2020 Vision: Looking In & Looking Out

Originally Published on LinkedIn on January 13, 2020

Happy New Year! (Yes, the year IS still “new”.) 2019 was a special year in many ways and I would like to take this opportunity to share some of my accomplishments throughout the year and open up about some of the challenges that I encountered along the way. My hope with this post is to share the highlights of the year and to shed some light on how it informs my outlook today. I hope that my story proves valuable to someone here.

Academic

In 2019, I burst onto the scene with one goal at the forefront of my attention: completing the Master of Engineering (MEng) degree at MIT. At this point, I had spent three semesters in the program, including a couple winter sessions in between. Now, I was aiming to complete the program by the end of the month in time to avoid yet another unsubsidized semester at the ’tute. With an incomplete thesis project, an incomplete thesis writeup, and an outstanding exam to bypass my final course requirement, the pressure had reached a fever pitch. As a result, I felt that I had no choice but to pay for academic progress with hours and nights of sleep, at one point reaching my personal record of over a day of sleeplessness (of which I am not proud).

At one point during this period when the workload seemed at its most insurmountable, I had reached a realization that would make the remainder of my time manageable and almost fun. It’s natural for us to psyche ourselves out and to preoccupy our minds with fear of failure and disappointment, especially in the midst of an important event, deadline, or decision. What helped me get through this period was trifold:

1. Dialing into my personal intention for the MEng program; my “why”
2. Understanding that I was working like a dog and that failure could only have been attributed to bad strategy, poor timing, or perhaps even incompetence, each of which are more forgivable than sheer laziness
3. Knowing that God, family, and friends were behind me the whole time

With this perspective, I was able to endure that grueling period with grace and I even found joy in my work along the way.

Reflecting on my time in the MEng program, I have no regrets about it. Its challenges are well-documented:

• Uncertainty about which lab to join and how to secure funding
• Switching labs after my first semester after losing grant funding (disguised blessing that got me into a funded and more suitable research position the following semester, but, nonetheless, worrisome at first)
• Enduring an unsubsidized final semester after a failed attempt at pitching my thesis project to another group for joint collaboration

In spite of these obstacles and more, I gleaned a great deal of value from the MEng program:

• Published my first ever academic thesis paper at a world-class institution: https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121667

• Worked alongside Web inventor, Sir Tim-Berners Lee, and digital privacy and security expert, Lalana Kagal, for my thesis and interacted with a number of other kind and brilliant folks at every corner
• Graduated from MIT with a Masters of Engineering degree in Computer Systems
• Published a modified version of my thesis at Rebooting the Web of Trust, a highly-regarded conference bringing together brilliant minds in the Decentralized Web community: https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot9-prague/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/solid-vc.md
• Participated in a student panel discussion held by MIT CSAIL Alliances, in which I shared my insights with company representatives on the best engagement and recruitment strategies for acquiring and retaining talent specifically from the graduate student pool
• Profiled by MIT CSAIL Alliances on my personal story and academic journey: https://cap.csail.mit.edu/engage/spotlights/kayode-ezike
• Bonus: A large blow-up painting of my writing finger was published on a wall in the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT (Shoutout to my good friend, Robert Vunabandi for capturing the photo)

The MEng program was an experience unlike any other I have encountered in the past. In a way, it represented the consummation of my time at MIT, which is perhaps a discussion for another time. I will forever be grateful for the blessings and lessons that accompanied my time in the MEng program.

Professional

2019 was a year of transition. The first transition was from academia into the professional world. After graduating, I moved from Boston back to New York, where it all started. Here, I remotely joined an early-stage startup called Sela, with which I have been involved since the summer of 2017. The mission of the company was a noble one that directly influenced Nigerian communities by bringing cutting-edge technological solutions, bolstered by social incentives, to bear on complex civic issues.

Throughout my time with Sela, I traveled to different parts of the world, delivered technical presentations on behalf of the company, and researched a great deal about distributed ledger technologies (DLT), digital identity, and other technologies in the Web 3.0 stack. I learned about business best practices, alternative leadership strategies, and the intersection of technology and social impact.

At Sela, I also had to come to grips with the realities of working for an early-stage startup, including the financial uncertainties, the social sacrifices, and the inability to meet the reasonable expectations of middle-class, immigrant Nigerian parents. All-in-all, my experience with Sela taught me a lot and I expect to draw from these learnings well into the future.

As 2019 was lying on its deathbed in November, it handed me a parting gift: job offers from multiple companies. I would ultimately accept an offer from fintech startup, Attune. Although, I have only been in my current role for less than a month and a half, thus far it has been a rewarding experience both on the technical front and the cultural front. I expect that there will be a lot more to share about my new role at a later time. (Shoutout to Triplebyte for their stellar recruitment services, which played a pivotal role in helping me secure my current position.)

Personal

The year was peppered with memorable experiences with friends and family. Here are some of the experiences that jump to mind in no particular order:

• Delivered my final singing performance at MIT’s annual Pulse concert run by the Black Students’ Union
• Visited Turkey during the summer to attend a friend’s wedding

• Started a weekly habit on Twitter called Weekly Ws, in which I posted a Win (what went well), a Wart (what went poorly), and a Word (lesson or reflection) of the previous week. The aim of this campaign was to encourage people to be a bit vulnerable about the things in their lives that aren’t going so well. It was started in response to a social media culture that only celebrates achievements at the expense of followers feeling insecure about theirs. (I missed many weeks of this practice, but it was an eye-opening exercise while it lasted.)
• Celebrated the 50th wedding anniversary of a pioneering couple of my New York Igbo church community
• Made preliminary progress toward a book that I am writing (not nearly as much as I wish though)
• Got my weight to be consistently over 160 lbs
• Discovered a lot of soulful music
• Created technical reading/project group with friends that is focused primarily on distributed systems, DLT, and general systems engineering
• Finally got my personal website to a presentable state (always iterating though): https://ezike.io (Shoutout to Anne Kim for inspiring me to revisit this long-abandoned project)
• Spent quality time with my family in Nigeria

I am pretty sure that there are so many more amazing personal moments that made 2019 memorable, but these are the ones that I can remember on demand. If you feel that I have omitted a particular moment that we shared, I invite you to share in the comments below.

Outlook

As we usher in a new year and decade, I am excited for what’s in store for me and my communities. There is so much that WE WILL DO this year and, with time and relevance, I will share more, to the extent that it is valuable to the broader LinkedIn community. For now, I just want to relay how grateful I am to have some of the most impressive people in my life, starting at home, extending into the workplace, and continuing on this very platform that exposes us to professionals from every walk of life imaginable. With that, let’s have a happy, healthy, and hungry year!