Weinberg College
of Arts & Sciences

Waldron Career Conversation with Kathy Lin '08 PhD: Product Insights Manager at Spotify

Kathy shares stories about the MMSS Major, Internships, the PhD Process, Working after Grad School, Work-Life Balance, Finding a Career Path, and Working at Spotify.

0:40: The MMSS Major and Memorable Classes
4:15: Rarity of MMSS
6:20: Extracurriculars and Internships
9:30: Deciding to go to Grad School
14:40: the PhD Process
20:20: First Job After Grad School and Work-Life Balance, and Finding a Career Path
30:30: Working at Spotify

Cassie Petoskey:
Welcome to the Weinberg in the World Podcast, where we bring you stories of interdisciplinary thinking in today's complex world. This episode is brought to you by The Waldron Student Alumni Connections Program, a resource in Weinberg College where we help current students explore career options through making connections with alumni. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Kathy Lin, who graduated from Weinberg College in 2008 with majors in sociology and MMSS, along with a minor in global health studies. She later pursued a PhD and now works as a product insights manager at Spotify. Kathy, thanks so much for being here with us today.

Kathy Lin:
Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah, and we're so excited to hear more about your work at Spotify, of course. But we want to start out with your Northwestern student experience. And if you can tell us more about your time as an undergrad and what were some of the impactful classes, internships, extracurriculars that impacted you in your post-grad path?

Kathy Lin:
Yeah, there's so much. So I was an MMSS major, and I think that was the first thing that crossed my mind when I got this question was, and I think a lot of MMSS grads maybe relate to this. Before going to college, you just didn't know you could think about the world like that. I think I did well in all the hard sciences and math classes, and it was just like, oh, but I don't want to be a scientist. I don't want to be a chemist or something like that. And then I was like, oh, do you want to be a doctor? I don't really want to be a doctor. And then it was like the first week I got on campus, I went to one of those fairs that was at Norris where you could look at all the different departments and meet faculty because I was that first year student and I met Professor Rogerson, Bill Rogerson of the MMSS, who is at that time was leading I think, the MMSS program.
And he was like, "Oh, here, you can apply analytical skills and we teach models of social problems." And I was like, wait, I've always been more interested in people. I've always been more interested in the social sciences, but I never thought that I could study it analytically and as empirically as MMSS promised me. And so it was just eye-opening that that was a way of thinking about the world. And then similarly, the reason why I went into sociology, it was two classes. One was my freshman year seminar, and I'll backtrack. The whole reason why I chose Northwestern and Weinberg in particular is because I was very indecisive about what I wanted to study. And so the way I picked my courses in the first year was I went by teacher ratings. I didn't care about the content, I just wanted to make relationships with really smart professors and have them care about growing and developing me and teaching me something.
And so I enrolled in a freshman seminar about social movements and cultural politics, which is at that point taught by, I think a grad student, Amin Ghaziani, who is now a professor at UBC in the Sociology Department. And we studied social movements, but in a very theoretical and analytical way. It was like, oh, there are ways of thinking about revolutions. There are ways of thinking about why the civil rights movement happened. There are ways of thinking about pro-life, pro-choice movements that are structured and analytical. And that really opened my mind up because I was like, wow, if this is the kind of work that happens in sociology, I can already start to see how that would meld with the MMSS courses that I was taking. And I think in the second year I happened across medical sociology with Professor Carol Heimer, and that blew my mind. Because I think up until that point, I had been thinking that medicine was only the purview of medical doctors, people who had medical degrees, who studied biology.
And here in comes this way of thinking about medicine that was so much more culturally oriented that really had theoretical frameworks about how people actually thought about health, how health was a social construct. Yeah, you could get really, really sick, but there's all these great, the medicalization of childbirth or the medicalization of specific mental health issues. And that just really opened my brain and I was like, wow, if I could keep investing in these types of courses, that really opened my brain to thinking about here are some new ways of thinking about the world. That really, really transformed what I wanted to do.

Cassie Petoskey:
I will say, Kathy, this is great. The fair you mentioned is back this year in 2022, so it was virtual the last two years I believe. So I'm sure students are going to have some of those experiences this year, this fall as well-

Kathy Lin:
I'm so glad, yeah.

Cassie Petoskey:
... meeting some of those professors and key faculty members, so that's great. And yeah, I'm curious about these two classes sound fascinating. And I know sociology is, you had mentioned in a previous conversation, sociology and MMSS was a little more rare.

