(The events in this post occurred in March 2011)
Throughout January and February, I remained content with being nominated and the direction that I had set for myself through my application. Then, in early March, while I was sitting at my desk, another e-mail arrived from Sally. Momentarily, nothing else mattered except for the need to open that e-mail. It began with, “Congratulations, you’ve been selected as a finalist for the Loeb Fellowship!” A broad and indelible smile appeared on my face. I read the balance of the letter which provided information for three upcoming interviews, after which the final selection would be made. I was extremely happy that my message had been received favorably. I was one of 19 finalists and nine would be awarded Fellowships. Now, it was time to deliver in person.
The first interview would be with Sally and Jim; the second with Professor Mark Mulligan, with Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; and the third with Camilla Ween, a Fellow from the Class of 2008 and a high level transportation and land use planner with Transport for London, England. I had an inkling that these people would conduct very good interviews.
The first two interviews could be conducted either by Skype or in person. The third would be conducted by Skype. I chose Skype for all three interviews due to the cost of travel and ease of scheduling. Despite the scheduling flexibility, finding mutually convenient times was tricky; these folks were busy. A little wrinkle was that the firm did not permit Skype to be used on any of its computers due to a small but real concern about security. Also, I did not know how to Skype. Consequently, I had to get Skype at home, learn it, and do all the interviews from there.
I shared the news of the short-listing with my closest colleagues and family. Everyone was as supportive, or more supportive, now that I had advanced a step. Most people thought my odds of a favorable outcome were elevated because the finalists were in the interview stage. The idea was that, being a consultant, interviewing was a normal part of my life. However, having learned more about the “average Loeb Fellow”, I suspected that all the finalists would be comfortable with interviews. Furthermore, I’m normally interviewing to help other people; this time, I was interviewing to get help myself but, at the same time, reinforce my potential. Tim and Ben gave me great advice which I really appreciated. What I appreciated even more was their enthusiastic encouragement.
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| Joe Brown Landscape Architect & Urban Designer |
Tim also mentioned the pursuit to some senior people at AECOM. As a result, one day, a phone call was arranged between me and Joe Brown. He wanted to talk to me about the Loeb Fellowship. This was very cool. I had heard that Joe was likely the most accomplished landscape architect that I had ever met. We’d met for about five seconds when we shook hands when he visited our office in early 2010. Joe had been the head of the firm, EDAW, until joining with AECOM. Joe is now AECOM’s Chief Innovation Officer. Over his multi-decade career, Joe’s contributions to landscape architecture and urban design were huge. When he spoke to our office gathering during his 2010 visit, he was soft-spoken but had conviction. His passion for people, with roots in any profession, to make positive change to the built and natural environments was contagious. I thought to myself, this guy is the real deal, no wonder he is able to make a difference.
Prior to the call, I learned that Joe was already very familiar with the Loeb Fellowship, having attended and taught at Harvard. There was no need for me to describe the Fellowship to him since he likely knew more about it than I did. I was really looking forward to the call even though I did not know how much time had had budgeted nor what he wanted to cover. I was ready for anything from a short call with him saying, “Good luck and work hard” to who knows what? We ended up speaking for over 45 minutes about a variety of topics. Based on this, my one and only conversation with Joe Brown, it was evident that he had given a great deal of thought to a range of urban design subjects; he easily cut to the chase on every one of them. What was pleasing to me, was that he was interested in the integration of transportation and land use and the related reforms. Also pleasing to me, was his excitement for employing and spreading sound urban design principles to help cities all over the world. That sounded like exactly what I would love to do, but through a Livable Transportation lens. Mostly, he genuinely wanted to use the call to impart some wisdom to me about getting the most out of my time at Harvard so that I could be a more effective change agent when I was done. He summarized his key advice in two words: “avoid distractions.” He didn’t mean the Animal House toga parties or beer drinking sort of thing. He meant drilling down to what the real issues were. Get past the rhetoric, the noise, and the insignificant stuff in order to expose the nerve. I thought, now that was good advice and that is exactly what I am going to do, with only the odd frat party thrown in now and again.
Prior to the interviews, I felt prepared. Before each one, I reviewed the material, which I had gathered in December, and glanced through my copy of my application. I knew exactly where everything was in case of a specific question. I also turned off my mobile phone and asked my wife and kids to please find something to do somewhere away from the house for a couple of hours so that there was close to a zero possibility of background noise, distractions, or interruptions.
