Today, I had the rare opportunity to act as a moderator for one of the Backpack to Briefcase sessions organized by the Arts & Science department. For those who do not know, the Backpack to Briefcase sessions are
“An interdisciplinary learning series that brings together students and alumni in a relaxed setting to share questions, experiences and professional advice.”
Basically, its a chance for undergraduate students from the fields of Computer Science, Political Science, and Economics to come together and meet some accomplished UofT graduates. I’ve been to three of these sessions already; and every time I am simply astounded at the caliber of the alumni that are brought in. The alumni who come in aren’t your typical middle-management suits; these people are either Directors or V.P.-level professionals who have over a decade of working experience! In fact, its such an amazing opportunity to be able to talk with these people that its simply disappointing that more computer science students don’t come out to these events. In a room of about 30 people, only two of them were in computer science; and yes, that number includes me.
For this session, the Arts & Science department invited three alumni to come in and share “three things” about career success that they learned over the years. One of the speakers, Julie Bristow, couldn’t make it at the last minute because of her commitments at work; but I was more than happy to be able to meet the other two speakers. One of the speakers was Rian Mitra, he’s a Director at CIBC Technologies, and the other was Kelly Munro, a General Manager for Yahoo! Canada.
For this particular B2B session, the organizers were playing around with the idea of having a student do the introductions and act as a moderator. For reasons that still baffle me, Sara Franca (one of the organizers of the event; she does some amazing work organizing events for the Department of Computer Science) thought that I’d be best person for the job. So when she asked me if I would be willing to do the introductions, I was definitely “shocked and awed”. In the end, I decided to go through with it and do the introductions.
My biggest fear for this event was screwing up the titles and names of the guests that I was in charge of introducing. Some of you might have seen me in Bahen completely stressing out and trying to memorize my blurb for the introductions. Fortunately, I didn’t screw it up; there were a few kinks here and there, but in the end everything turned out fine.
In fact, halfway through one of the talks, an elderly gentleman walked up to me and shoved me his business card. On it were the words: “I will pinch hit for Julie if you like”. I seriously had the deer-in-the-headlights look for a good 30 seconds before I realized what the man was trying to say. The man in question was Donald E. Short, and apparently, he’s a pretty famous and prestigious lawyer. So who was I to argue? I flew the idea by the event organizers, and they were more than happy to have Mr. Short give a short talk (pun intended?).
However, looking past the wrinkles in the event itself, there were some serious lessons to be learned from the guest speakers. There is a very specific reason why the Arts & Science department chose Computer Science, Economics, and Political Science students for these events. As most of you know, the demand for technological solutions is continually rising. Everyone from banks to hospitals want more tech and software in their work flow. President Obama is a crackberry addict, and we’ve got mayors and congressmen twittering their way through meetings. Its a simple fact of life that people who are studying Computer Science, Economics and Political Science right now are going to be working very closely with each other in the very near future.
So what does that mean for us? Well, it means that we can’t go out into the workforce with this attitude that we’re just going to hammer away at the keyboard for the rest of our lives. I mean, sure, some people are perfectly happy with that idea, and all the best to them. But the reality is that we’re going to have to actually deal with real people; that means managers, businessmen, politicians, etc etc. Unfortunately, as it stands now, we don’t speak their language, and they don’t speak ours. There seems to be this huge disconnect, where one side you have managers who only care about the bottom line, and on the other, you have developers who only care about writing cool code. If you can position yourself so that you can bridge that gap, you’re going to be an invaluable asset to any company.
We’ve got a long road ahead of us, and events like these can really give you some interesting insights into what the “real” world is like. So the next time I go to one of these events, I had better see more than two hands go up when they ask, “who here is in Computer Science?”