Episode 12: Laura Summers
Having graduated from Cornell with a degree in Literature, Laura found herself in the middle of a recession. Gap year travels lead her to Australia for a few weeks and is still here!
Her career led from one opportunity to another - from quality assurance testing to UX designing (before it was even termed that!) to diving into the start up world. From amazing colleagues to toxic workplaces and startup challenges - Laura has seen it all and has kindly shared it all with us today.
Check out her work at her startup: debias.ai/
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Below is the episode transcript. This is automated through Azure Cognitive Speech Services - so if there’s missing words or there’s any typos - please blame it on the AI!
A summarised TL;DR version is available as a blog here.
Transcript
Akanksha
Welcome back everyone to another episode of Path uncovered. And. I think. Every. Week at this stage I just get excited about another new guest as Opasen covered is a podcast where I get to talk to fabulous people in tech and who have had really untraditional careers into how they actually managed to get to the tech world. And. It's just. Shining a light on all these underrepresented kind of careers in the world. And today I've got a very exciting guests. I've got Laura summaries. With me and. I will let her do. Her own interruptions and stuff, but she is very.
Laura
Cool and very.
Akanksha
Excited.
Laura
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here and thanks for inviting me on the podcast I am currently working on a new startup called D by Sai which is. Focusing on. The problems of bias. And structural harms in like what I'll call automated decision systems but really covers everything from business logic through to like deep learning. So that's a weird. Little niche that I've. Fallen into in the past couple. Years, but I've had a very. Strange, winding pathway through tech. I've been a product design. Lead of being. I've been QA. I wrote help docs that my very first job was writing help docs I. Did a lot of design. Work for a number of years. Did a lot of design. Research. I've done a lot of front. End. So I've I've just had a very strange career in tech and basically through combination of getting bored with what I was currently doing and just having great opportunities. Land in my lap. Just kind of followed my. News a bit.
Akanksha
I like it. I feel like that is definitely. A recurring theme with people who kind of ended. Up in tag. And I don't. Mean I'm not a big fan of like I fell into it or end up. Like you've done all the work to be. Able to fall. Into it, it's kind. Of the way I look at things at this stage. But a lot of the. Kind of precursor, they usually just. I hated the way things were already working and I thought I could do it better. Or not, just I can do it, but I can. Fix those and it's. Like I mean. Glenny talked about this too, she's. Like I was fixing. This. Teaching platform and I could just do it better and I can do a better job of how to. Explain. This and I. Just started doing it and I was like I love it. It's very much kind of a running like nice throughout the whole thing where it's like Yep. It's just an interest. And there's there's some kind of problem here. We can help fix up.
Laura
Absolutely my my transition from design only skills to programming skills. Was literally me being just a control freak and being like I know that you can do this, but you're being lazy and you don't want to cut up my design mock the way I asked. And just like going home and like doing it in rage I. Mean like look. This is how you can do it, and then from there I was like oh this programming thing is actually quite fun. I better learn how to do it.
Akanksha
I like it so look, let's take it back a little bit. Into kind of high school like I know you've had a very different programs. Different like step to starting off. So. Talking through high school. Kind of college times what was happening. What were the decisions happen in there?
Laura
Yet for sure. So yeah, I was. I was actually listening to your podcast about the Juilliard answer before he was like, oh, it's a bit like me. I was. I was a very serious ballet dancer for number of years and I'd like from age sort of 10 ish and tell me 16 I was like I'm going to be the answer. All I'm going to do and I just had a very clear vision of my life and then sometime around 16 I was like actually I don't think I want to be a dancer. Oh no, what do I do and? I just had. No idea what to do with. Myself and then spent. Probably. Like honestly, the next decade, not really being sure what to do with myself, but then finding my way through it. So I did a. Bachelors of Arts. And I did kind of like that classic humanities degree, so I did an English degree. With a focused on. Theater. I. Did a lot of learning. How to learn deconstructing. Texts. I've always really liked fiction, so I read a lot of Hemingway and a lot of Fitz Fitzgerald and a lot of like misogynist male authors which I don't know why I read them now. But I was. Obsessed with him at the time? Yeah. But at the same time I was working in a computer lab to. Make ends meet. And I just had this fabulous boss and she was just like here's some new RAM. Go install it and I was like what does that mean? I do that and I just like started pulling. Apart these PC's. And working out like what the motherboard was and what then RAM was and you know, like what? What all the? Different like pieces were and how they fit together. And that was. Actually, like a really. Finding like highly permissive environments just let me tinker and learn how to do things, and having been someone who didn't grow up with computers like I didn't have any computers at home as a teenager, I wasn't. Really like part of. My world, I think I barely. Touched one a couple of times to write a paper in high. School. But that was about it. So it wasn't really like. Even on my radar. So just having this environment where my boss is like oh. Hey yeah go do. That that's the thing you need to do or go. Upgrade the operating. System is like what's an? Operating system cool. OK, let's work this out. It was really great and all that kind of is maybe then the theme of my career is that I just had someone who is incredibly generous and let me just go play until I worked it out.
Akanksha
I love that and I think it's just really funny when he talked about like. Essentially just. Taken a pirated. PC, I remember one of my cousins did that. I was like very. Young, I was like seven or eight years old and I'm just like was like sitting there watching him for a little. Bit I was just like. This is. Just. Boring. And I'm just gonna. Leave and I've never thought about it again, right? I mean like the whole run stuff. I genuinely still remember the first time I bought my whole laptop, which was probably sometime in college like I think up until that was like like me and Tucker and like that would look pretty. I'll have that one. But I remember picking up that one, and I was like. What do these like numbers and GP? Like all this means I'm never understood us until I actually started working in tech. And I'm like. Oh oh. Now I get it. Like I knew the. Terms I just didn't understand. How it all works. It's really funny. It's just I mean unless someone really. Pushes you into doing it. You're never gonna actually figure it. Out.
Laura
Yeah, I mean. One of the reasons that a bit sad about all this closed box environment stuff we're seeing happening with like personal computing these days. We're just we're not in a world where you can. Say hey, just go take the case. Love your MacBook. Pros like I I did upgrade. The RAM on like my. Previous box. But the one I have right? Now. Is from 2014, so it's quite old. Who's really needs an upgrade and I just I I'm being a little bit of a like old persnickety person. I'm like I don't want to get rid of it 'cause I love it so much. But yeah, like I I was thinking. Gosh, there's I can't think of a single box I could buy right now that I could just like take, you know my my first group driver. Case open and take a look. At the battery or take. A look at anything under the motherboard.