Kathy Lin:
Yeah, I think the standard, I don't know if this is still the case on campus, but everybody was MMSS and Econ, and I think in some ways it was very pre-business oriented. I think people went in with the assumption that the goal was to get out with Bain, McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture, JP Morgan, Morgan Chase, just United was another big, I think recruiter or going into corporate. So any of the big companies, I had friends who go into Walgreens afterwards. It was just very corporate minded, a number of my peers. I would say maybe now that I think back to it, I would say 60, 70% of my cohort went in that direction initially with a certain number of people going into more social impact areas.
And then another fraction going into graduate school, which interestingly, well, Professor Rogerson told me when applied to graduate school, he said the original point of this program was actually to go into graduate school to get quantitative social sciences training at the undergraduate level so that one would be prepared, because quantitative social sciences is huge at the graduate level, but not as well exposed in the undergrad level. And so that was the goal of the MMSS program, but it also gave a very complimentary skillset, I think, for these other more business oriented, corporate oriented first jobs. So yeah, I would say yeah, I felt like because I was interested in grad school, I'm more of a minority.

Cassie Petoskey:
And with your sociology and MMSS and even global health studies, how did that impact your extracurriculars and the things that you were involved in and the internships you did?

Kathy Lin:
Yeah, so one thing I'll say is that I think when most of my peers were doing that junior year consulting internship, I was doing a lot of research assistantships. So I did a research assistantship at CESPE, I think my sophomore year. I think my freshman year I did a quick jaunt as a lobbyist for a education lobby firm in California randomly. It was just like a gig that I got, so I took it. And I realized that I definitely didn't want to be a lobbyist. Then I did the research assistantship through CESPE, where we looked at how teachers were teaching math, and I worked with I think two graduate students in the school of education. And then my junior year I did a research assistantship with Professor Heimer, so I worked on her project looking at, gosh, it was so long ago. What was it about?
It was acceptance of different AIDS-related drugs. I'm going to botch this, you should cut this because I don't remember. But I was her research assistant for the summer and really just took that summer to learn a lot about what it meant to be an academic, what it meant to be a professor, what it meant to study a topic so in-depthly that you could write a book about it. I was just like, how does one write a book about this topic? Oh, okay, this is how one writes a book. There's a lot of data, there's a lot of organizing, there's a lot of summarizing, there's a lot of coding. And through those experiences, I think I really was like, oh one, my brain does work this way. I like it. I could do this for hours. It's not something where at the same time some of my peers were like, "I never want to write a paper again." And I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to go to the basement of the library and perfect my paper." I liked that.
And I also liked being able to expand the way I thought about the world, really take... MMSS and sociology gave me these structures of how to think about the world from this very interesting perspective. And then I liked contributing to that. So it's like, okay, I'm going to take this framework. I'd be like, I'm interested in this little corner of it. I'm dive really, really deep into that. And I think I would've never made the decision to go to graduate school. I guess we'll talk about this later, why did I even choose to do a PhD? I would've never made that decision if I didn't know that about myself. So it was really useful to get, because I think even coming out of high school, I did not think that I would go to graduate school at all or even considered myself being a professor one day.

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah. Which is so interesting because you definitely, as you're talking about these research experiences and how much you enjoyed that and you could see how people could write books, when did this interest in grad school come up for you? Because I know we have so many MMS students who are considering grad school, as you mentioned, it's a training ground for grad school, but sociology students and just generally across the board students who are considering masters PhDs, when did this start to think it might be an option for you?

