Career Path of a Senior Research Fellow at Clayton Christensen Institute

When I was an undergrad, I initially majored in engineering. I came from a family of engineers and thought that was the path for me. Growing up, I really liked math and science.

During a summer job between my sophomore and junior year, I worked as a laborer on a construction crew. My intention was to go into civil engineering, which was the area I was studying. I found that working on the crew was much more interesting to me than the engineering itself.

I was particularly interested in the dynamics of how the crew worked and some of the social issues present. As a laborer, I mostly worked alongside men who had immigrated from Guatemala and Mexico. I spoke Spanish because I had lived in Puerto Rico for a while, and I acted as a go-between for them and the job foreman and superintendent who didn't speak Spanish.

That role was far more engaging to me than the engineering of the project. We were burying a large pipeline along the side of a mountain. While the engineering aspect didn't capture my attention, I remember thinking about the guys I was working with. They were smart, hard-working, funny, and really cool people.

I often thought that after the summer, I would return to college, and my life would take a completely different path than theirs. I wondered about the real difference between us. I realized it was my access to college, my English fluency, my high school degree, and my US citizenship.

Despite feeling relatable to them on a human level, I knew our lives would diverge significantly. I decided that rather than pursue engineering, I wanted to do something focused on figuring out how to improve society and provide more people with access to better life opportunities.

One guy on the crew, for example, wanted to become a radiologist and was working his way through English classes to attend school. However, the barriers seemed immense for them compared to me. After that summer, I returned to school and explored social sciences.

I eventually became an economics major. Economics is a social science that also involves a lot of math, which appealed to my engineering-minded side. During my senior year, two experiences were pivotal: a class on the economics of education and meeting a Teach for America recruiter.

These experiences led me to believe that education was the right path for me initially, a way to figure out what I wanted to do and how I wanted to make a difference. Teach for America was a very formative experience. It instilled in me the belief that education is key to providing people with opportunities in life.

However, as a teacher, I struggled with the wide range of needs in my classroom. I've often described how in one class, I had a homeless student who only attended a few days a week due to bigger problems, and in the same class, another student with strong home support.

The homeless student often showed up lost because he had missed so much school. The other student, meanwhile, was bored and acting out because I wasn't challenging him enough. These were the extremes, but there was a vast spectrum of needs in between.

As a teacher, I thought some of this was my own failing; I needed to improve my teaching. While true, I also realized that there should be better ways to structure schooling so that a teacher isn't trying to figure out in an hour what every student needs and how to provide it.

I found myself trying to manage distracting behaviors in my class, realizing that my efforts to control the classroom were more about needing students to conform to my expectations so I could cover material. This wasn't necessarily what any given student needed at that moment.

These experiences led me to want to remain in education but to find ways to make it different and better. I taught for two years and had taken the GRE as an undergrad, considering an MBA. I shifted plans toward the end of my second year of teaching and got into a graduate program for an MBA.

While there, I learned about the organization I work for now. I had heard many people discuss how education could and should be different. I felt my organization had a compelling set of concepts and theories for how to transition from the current education system to better versions.

Our organization was founded by Clayton Christensen, a Harvard professor who studied how innovation plays out across various sectors. If you've heard the term "disruptive innovation," it has come to mean many things to different people, but he coined the term. His theories on innovation were profoundly insightful for understanding how to move the needle on big problems in education, healthcare, and global prosperity, and how to create systems change.

After my graduate program, a job opened up at the institute. I applied and have been there ever since, about ten years now. I am a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.

We are a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, a nonpartisan think tank. Our work involves tackling significant global problems through research and then disseminating that research. We aim to inform leaders in various fields, helping them solve complex issues and advance their respective sectors.