with the back and forth with his mom in high school, Geoff ultimately feels incredibly lucky that his parents were able to leave China at the time that they did and find work in America.
He hesitates to call himself successful yet. “Success is not one point,” but rather a graduate path that you can never really achieve until you’re “at your death bed and reflecting back on your life.” Nevertheless, by Geoff’s definition of success as a function of one’s personal expectations of satisfaction or happiness, he believes he (and many people) are on the path to success.