Welcome to ‘How I Got Here’: a content series brought to you by Vamos Insights. We will be featuring inspiring students and young professionals across a broad range of industries, who will each share their career journey and provide insightful advice to help you navigate the big wide world of work.
Introducing our guest, Arinze Obiezue!
Please go ahead and introduce yourself: your name, current job, degree, and interests.
My name is Arinze, I’m from Nigeria but currently living in London where I work at Facebook as a Content Designer within the Central Integrity Team. Last year, I graduated from the African Leadership University in Mauritius where I studied Business Management. While I was there I used my internships as an opportunity to explore different industries that I was curious about at the time. So I got to work in entertainment, education, big pharma, finance and now I’m in tech. I'm interested in media and entertainment because I really think that these industries provide opportunities to impact the world at scale by being able to change minds. I’m also a very big advocate for Women's rights and LGBTQ rights. In my career, I kind of know that I want to sit somewhere within the ecosystem of tech, and then in the longer term branch out into VC (Venture Capital) as well as invest in tech and in African and Asian startups.
Getting a degree in Business Management in Mauritius sounds so cool! Why did you choose your degree subject? Were the reasons linked to your career aspirations at the time?
This is actually a funny story because I got to uni in order to study psychology. For context, I was a part of the inaugural class of my university, like one of the very first cohorts. So it was very much an experiment. At the time, my university said they would be offering six courses, one of which was psychology. So I went there with the intention of majoring in psychology because I've always been fascinated by how the mind works. But then it turns out that when it was time to pick our majors, they now broke the news that “Oh, by the way, we are no longer going to be able to offer Psychology or Entrepreneurship because we couldn't get the accreditation for those majors from the Ministry of Education.” So I now had to pick something else.
After looking through the curriculum, I ended up choosing between business and computer science. Computer science would have been the more natural choice to me since computer science and data processing were among my highest grades at the time, besides math. But I decided to drop it and pick business because I found the curriculum more interesting. Plus, I felt like it would give me more optionality in terms of opportunities to try different things through internships. It was very much an experiment. I didn’t take any of the earlier accounting and finance classes before I majored in Business, but most of my classmates had, so I was playing catch up most of the time.
That’s quite a journey! Have your aspirations changed during your time at uni? If so, how?
That's a great question. I don't think my motivations have changed per se, because when I started uni I actually didn't have any specific aspiration at all. I was very much in exploratory mode, which I guess is typical for college students, because you use the college experience in order to figure things out. But I think one thing that has changed is that I'm increasingly becoming more specific on what it is that I want to do in my career. So that granularity helps as I now have a sense of how to prioritize my time and my energy, and what industry areas I want to deepen my career in. I'm pretty set on working in tech and VC because, out of all the industries I worked in, tech was the one I enjoyed the most. And then I want to go into VC as I think it will enable me to create large scale impact in the world through business. Instead of being a founder where I’m just building one business, I can empower a suite of businesses. Yes, it is a gamble, but the possibilities are endless.
You mention that you’ve done internships across a variety of industries. How did you find each experience?
When I started uni, I actually thought I was going to become an entertainment and media mogul. So I interned at the African record label Chocolate City Music in my first year… and I hated it! I realized that the entertainment industry, at least in Africa, is actually run by lawyers. And lawyers are not the most fun to work with. So after that I decided to try something different in the following year. Since I knew that I wanted to go to business school after finding out about the Harvard 2+2 programme, I interned at my university’s business school to get a vibe of what business school is like.
In the summer of my sophomore year, I ended up interning at Bank of America’s London office and then in Germany at Sanofi, a global biopharmaceutical company, because I wanted to get a feel for what working in finance and pharma was like. I hated both experiences and swore to myself to never go back to either industry! But while I was working at Bank of America I got a random message on LinkedIn from a recruiter who was inviting me to some party at Facebook. So I went to it, learned about the different roles, and came across a specific team that I was interested in joining. After I got the contact details of the recruiter, I set up a Google Alert when I got home so I could be notified when the internship opened up later in the year. When the time came, I sent in my application, not thinking I was going to get it because, I mean, it’s Facebook! I’d never worked in tech before and I wasn’t a computer science major. But after doing an assignment and two rounds of interviews, I somehow got the offer! And that’s how I found myself in tech. After the internship I got a full-time offer and now I’m at Facebook. So it has really just been an adventure.
