After moving her typically in-class guest speakers to Zoom during the pandemic, McCormick Prof. Elizabeth Gerber said she was inspired to create Technical Difficulties, a podcast to share stories of female and minority leaders in technology and design.
In each episode, guests share stories about their careers and values, as well as advice for students looking to follow in their footsteps.
“There was an opportunity to have these wonderful people share their insights about their work in design and technology, and record it so that other people could share the conversations later on,” Gerber said. “I’ve always loved and been very motivated by listening to people who I can see myself in. I wanted to give that and offer that to the students.”
The first season of the podcast discussed themes including leadership in design, identity and social impact.
Gerber — who founded Design for America — said she feels it is helpful for young students to hear from experts about common experiences like feeling impostor syndrome and navigating non-linear career paths.
“I think there’s some really wonderful insights about navigating your careers (and) about finding meaningful meaning in your work in design and technology,” Gerber said.
SESP junior Lauren Lin helped create the podcast’s first season and now hosts the show with Gerber. Gerber said the opportunity to work with Lin on the podcast has been “phenomenal.”
According to Lin, there aren’t many outlets for female leaders in tech or design, which motivated her desire to share these conversations on a wider scale.
“I’ve had a lot of amazing conversations with mentors and female-identifying people in the industry and we’ve had such great guest speakers in classes,” Lin said. “There were some insights where I just thought, ‘Oh my god, it’d be nice if I could share this with other people.’”
With a following of over 150,000 on her TikTok account, Maalvika Bhat — a second-year Ph.D. candidate in computer science and communication and Technical Difficulties’ latest guest — shared insights about the internet, as well as her career thus far.
Bhat said hearing that Gerber, who Bhat has long been a fan of, faces similar challenges to her helped her realize that she isn’t alone in her experience of desiring external validation in her career.
“You have three people at pretty different stages of their career navigating such similar struggles personally and professionally, which is always a really comforting feeling because I always feel like I’m going through this thing that no one else is going through,” Bhat said.
In the future, Gerber said she hopes to expand the network of sources featured on the podcast to provide a variety of role models to her audience.
Gerber added that she believes the personal experiences that sources offer are invaluable to students beginning their career.
“They’re not just stories about successes, they’re stories about failures and things that they’ve tried that haven’t worked,” Gerber said. “That kind of vulnerability in a public forum is really admirable. I think it’s something that we need even more of.”
Gerber said she also aims to inspire the future generation of female and minority leaders to continue entering technology and design fields, even if leading experts don’t look like them.
She also said she wants to encourage listeners to think about the broad impact that designs can have on society.
“The more diversity and the more people you have participating in designing the world in which we live in, the technology will be for everybody,” Gerber said. “The best person to design the future is you.”
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