For one of my externships over the summer, I met with John Santoro, father of James Santoro ‘18, who works for a company known as Gartner, inc. It is a renowned client consulting firm, and over the course of my externship I helped Mr. Santoro in various ways. He has several roles in the company: editing documents and mission statements, researching the markets of all kinds of fields (from Dutch banking to machine learning), speaking with clients on conference calls, etc. On the first day, I had the opportunity to work with him by editing documents with him, and that particular experience taught me a lot. I had to edit an abstract that was only twenty words long, but it took nearly half an hour because I had learned that in the world of consulting and advisory roles, every word mattered. Every word needed to have an impact and work directly toward persuading a client or reader of something. Such awareness helps me in my writing to this day. Furthermore, I got to listen in on conference calls and watch Mr. Santoro in action, telling his clients how to adapt their strategy, focus on new aspects of the company, and just overall how to become more successful. On the second day, I researched the fields of various companies for Mr. Santoro relating to computer science. These companies were Apache Kafka and Google Tensorflow. Over the course of the day, I gathered as much information as possible, made Powerpoint presentations, gave examples and even ran demonstrations (with my limited ability), which helped him a lot.

While my time at this externship was short, I got a lot out of it. I learned how the skills I developed in school could apply directly to highly successful and hard-to-earn jobs, whether with research, writing, time management, or prioritization. My favorite parts of the externship, however, were the interactions I had with Mr. Santoro outside of the work environment, during lunch or some other free time. I say work environment because he did not work in an office building, but rather at his own house, where I was for both days. I asked if working at home made you less productive than working at a dedicated office space, and he said no. He said that with Gartner, results mattered much more than how many hours you clocked in every day, and that the only way to get more and better results was to be productive.  He found that working at home gave him more flexibility to get the job done more effectively. On that point, he stressed that I focus on getting results, as that is what impresses higher-ups in a company–if you work long hours but do not yield meaningful results, it will not get you too far. He also told me about his own high school and college experience, and his life story signaled to me how radically different one’s success story can be from what was initially expected.  He entered MIT wanting to become an electrical engineer and spent the majority of his time in the workforce as a consultant, and also had been in Gartner for less than a year. As such, he emphasized to me how important it is to be well rounded and learn as much as you possibly can, because success can come in all shapes and sizes. Overall, these insightful conversations, in tandem with the tasks I performed, made me truly love my time working with Mr. Santoro for Gartner.