Wow, such an interesting journey. I really liked how you mentioned that you did not enjoy some of your internships, as hating an internship can be just as insightful as loving it! Out of all your experiences, which one in particular has played the biggest role in helping you discover and pursue your ideal career? (i.e. A particular person, event, internship, or extracurricular activity)
Funnily enough, the thing that's actually been most useful to me was a particular relationship I was able to build on during my time at Bank of America. I had a lady who was assigned to me as my buddy for the internship. I think she was one of the only Africans in the division, so naturally we got paired. But as the years have gone by she has become more of a mentor for me, both during and after the internship. She was somebody who I could speak very candidly to, like I was able to share my frustrations when I felt like some people were speaking to me differently because I didn't go to a top school or maybe even because I'm not white. I could be honest with her about that, and she understood me. So she's been my mentor since then, and she wrote all my recommendations when I was applying for Business School and for the Masters programme I'll be starting this year. I’ve been accepted onto every opportunity she’s recommended me for. It's a relationship that honestly just keeps giving. Because even when I'm conflicted in terms of what to do, I’m able to turn to her as my mentor. So she's been able to help me figure out my career and answer a bunch of the questions that I have based on her own career experience.
That’s a great example of how the relationships you gain from internships can offer value beyond the actual experience itself. Can you tell us more about what you do now at Facebook, and the key skills involved in your role?
I think the general skill that is the most evergreen is the ability and willingness to learn and drive your own learning. Facebook is a company that moves fast. There's a lot of things that you probably won’t understand in your first few months, so you have to go out of your way to people and do your own digging. People at Facebook are probably more willing and excited to make time to explain things to you than they should be. So it’s important to be respectful of someone’s time and show that you’ve done the homework as it saves them time and energy.
As for my role in particular, content design is one of the three disciplines within the design organization at Facebook. Content designers work on users’ experiences with words, making sure that the users understand what needs to be done at every point in the product. Our job is to make sure that whatever we are communicating to the user is done so in a way that is human, simple and straightforward in order to minimise cases of causing confusion or miscommunicating something that may end up damaging Facebook’s reputation. Other than the typical design and writing skills, I think that an understated skill is attention to detail. Because when you’re designing products that are most likely seen by hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and Instagram, you can’t afford to get small things wrong like spelling errors. To users, it wouldn’t be a spelling error by Arinze but a spelling error by Facebook. Like if I’m doing work on our data privacy policies and how we use or store people’s data, I can’t just be writing things in whatever way I want, everything needs to be grounded in actual policy because if they aren’t then Facebook can actually get sued. So there are risks to everything that we design. That’s why attention to detail in design at a company the size of Facebook cannot be overemphasised.
How were you able to develop your skills during your time at university to align with what they were looking for?
Honestly, finding my current role at Facebook was a complete stroke of luck. Because like I mentioned earlier, I only found out about it after being randomly invited to a party by a Facebook recruiter on LinkedIn. I still don't know why or how I got that message. Initially, I thought it was a scam! But then it was actually legit. When I learned about Content Design at the event, I realised that it was actually something I already do, because by that time I had already built my own blog as well as the official blog for my university’s business school, so I already had that experience in writing for the web. For one of the projects I worked on at Bank of America, I had to recommend content and UX improvements to their external Brexit website that streamlined communication, so it was easier for clients to find relevant documents. That in itself is the kind of work done in Content Design. So when I learned about the role at the Facebook event, I made sure to find out who the recruiter was and chase them down because I had never seen the role when I previously checked out the Facebook careers website. It wasn’t like I had to go out of my way to develop the right skills for Content Design because I already had them. I just needed to put together all my previous experiences into a portfolio and submit that with my application when the time came.
Finally, what advice would you give to students who have similar interests as you? Any recommended resources or opportunities?
Focus on spending time researching the different roles in tech. One thing I've found is that a lot of people don't actually know about the variety of roles that exist within the tech industry. People tend to think it’s just software engineering, product management and maybe product design, but there are a lot more roles than that. So spend time on the career websites of the companies you’re interested in, and find out more about their divisions and teams. If there aren’t any openings for your target role, look for someone who is in that role. Stalk people on LinkedIn and send them a cold message — you’ll find that people are actually a lot more responsive than you think. If you lay the groundwork by spending time to do the research, you can find the right opportunities.
Plug yourself! Do you have anything you’d like to share? (Projects, social media etc.)
Yeah, I have my own newsletter that I publish every Sunday. I’m also the Co-founder of EarlyAdmit, which helps people who are applying to business school through the deferred admissions process to put together the best application that they can.
Here are Arinze’s social media:
LinkedIn: Arinze Obiezue
Instragram: @heyarinze
Twitter: @heyarinze