One of the things that I remember is back in my early days at the university, I went to Pomona College. I had great dreams of actually becoming a doctor. I remember that's what every Asian apparently wants for their son. And then, after my first chemistry test at school, I realized that that dream was gonna go away, and so I had to actually re-center and find some of the things that I was really interested in. And as I started to really think about things that interested me, I really like the study of people. I like understanding them. I like understanding what makes them check and what moves them to do things. When I got into psychology, it wasn't an accident. It was actually a very thoughtful sort of thing to do. So I think I did everything that any good psychology major would try to do, including helped to publish papers for my professors, write some papers, be part of the psych lab, and then really grow my career from that perspective. In fact, one of my most favorite or two of my favorite teachers Dr. William Banks and Dr. Sharon Goto really helped to shape my desire for how to understand people specifically in areas of cognition and perception, as well as industrial-organizational psychology. When I got out of school, back when I started, there weren't many jobs for psychology majors. Unless you go straight into University and I remember actually doing odd jobs, including working at retail stores, I worked at J. Crew. I worked as the Paralegals Assistance, and one great thing is that there's always something to learn. Whatever job you take on, and if you're open to learning it, it shapes you in a way that nothing else could, and nothing else shouldn't. One of my favorite things is mentorship. I have a big brother named Kevin Wong, I tell him all the time. He doesn't remember doing this for me, but he said, Hey, I've just been following your career. He's not in what I do. I think that's something you should look at. And, it was called market research, and basically it's the study of humans and people and how to actually take that behavior and give it business value. That basically pushed me into a really interesting path where I started to use this ability that I have gotten in college and start to understand how to understand human behavior and how to work with brands specifically to help them understand white spaces, help them understand how to communicate with consumers, understand where they were lacking and really use it from a consulting perspective. That is a nice little path from this. The start of where I think many of your students are to where I actually started in my career in the reserve field.

I run the research function or insights and innovation function at Vox. One of the things about this job is you're constantly looking for how data need needs to be much more meaningful than just the numbers on the page. What's interesting is that we all know that that data is really human intention or behavior in a database, and we often forget that that's what it is. How do you bring understanding to do that specifically and how do you actually bring strategy and align resources around, how to make insights meaningful for the company. Innovation is such a cloudy word as you will like. People are like what? What does that mean? And I think what it means for me personally is it means I know very little. And part of innovation is listening and knowing that there are amazing things that go on outside in the world, that if you're just willing to engage with people who have great ideas, sometimes you bring some of those ideas in the house to build better products, monetize or create things for your audience that they're just gonna love or even partnerships for that matter. And so when you talk about hours, I'm very passionate about the job. So I feel like life inspires work and work inspires life. I'm basically always there. I'm traveling a ton, just thinking I go to New York where most of my staff in and I think what's really important and one of my favorite things came from the managing director that I used to work with, in my first job at home partners, Julie Smith. She actually encouraged us to have a good work-life balance. And the reason why she said, that is you don't take time outside of your work, you become insular and you don't know or are not inspired by how life actually works for your friends, for your family, what you watch on television, what you see in a mobile device, whatever it is. And so having that clear distinction, not just energizes you personally, but I think there are real benefits for what it does professionally because you start to pick up on things and about this could work at work because your mindset and context are completely different. And that's, I think, is very important. The hours that I spend on half fluid actually really kind of taking time out to not always be on call and be at work.

I work a lot with our data science team. I work a lot with our engineers, at times as a part of being an insights person. There's a lot of connection with people in marketing as well as our revenue sellers, sales folks, that account manager that works with our customers every single day and even product builders. So the head of the product is a title that I'm connecting with all the time. And, the approach I have is that insights need to challenge, not confirm. But really, it's about being a partner. I think one of the things that happen in our field is that way sometimes, you feel that we need to be the smartest people in the room when actually, the best insights people are the ones that are listening most intently, and it's really helping people confirm or readjusting, re-optimize their decisions based on the numbers that you found. There are no gotcha moments with insights that there's really this is how we can actually get to a better place together because we have the proof through data and analytics that we basically come up with. We can't do that without our partners. We can't message without marketing. You can't build products without the product folks actually building. We can't get to these higher levels of analyses without our friends and engineering data science. And so that collaboration, I think, is incredibly important when you're working cross-functionally in a larger organization.