Kathy Lin:
To be honest, I kind of fell into it, and so to understand that I think we'll just talk about my senior year. So my senior year, I basically was writing my thesis and I had taken enough courses and credits that I actually was able to finish a little early so that the only thing that I did for the majority of my senior year academically was work on my thesis, register for those courses. But I also had time to do a bit of a part-time gig. So actually through my MMSS friends, I got a gig working as a part-time analyst at a market research firm in Evanston. I was like, oh, okay. I think a lot of my decision making about why did I do the research assistantship, why did I do that lobbyist gig was I was like, okay, I should go try some of these things out just to see how do I do in these environments?
And so I was like, okay, market research is kind of corporate. I'll go try that out. And I discovered I hated it. I was just like, I didn't want... And then around that time recruiting was happening and you had that big recruiting fair where everybody put on their only version of heels and pantyhose and typed up their resume, printed out multiple copies, put it in the black folder, and marched around Norris and was like, "Okay, I'm going to hand out my resume to all the important companies that I recognize their name about." And I remember distinctly the combination of my experience at this market research firm and then stepping into Norris, taking one look around me and then walking straight back out. Something about it... In my now more mature phase, I'm like, I work for Spotify now. I should accept that part of society. But back then as a college student, I was like, Ugh.
So then I started thinking a little bit about, well, if I don't really want to take one of those jobs, what do I want to do? Public interest and social justice stuff has always been, I've always just been interested in society and helping. And so the Northwestern Public Interest Program in UPIP, I guess our new PIP, I don't know what the acronym is these days, supported Northwestern students for a year doing a public interest fellowship in Chicago somewhere. And so at the time, and I think it still is quite an exclusive program, and so I applied and I didn't get it and I was so pissed. And at the same time I had another conversation. I guess this is the thing where you go through a senior year, you just try to explore as many options and have conversations with as many people as possible.
And so around this time I was also considering getting an MPH, which seemed like a logical extension of the global health background, the global health classes that I took, but I never thought about a PhD. And then I went to the Global Health Advisor, Professor Leonard, I think, and I was like, "What do I need to do to get an MPH?" And he responded, "Why do you want to get an MPH? You should just get a PhD." And so I started applying to graduate programs, and so I started seeking help from both the MMSS department and the sociology department to get letters, talked to my professors about what programs they thought would be a good fit for me, got them to read some of my personal statements and stuff like that. So I started, it's a big deal. I think all seniors kind of felt this way, especially during recruiting, not knowing what I was going to do and getting rejected by a program that I was really interested in. I guess I'll go to grad school. And so that's how I ended up there. And it wasn't until probably three or four years into grad school that I was like, "Oh boy, I'm not just leaving with a master's. I'm here. I'm here to get the PhD." But that's probably a tangential story from this.

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah, that's so interesting, and it's really great to hear more about some of those key people throughout your experience who mentioned some of these bits to you that really helped you narrow down what you might want to do and end up doing. These professors who are sharing more with you, if you're going to do this, you might as well go all the way and things like that. I love hearing about the specific faculty and professor relationships because those mentors really do have a really big impact.

Kathy Lin:
I probably have distorted memories in my mind, but there are definitely key memories that I'm just like, "This was a pivotal thing that you said to me that influenced my thoughts about this process."

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah, totally. And so eventually you picked to continue on with your PhD. Can you share more about location and focus and more about the PhD process with students who are considering themselves Master's, PhD? What do I want to do?

Kathy Lin:
Yeah, so let's see. I will say that thinking about grad school applications, I originally had an approach where I was like, I just want to go to grad school to learn about medical sociology. I just care about health and medicine. And so some of the stronger programs in that were the ones that made it to the top of my list initially. And then I took that list and I went to my faculty members who were writing me letters and I said, "What do you think?" And the first moment there, especially for going into a PhD, is that my professor said that, "If you want to get a PhD, don't specialize right off the bat." And it was definitely something that was similar to how I thought about undergrad, but I had forgotten. Because I felt like all through senior year, I felt like I needed to specialize. So it's like where was I going to go?
I was going to go to a great medical sociology, health related program, get an MPH, leave and go work for the CDC. I think I forgot to mention it, but my dream at this point now that I was rejected by these other places was I wanted to be either Kate Winslet or Marion Cotillard's character in Contagion. I wanted to be these epidemiologists on the ground flying around places and looking at different epidemics. It was interesting too, because at this point, Northwestern actually hosted somebody from the WHO as a career fairish type of event. And I went to that and I was like, "Hey, how do I work for the WHO?" And he was like, "You don't want to work for the WHO, you'll get nothing done. It's all bureaucracy, never work there. If you want to get actual change done, go be an expert in your field and then contribute later." And I was like, "Oh, okay."
So then couple that with what Professor Leonard just told me about getting a PhD. It was like, "Oh man, all these factors are kind of pushing me in this direction. So I want to go get a PhD in medical sociology so that eventually I could become an expert as a medical sociologist and contribute to the WHO somehow." And then in comes another professor, Professor Chemek, who is my theory teacher, and he said, "You don't want to specialize if you want to go to grad school right off of that, because what if you decide later on that some field is not as promising? Or you're not going to get as well-rounded training if you go to a place that's just known for one thing." And it reminded me of the way that I thought about even going to Northwestern to begin with. There's like I pick Northwestern because I was like strong liberal arts, strong engineering, strong communications. There are schools for each of these different domains and ways of thinking about the world. I want to be there so that I have the flexibility to go in whatever direction I want.
Similarly, for graduate school, Professor Chemek basically was like, "All right, these aren't going to be your top 10. These are your top 10." So he threw on places like UCLA, U of M, Duke, NYU, just much bigger programs with larger numbers of faculty, a lot of different sub-areas of expertise. And that became my list. And I was like, "Okay, you're writing my letter, so I don't want to say no." So then I started applying to those, and it turns out I ended up getting accepted into places that had something called Demography Centers, which is similar-ish to the Institute for Policy and Poverty Studies I think that Northwestern has UCLA, U of M, Duke, UPenn all had established Demography Centers, which is essentially a separate discipline that looked at populations from a very analytical statistical perspective. You work with large data sets, they produce people who eventually go on to work for the census. So it's a place where actually I think people saw my application as like, "Oh, you have an MMSS background, you have a sociology background. They're both strong. That means you could be mixed methods or quant in a particular way." And so I think that's where my application track.
And then eventually when it came down to actually picking a school to go, I think the calculus became very similar to other ways that seniors might be making decisions, which is like, "Who's paying me the most? Where can I get the most bang for buck?" So going to LA was going to be really hard on a grad student stipend, similarly with UPenn, but UPenn had my sister there, so maybe I could live with my sister. But honestly, when I hesitated, U of M gave me a little bit more money and Ann Arbor was cheap and it was close to Chicago and I wanted to stay, a lot of my friends were staying in Chicago, and so I just made that decision. And I actually told U of M I was going to go there to study something completely different from what I ended up studying. And so I actually got money from a center that was like, "Oh, yeah, I'm going to do research about that." And I ended up not doing any of that research, but I still got the money.

