Cameron Akker on the Harvard Psyche, project management, and accessible education

Cameron Akker, a 2019 Electrical Engineering graduate from Harvard University, now works on global supply management for micromobility at Lyft. Occasionally, he also writes amazing articles on Medium. One is the basis for this episode! Check out his article, "Overcoming the Harvard Psyche" here: https://medium.com/@camakk/overcoming-the-harvard-psyche-b812f224e1ab.

  • (0:30) Introducing Cameron!
  • (1:04) What is the Harvard Psyche and how did you come up with the idea?
  • (20:08) How to overcome/deal with the Harvard psyche?
  • (4:30) You defied the call to “specialize in one thing” with your experience taking 13+ courses by cross registering at MIT.
  • (10:10) Let's talk about bandwidth – how did you manage?
  • (14:03) Moving into career experiences, how’s it going with micro-mobility at Lyft? 
  • (16:24) Based on your experience, what is your advice for early graduates pursuing tech and project management?
  • (25:22) What is the narrative behind your career arc? Universal access to education (25:40)
  • (30:12) Ties back to how you structured your own education. Big proponent of self-education.
  • (32:05) How to provide free access when everyone's so focused on making money? How to get around the homo economicus?
(33:10) "That's the result of wanting to get your worth for what you put into it. My motives for doing this kind of thing is that I've been helped immensely by the free resources in everything I've tried to learn. It's much like the open source software community. If you're trying to implement something for your own project, you tap into the community knowledge database and can pull something from it, with the expectation that you'll give back at some point in the future." – Cameron Akker
  • (34:03) Check out Superminds by MIT Professor Thomas Malone
(34:17) "The future isn't going to be decided by a bunch of individuals. ... The shared intellect of a large variety of people might be the largest resource yet when it comes to progressing humanity. Think of Wikipedia. Very small ownership team, basically maintained by the same internet that uses it. So in the model of wikipedia, how can we have more of these types of platforms? ...enriching the society that engages with this material. I think that investing in education that is freely available is not pouring money into the void; it is pouring it into a society that then reflects that back, much in the way that something like wikipedia reflects that value back onto itself." – Cameron Akker
  • (35:45) Super elucidating! Thank you!


You rock, Cameron. Keep walking the talk!

Everyone, thanks for listening, and have a fantastic day.


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