Women in AI Awards 2023
Earlier this month I won the Women in AI award for AI in Defence and Intelligence. These awards honour innovators in the Asia-Pacific who pave the way by working, leading and innovating in the fields of AI. I’m still feeling very humbled to have won this award. My career has been shaped by hard work in what has often been a challenging industry. Not all my working experiences have been positive or successful in the traditional sense. Some have involved great people, but uninspiring work and others have involved challenging work, but not so great people. The night I won the award I stopped to reflect on what has now been a decade of my career. Looking back, I can see that every work experience I have had has shaped me in some way. From some I learnt critical technical skills, while others taught me softer skills like patience and persistence. It didn’t always feel like I was on the right path, or any path for that matter. I wasn’t someone who made career decisions with long term goals and aspirations in mind. I made decisions based on what I wanted in the moment. What work I wanted to be involved in, what new skills I wanted to learn, what kinds of people I wanted to work with and learn from.
Had you asked me during my PhD if I wanted a career in academia, I would have said absolutely not. At the time, I didn’t see academia as a pathway for innovation and excitement. This was due to a lot of factors, and with hindsight I can see that the biggest one was fatigue. I was tired of research. So I moved into industry instead. I spent a few years working in different spaces, exposing myself to the different corners of the aviation and aerospace world. By the time I moved back to academia, I finally had a long term vision for what I wanted for my career and myself.
I’m now in a place where I can look back on the past decade and clearly see the pathway that has gotten me to where I am today. I am able to illustrate that pathway with clarity and perspective. I can see how each experience has contributed to not only my skillset, but also the long term objectives and aspirations for my work.
I’m the first person in my family to go to university. I grew up in a working class family with immigrant parents. I didn’t have an example I could model myself against from a professional career perspective. This meant that I stumbled a lot in the beginning of my career. Things that seemed obvious to others were not obvious to me. Opportunities that others saw and grabbed immediately took me time to even recognise. The learning curve I experienced in the beginning of my career was HUGE because it wasn’t just technical skills I had to learn. I was immersed in an unfamiliar world without guidance. It’s the reason I do so much mentoring work now, to try and fill a gap that I wish had been filled for me.
Winning this award was a wonderful recognition of the work I’ve done over the last decade, which has consisted of some great highs and some incredibly challenging and trying lows. For anyone else who feels that their path through life is unstructured, a little messy and at times spontaneous, know that the pieces will fall into place at some point.