Cassie Petoskey:
And the rest is history. That's so interesting. No, this is helpful picking your brain about what are some of those, the evaluation process really of all the different things to consider because it's never apples to apples. There's all these different things for each program and each school and opportunities. So that's really helpful to hear more about the grad school plan. And I know there's a lot that goes into that program, but I want to hear more about after grad school and your first job in the professional world. And I know a lot of students that may be listening, may be going straight to their first job from undergrad, and you went through to your first job after your PhD. But I'm just curious if you can share more about that job. Was it a perfect fit? And then how did it impact your path from there?

Kathy Lin:
It's a good question, and I feel like with every question, I'm backing up 20 years, but I will say that when you say first job, I don't even think about senior year as necessarily a distinct point in time where, oh, I leave school and then I start a job. I waitressed in high school and then I had these opportunities, like summer jobs, research assistantships. I was also a tour guide at Northwestern and that I considered a job that required me to be a certain place, do a certain thing, get paid for it. So I had all these different paid opportunities or working opportunities. It doesn't make the transition out of senior year any easier to digest, but it's in retrospect when I think about it's like, oh, sometimes thinking about, oh, this is the first job, puts a lot of emphasis on an opportunity that is arbitrary if you think about the broader span of what you do with your life and time.
And so anyway, just one point is they're like, oh, what is my first job? My first job was actually waitressing at a cafe in Singapore. But in terms of the first post-grad job, so it took seven years to finish the PhD, and a lot can happen in seven years and you learn a lot. Seven years, that's like 22 to 29 years old. It's like your 20s. So everybody goes through personal journeys, professional journeys throughout that time. And I emerged with a PhD in 2015. I also had gone through the academic job market and that was brutal. So for anybody considering an academic job, it's a commitment. It's like a full two-year commitment of lots of stress, but it was something I was going to give a shot at. So then I graduated having gotten both a postdoctoral position at University of Wisconsin and then a tenure track position at Dartmouth College.
So Dartmouth allowed me to delay my start date for the duration of the postdoc. So I went to Wisconsin first. Was it a perfect fit? In many ways, especially when you write about your narrative on a cover letter or a personal statement, it was the perfect fit because in some ways the Center for Demography and Ecology, which is where I got the postdoc, it was like a sister organization to the Center for Demography and Population Studies at University of Michigan. So the narrative that I told was I learned about a certain set of data sets and a certain set of techniques and questions at University of Michigan. It makes sense for me to go broaden my understanding of those data sets with new data sets that are housed at Wisconsin and do a little bit of cross-pollination with the faculty there, understand how they think about the problems, get new training and so on. So on paper, it looked really good.
In practice, I think one of these things, something that started happening to me at my postdoc was just realizing that work wasn't everything. So I've been very, "All right, onto the next one, onto the next one, onto the next one." And then I was all of a sudden living by myself in Madison Wisconsin, which is a beautiful town, beautiful university, but I had to redo all my social networks. Post-Docing is a very temporary experience. Everybody knows you're there for a limited contract, so you do this balance of how much do you want to invest in somebody? How do you make friends? At that point, I was also in a long distance relationship. I had met my current partner in graduate school and we were both trying to pursue academic careers at that point, and it was like, okay, I have this amazing opportunity to learn from some really smart people between 9:00 to 5:00. At five o'clock, go to the gym, do grocery shopping for one, come back.
I watched a lot of Agents of Shield that year. I watched a lot of, that's when I still have an MCU Marvel bent to me because that year I just heavily invested in that entire universe. And so it was not perfect from that perspective, right? It's like on paper when I describe it to anybody else that's in the field, it's like, "Oh my God, that's amazing. What an awesome opportunity." And then in practice I was like, I have no friends. Emptiness after 6:00 PM, is this sustainable? But I knew I was going to go onto Dartmouth, so I continued in the academic track. And then I got to Dartmouth and again, amazing faculty, amazing opportunities for research, really, really supportive place. Students are great. There's a lot of similarities I think between having been in Northwestern undergrad and then going and teaching Dartmouth grad students.
