An Interview with Yolanda Kowalewski
Yolanda Kowalewski is currently a product manager at Bio-Rad Laboratories in their Life Science Education division. When I first asked her for an interview, she replied, “My career path has taken many turns. I have a BS and PhD, did some postdoctoral research, published some papers... then went into marketing, became a freelance writer for 15 years, and now am back in marketing.”
So obviously, I needed to talk to this woman.
And speaking to Kowalewski, I was impressed by the level of aptitude despite her extreme modesty. And while she attributes some of her success to luck, I would say that it would be a tiny fraction. Kowalewski earned her BS in Botany and PhD is in Plant Cell and Molecular Biology. After college, Kowalewski researched for a biotechnology company, working to devise a protocol for genetic transformation of corn. For her PhD, Kowalewski studied plant hormone responses in barley, and her postdoc research analyzed membrane transport systems, utilizing a lot of molecular biology (e.g. cloning, heterologous expression, protein biochemistry, bioinformatics, and genetics).
The decision to move around jobs, according to Kowalewski, was a combination between circumstance and uncertainty. When Kowalewski began raising her own family, she switched to marketing. “I was at a point where I had an interview set up at the college of my dreams (Smith College in MA) when my husband proposed to me. He was willing to support me, but by that time I think I felt I needed to go in a different direction, so I chose the craziest job I could find that would use my background: marketing for a dotcom was it!” she says.
So Kowalewski tapped into another skill that she was good at: writing. “Over the years, my writing skills were something people mentioned, and at Bio-Rad, I had always tried my best to turn in well-reviewed pieces to our Marketing Communications group,” she said. Listening to Kowalewski, I saw how continuous hard work allowed her to build first, a good reputation, and second, opportunities. By turning in quality work every single time, giving a good effort to what she did, Kowalewski was offered to do freelance writing including curating brochures, technical manuals, application guides, textbooks, web content, review articles, and even training programs for others.
Having different interests is not a burden, but a gift.
What Kowalewski replied to me once was crucial to my understanding of her personality, her journey, and her work. It was as if she summarized pages and pages of life philosophy into several sentences, and each sentence could be its individual book.
My key piece of advice is to understand the "journey" aspect of any career. Your training and education are important, but learning to apply them is even more important. Then, your natural skills and talents will factor in and make you unique in whatever path you take - don't ignore them! Connections are critical, and you will never go wrong with a solid work ethic.
I won't tell you any of it was easy. I worked hard, and I was lucky, but there were really hard times I had to work through, as well. Looking back, I think I could have shortened those bad spells if I had the courage I have now. The biggest mistakes I made came from selling myself my short and lacking confidence in my value. But we all have things we need to learn, I guess.
And something pivotal in my conversation with Kowalewski was how much she was able to do with connections. Despite difficulties in having to deal with competition and just the ups and downs in life, Kowalewski continued to give her full effort in what she believed and learned from experience.
Moreover, Kowalewski showed the power of trying and knowing how to try. Before Kowalewski could earn her Ph.D., she was required to take a “qualifying exam” where world-class scientists would interview her. This is an extremely intense questioning, where these evaluators can ask you any question in the world. “But ultimately, what they want is for you to say, ‘Oh, I don't know. But this is what I would do to find out’,” Kowalewski says.
And what really caught my attention in this was the second part. Admitting “I don’t know” can be easy, but how to get there? Not so much. And even Kowalewski, who faced much uncertainty in the job positions that she has held, not because of her skill level but due to the companies she worked for themselves, had to wrestle with finding a path. Her solution: learning.
You know, along your career, learn from every job you can get...if you want to ultimately be a scientist but can be a barista, be a barista. If you have that mindset that you can learn, no matter what you're doing, you're going to be fine. And having the connections that come from different jobs, going to grad school, and being with people who go in different directions is huge.
This doesn’t mean being a barista is bad. In actuality, Kowalewski means the exact opposite. Being able to learn in multiple environments requires a lot of adaptability that can be learned, and it really helped Kowalewski be able to find her own niche. In any job, she points out, there are opportunities to learn, whether it is managing high stress or working as a team. So when she was facing a difficult time in her life, perhaps an opportunity presented her and she was able to take it.
Sitting at the table next to me was the head of marketing communications, which is the group that puts all the brochures and all the printed things that we do together...And I overheard them saying how they had so much work coming in that they didn't know how to deal with it. And just hiring freelance writers wasn't enough. They really needed people who were good writers, but also understood marketing and had a science background, preferably PhD so that they could pick up the different technologies,” she told me. And she was the right person at the right time to go up and ask them for a job.
“There's a group where they're trying to train people through these two year programs to go into the health science industry. And one of the things that they say always hurts is the inability to train for soft skills, like talking to people,” she says. And achieving these soft skills, she tells me, really comes from experience.
While it may seem that being confident and being able to talk to others is innate, Kowalewski reminds us that “part of it comes from throwing yourself in situations that scare you to death.” And when she was pursuing her Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley and postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, she had to step out of her comfort zone to figure out what she could really do. “I volunteered in a hospital for two years and I knew that that was not for me,” she told me. But that wasn’t the only way to get involved with her community and helping others. “I worked in a flower shop for a couple of years, and I really enjoyed helping people put together bouquets that were personal that had meaning for them, and they were so happy.”
So the lesson I took from speaking to Kowalewski and her journey at finding what she wanted was this: the journey isn’t easy and it will be scary, but accepting the challenge and learning as much as you can in every way, from school or from experience, allows us to grow. And the desire to grow, solve problems, and fulfill what we love drives us to finding opportunities that we might not have known were there in the first place.
I have been fortunate to talk to Yolanda Kowalewski, and perhaps her drive and her ability to persevere through hardship encourages anyone who is reading right now to step out of the comfort zone and do something that can improve themselves or the people around them.
