Q. With 24.1% of last year’s MIT Sloan class entering technology roles [1], which emerging technologies provide accelerators for the career trajectories of the MIT readership?
A. (Meyerson) While AI has and continues to be a hot topic across the various industry verticals that I have engaged with; we’re at the juncture where the application of AI and other emerging technologies will separate the market leaders from the followers. For example, I have been engaged with a company leveraging AI in the interpretation of radiology images, the quality of that work is sufficient to have obtained FDA approval for commercial versus experimental use, a significant hurdle to overcome. However, with the velocity and breadth of today’s technological gains, here is a sampling of specific emerging technologies which your MIT students and alumni might consider to pursue.
Synthetic Data: While biopharma executives have been excited about emerging technologies’ potential usage in their daily operations, HIPAA compliance and other regulatory considerations have made leveraging patient data a challenging matter. Addressing this challenge, executives have realized that synthetic data mitigates this issue. Specifically, synthetic data resembles real data, mimicking the mathematical properties of the real-world data set it represents, but it does not contain any personally identifiable information. Your MIT colleagues (Veeramachaneni, Patki, and Wedge) have published content which points to their findings that there were “no significant differences” between predictive models generated on synthetic data and real data. They developed the Synthetic Data Vault (SDV), a system that generates synthetic data by learning the structure and distribution of real datasets. The SDV uses probabilistic modeling techniques to capture the relationships and dependencies between different features in the data.
CRISPR-CAS9 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats): CRISPR is a genome-editing tool that allows scientists to precisely modify the DNA of organisms. CRISPR taps into the Cas9 enzyme to cut DNA at specific locations, enabling the addition, deletion, or alteration of genetic material at precise locations in the DNA strand. This revolutionized gene editing, as prior “editing” used viral entities to insert genetic material at essentially random locations, with less reproducible editing results. Through editing specific genes associated with water usage, scientists have been able to create rice varieties that are more drought-resistant and require significantly less water to grow. The benefit for society is that such rice plants are proving to be significantly more resilient in the face of climate change, requiring less water, tolerating extreme temperatures, and as such providing significantly more nutrition in regions suffering famine due to existing climate challenges. Given the trajectory of climate conditions, such work is likely to thrive in the coming decades.
Quantum computing: Quantum computers provide an opportunity to accelerate the speed of solving problems biopharma, material science, secure communications, and countless other fields. Unlike digital computers as you are using at work today, based on transistors that are either “off(0)” or “on(1)”, having only two “states”, quantum computers employ “quantum bits” or qubits able to have many different “states” at a time. This ability is called “superposition,” and it is what makes quantum computers so powerful. With these qubits being in multiple states at once and being connected to each other, quantum computers can solve certain problems vastly more rapidly, potentially by a factor of a million faster than digital computers. Though quantum computing is still in its development stage, I would strongly suggest tracking its development, and if interested you can access such systems to explore their capabilities through a number of open development/demo platforms. [2]
Q. What is your advice for MIT Sloan’s class of 2025 who are striving to determine whether to join a large tech firm like Apple, Google, or IBM to name a few; or to enter the world of start-ups?
A. (Meyerson) Obviously, my advice is going to have a bias given approximately 40 years with IBM [3]. Ideally, if you’re able to join a unit within a Fortune 500, explore those where there is a history of enabling one to build a “start-up” within the larger organization. That is what attracted me to IBM. Entering Physical Sciences, I was surrounded by world class practitioners in a wide range of endeavors. Net-net, learning of an upcoming disruption in the trajectory of silicon technology, I gathered a team and tackled and overcame the accepted roadblocks to progress. From an initial team of three IBMers, we took our discoveries into commercial application, ultimately creating IBM’s highly successful Analog and Mixed Signal business.
Providing “Aircover”
Although part of an enormous organization, I had the opportunity to build what were essentially two startups into major business endeavors, and along the way had eight distinct “careers” in disparate fields. To be clear, I had the advantage of being an IBM Fellow, which provided “aircover” to pursue disparate efforts beyond the normal scope of what was supported at the time, so understanding the culture of the organization you join is vital. If you find that you have misjudged an opportunity, move on sooner than later to find your “niche.”
Some Start-Ups Go Bust
While I can understand the excitement of joining a start-up from scratch, recognize that common wisdom is that >90% of start-ups go bust. There are going to be future unicorn founders, but the reality is that precious few founders will match the success of a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. That said, I do believe joining startups along their life cycle is still an excellent goal if one has the right background to both judge their viability and add significantly to their ultimate success.
Build Your Skills and Network
My suggestion is to begin one’s career by securing a role within a large company where you have a personal interest in the field, and over the next 3-5 years build your skills as well as a network of contacts. Over a career, those you befriend at this time will be your best resource for both technical and personal advice. Given that you’re delivering exemplary value towards achieving their areas’ goals, they might be able and willing to introduce you to those new teams beyond the one you joined, expanding your job scope and opportunities to learn and grow your network. If you find that after 3-5 years you have “plateaued”, either through mismatch to your evolving interests, or lack of opportunity in the company, you can then take the high value learning you have gained and exit to join other companies better matched to your interests. Or perhaps join a more mature startup where your skills in a larger enterprise can be of great value in helping to scale the startup’s existing capabilities to enable a successful exit.
Strategy Consulting “Alumni”
To be more complete here, a parallel path would be to engage in strategy consulting with one of the premier firms, as it is common for senior consulting “alumni” to be placed in key corporate roles once having proven themselves a valued advisor to senior corporate leadership. This is a long-term commitment one must make as one must “learn on the fly” during early years, and does not often lead to engagements with startups, but it can be highly rewarding in terms of exposure to a diverse set of enterprise experiences. However, many of you MIT students likely are aware of this career path as a consultancy was the most popular destination for last year’s 2023 graduates. [4]
Dr. Bernard Meyerson is Chief Innovation Officer Emeritus of IBM. Named sole IBM Fellow in 1992, in 1994 he was similarly designated one of only twenty-five IBM Master Inventors. He was later appointed IBM’s first Chief Innovation Officer in 2014. A member of the US National Academy of Engineering, he has received many national (e.g., APS and IEEE Fellow) and international honors (e.g., Singapore’s National Medal for Public Service). He currently serves as Co-Chairman of the Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies for the World Economic Forum. Dr. Meyerson earned a Ph.D. in physics from the City College of the City University of New York and has produced over 100 patents and 200 publications in his career to date.
Partha Anbil is a Contributing Writer for MIT Sloan Career Development Office and an alum of MIT Sloan. Besides being VP of Programs of the MIT Club of Delaware Valley, Partha is a long-time sciences consulting industry veteran, currently with an NYSE-listed WNS, a digital-led business transformation company, as Senior Vice President and Practice Leader for Life Sciences practice.
Michael Wong is a Contributing Writer for the MIT Sloan Career Development Office and an Emeritus Co-President and board member of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association. Michael is a Part-time Lecturer for the Wharton Communication Program at the University of Pennsylvania and his ideas have been shared in the MIT Sloan Management Review and Harvard Business Review.
[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2023-12/MBA-Employment-Report-2023-2024_2.pdf
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt4OsgmUTGI
[3] https://www.ibm.com/history/bernard-meyerson
[4] 33.7% went into consulting: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2023-12/MBA-Employment-Report-2023-2024_2.pdf