You could see everybody wants to do 3 billion extracurriculars. You're double majoring and minoring. They're also on a quarter system, so they're stacking all their classes in a particular way. Everybody studies abroad. It's just a very similar student mentality. But it's in Hanover, New Hampshire. So if Madison was feeling small and secluded, Hanover was definitely starting to feel that way. So again, on paper perfect fit. I had really strong faculty mentorship. I was learning a lot about teaching, pedagogy. I really enjoyed my students. But two things happened is, one the life part, am I going to keep my personal life and my work life so separate now for the rest of my life? Is that sustainable for me? It was one question that came up. And then the second was like, okay, at this point when I was at Dartmouth, 2017, and I graduated in a first year in 2008, so I've been doing pure research for almost a decade, and I started really thinking about where did I want.
I really like research. I still really like research. I like the act of doing research. Was I still doing research in my day-to-day and was I doing the type of research that I wanted to do? And I think if my career decisions had been just about personal life or just about career, I probably wouldn't have made the same decisions. But towards the end of my time at Dartmouth, they started just really start to influence each other. So it's like, what are the trade-offs? Do I want to do this type of research for this particular personal life trade-off? Do I want these particular perks of academia, but continuing to live far away from my, at that point, husband? Do I want to live socially isolated in the rural green mountains, which is beautiful if you love cross-country skiing and beer, and I'm definitely a Cosmos cocktails and shopping in downtown kind of girl. So there's one J Crew in Hanover. So it wasn't going to be a great fit. And what people like to do is go snowshoeing and then go to a brewery. And I was like, "I hate beer, sorry."
So those things started to meld together and I started trying to explore. I went through a year of trying to figure out what it is I actually like to do. And through a lot of thinking about it, I was like, what I really like to do is answer questions. And I like to bring a structured way to thinking about a question, particularly about people and human behavior. And I get satisfaction when people take what I say and the answers that I come up with and maybe apply them in some way. I got a lot of that application out of teaching for a long time as an academic, I started being like, "Well, what if I brought research a little bit closer to things that were actually impacting people's lives?"
When I graduated Northwestern in 2008, Facebook was barely something that happened in college. It was like college students had it. And then when I was looking around in 2017, 2018, Alexa had just come out from Amazon. Everybody now had either an iPhone or Android. You got 50 different apps on your phone. And actually the way that I thought about it was like, these companies are collecting some of the most interesting social data that are available. Even academics had started reaching out to, academics work with Twitter and Facebook to collect social network data or just human behavior data. And so I was like, "How can I get a little closer to that and how can I use that to answer questions that I'm still interested in?" And one day I typed in Researcher onto LinkedIn, and the first posting that came up was Spotify User Researcher. And I read through that posting and I was like, "I do all these things. I will try applying." I threw in an application. Three hours later, the recruiter called me and was like, "Can we set up a time?" I was like, "Okay, here we go." And now I'm at Spotify.

Cassie Petoskey:
That's amazing. I love so many aspects of this story from the perfect fit on paper to the year of exploring, to landing at Spotify. I think so many of our students and alumni, it resonates with them that it's a perfect fit on paper, but then you get into it and it just doesn't feel quite right. What is it about this that isn't quite right? You were talking about the personal and professional melding and things like that. And then I also like that you're demystifying that one day you just wake up and it's an epiphany, this is what I want to do. It takes so much time to figure out what you enjoy, and I'm sure that's an ongoing process for you. It took you a year to figure out what you might want to do or what you enjoy rather, not even what you might want to do, right? And now you're at Spotify and you're doing really interesting work that's completely different from what you were doing at University of Wisconsin. So can you share just a little bit more about the work you're doing today at Spotify? And for students who maybe they'll get a PhD and could do what you're doing, but also students who are graduating right out of college, can they get involved at Spotify in some way?