Sally and Jim did a great interview. It was clear that they had a ton of experience speaking with hopeful candidates. The introduction provided a structure for the interview. The atmosphere was sincere and comfortable. I couldn’t actually see Sally because she was outside of their camera’s field-of-view but Jim was prominent. He didn’t appear to be using any notes but his questions were great. He honed in on several transportation topics from my application and went two to three questions deeper than most people would. That was quite impressive and displayed a healthy curiosity about a field that wasn’t necessarily his passion.
When I returned to the office, the two people who sit closest to me, Danni Hirsh and Fabian De La Espriella asked me how the interview went, followed quickly by “Did they let you know?” However, they really didn’t need to ask the questions; I could tell by the expressions on their faces what they wanted to know.
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| Danni Hirsh (from our group's rather fun bulletin board) |
We have an open format office. Our three desks are aligned and Danni’s desk is between Fabian’s and mine. Danni and Fabian had, more or less, front row seats to my pursuit of a Fellowship. Over the months, we had had dozens conversations about it and they’d heard plenty of snippets of related calls and other conversations. Next to my wife, Danni and Fabian were closest people to the day-to-day goings-on with the Fellowship and were sincerely interested in any news.
Danni is a young, cheerful, enthusiastic, and brilliant transportation engineer. She is totally comfortable and fluent in the increasingly digital world of transportation engineering but also wants to know the ideas and background behind the interfaces so she can further develop her own judgment; something I find refreshing in young engineers. She also does not accept ideas at face value; she needs to know “Why?” I hope she never loses that quality.
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| Fabian De La Espriella (from our group's rather fun bulletin board) |
Though Fabian works regularly with the other groups at the office, he has been my right hand guy on most of my projects over the last few years. He is from Columbia and has an architectural and urban design background but has developed a thorough knowledge of Livable Transportation. I keep forgetting that he has just under a decade of experience because of his dependability, capabilities, and breadth. He can fulfill practically any role during charrettes, guide the younger staff, and almost as if he has ESP, he knows what design direction makes sense. He loves the arts, he manages complex projects, he renders, and he undoubtedly has a great career ahead of him.
So, when I returned from my interview, I knew that it would be our first conversation before anything else could get done. I said that I thought that the interview went well but really had nothing to compare it to. Sally and Jim provided no indication about what they thought about my odds and rightly so. They were very polite and professional. At the same time, they had an empathetic quality to them; they knew what I was going through and made the interview much more comfortable than it could have been. I also confessed to Danni and Fabian that I had an uncanny feeling that they were always a deduction or two ahead of me, the whole time; these people were smart and experienced (which was, of course, consistent with the fact that they were at Harvard University doing what they do).
Professor Mark Mulligan’s interview was very enjoyable. He was so upbeat. He could immediately see opportunities and overlap between his own work/studios and my interests and we had a great discussion about related issues in an Asian context. The interview almost felt like a brain-storming session. He’d have a question, I’d provide an answer, then we’d explore it, he’d have ideas about how to explore it further, and so on. After that interview, I thought that, if Professor Mulligan was a typical professor at Harvard, then there would be no limit to the possible avenues to take during the Fellowship.
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| Camilla Ween with her Loef Fellowship Class of 2008 |
Camilla Ween’s interview was the hardest for me. Unlike the first two interviews, the audio at my end was a bit spotty and, occasionally, I had to ask her to repeat herself, which I hoped was not too bothersome for her. There was also a small delay in both the audio and video transmission which was just long enough for us to start sentences simultaneously and then simultaneously gesture for the other to finish and then we’d both start our sentences again. However, it was still amazing that we were, more or less, having a face-to-face conversation with an ocean between us. Despite the distance, philosophically, I felt quite close to her. She was definitely a kindred spirit. Her main concern about my transportation reform ideas was the sheer magnitude of the problem in the United States and the tilted playing field over here. It was so nice to get an independent and well-articulated verification of the magnitude of the problem from someone who is so knowledgeable and a world-class leader in my profession. She was dead on; it was a tough challenge. And that was exactly why I wanted to do the Fellowship. I also mentioned that our Livable Transportation group had already achieved several successes in parts of America, in all the basic contexts (rural, suburban, and urban), despite the tilted playing field. The real challenge would be spreading the ideas, scaling things up, leveling the playing field to make it easy for all cities to do the right thing, and making a new normal. Lastly, we discussed that, in North America, it took about five decades for the originally untested conventional transportation paradigm to demonstratively and repeatedly fail on so many levels. I assured her that nobody was expecting to develop a silver bullet that would solve such a giant problem quickly.
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