Kathy Lin:
Totally. Yeah. So my current role is a insights manager, and I work on a team located within the personalization mission. So what we do is we conduct research and generate insights that help product teams and squads build better personalized products or improve our current personalized products. So I get to then supervise and scope and run research studies about the role of music and podcasts in people's daily lives. I moved from senior IC role where I was conducting the research myself, to a managerial role in which I do a lot more of the scoping of the research. I help other ICs plan their work. ICs being individual contributors in contrast to a management position.
And I love it because I get to, I think going back to the roots of I am indecisive about what I want to specialize in, as somebody who can have their hands in multiple projects, I can oversee a couple of different research timelines. I can play around with different methods and duration of the project. So sometimes projects need to be faster because there is an actual product timeline that we need to be on. Other projects can be slower, they can have some time to organically grow. And then my role is also about when those projects end, making sure that the insights, the actual information that we generated from those projects find a home that has a big distinction between academia and industry is that both starting points of research are important. The questions asked are important, but then it's even more important in industry that whatever answer you find provides value to the team that you're working on, the company that you're in or something, you make the case about why it provides value.
You don't have to have a PhD to do this. You probably need to have a pretty strong research methodology of training. And I think everybody that I've met in particularly tech and Spotify, has come into their role from a wide variety of directions. I actually work with a surprisingly large number of former teachers who then went and either decided to become a product manager, and so did a bit of business training and then became a product manager or did a data science bootcamp, started as an associate data scientist and eventually accumulated enough, and now are senior staff data scientist or manager of insights as well. People who with not surprisingly, Spotify attracts a lot of people with music backgrounds. So people who started off in the performance or writing or composition type of region, and then doing a little bit of analytical training or business training and getting in. So I can see why if you really lean into the liberal arts education and become very well-rounded and able to absorb new skills quickly, that is possibly a bigger asset to a fast-moving tech company than 20 years of line-by-line coding. Because if you've done 20 years of line-by-line coding, and all of a sudden a project needs a pivot, how fast are you going to pivot?
And then for the fresh grads, there are lots of stepping stones out to a place like Spotify. So there are internship programs, there are master's programs and training programs in fields that did not exist when I graduated. Human computer interaction is like a big domain now. Information sciences, human-centered design, these things that are methods and theories that probably have existed for a long time but are adapting to the fact that mobile apps are just the backbone of a lot of the way we live our lives these days. And so improving mobile apps, improving the mobile infrastructure design classes and tech and information classes are also stepping stones.

Cassie Petoskey:
That's great to hear. Absolutely. And we actually have a new data science major starting at Northwestern fall 2022, which I'm sure based on what I'm hearing from you will be another asset to our arts and sciences background from Weinberg College. Getting that well-rounded both the hard skills, the soft skills and how you're thinking, and also putting research into practice, which is just so interesting and also exciting to hear for our grads, our students who will be graduating in the next few years. Just some really cool challenges and questions to ask and problems to solve out there in different spaces, which is really great, Kathy. And I don't want to take any more of your time. I know we've been chatting for a while, but Kathy, this has been fabulous hearing more about your path from academia into Spotify and tech and why you did it and your evaluation process. We really appreciate you spending so much time with us today. Thank you so much for being here.

Kathy Lin:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was fun. And it's never a linear path, and the more that you expect it to be a linear path, I think the harder you make it on yourself. That's something that I told my students too when I was at Dartmouth and they were in their senior years. It's like, "Yeah, do a good job getting that first opportunity, whatever it is when you're coming out of senior year, but it's not the end all be all, and everybody goes through transformation in their mid-20s."

Cassie Petoskey:
I love hearing that. Such a great insight to end on. Thanks again, Kathy.

Kathy Lin:
Yeah, thank you.

Cassie Petoskey:
Thanks for listening. If you want to hear more of these conversations, links to the full videos and podcasts are below. For more information about Weinberg College and this podcast, visit Weinberg.Northwestern.edu and search for Waldron. As always, we would love to hear your feedback. Please email us with your thoughts on the program. Have a great day, and go Cats.