Power Your STEM Career With Curiosity

This article pulls from the Stay Curious with Lalitha Suryanarayana episode of the “Championing Diversity Voices of Seagate” Podcast, which features host Yasmine El-Khatib.

When trying to envision where your future will take you, it’s important to start by learning more about yourself. “We're all shaped by our experiences, our upbringing, and the exposure we have to the world around us,” says Lalitha Suryanarayana, vice president of corporate development and strategy at Seagate. “It's really important for us to take the time to get to know ourselves and figure out what makes us tick, including what it is that we enjoy doing and what we find boring. That's how we discover what our strengths and passions are."

Not only that, but “you'll be successful if you understand what drives you because you can follow a clearer path — which doesn't magically happen,” adds Yasmine El-Khatib, founder of Seagate’s Professionals of Color Employee Resource Group, Colorado chapter.

For Suryanarayana, one of her intrinsic strengths is curiosity, which is also a key driver in her life and STEM career, since, as El-Khatib puts it, a field like STEM “is an expression of curiosity about the world around us.”

Here, we’ll take a closer look at the power of curiosity, working in the STEM field, and other great lessons we learned from El-Khatib’s and Suryanarayana’s conversation. (Please note that the following interview has been lightly edited and shortened.)

El-Khatib: You have a really strong engineering and technical background. How did your curiosity for technology evolve as you transitioned from lead engineer early in your career to your current role as VP of corporate development and strategy?

Suryanarayana: When I was a kid, I was quite curious about the world around me, asking questions such as: how does something work, why is something like this, and how do we make it better? I was always absorbing and imagining and figuring things out.

I channeled all this enthusiasm and curiosity into my engineering career. Here, I had the opportunity to be truly hands on about emerging technologies, and I spent a ton of time in research & development. In R&D, you're always looking at the future and asking yourself: what are the technologies on the horizon and how can those technologies impact what we're doing? [...] My experience has shown that when curiosity and enthusiasm for inquiry are combined with a keen desire to solve problems plus you apply creativity, then magic happens.

What I mean by magic is that you begin to innovate, explore solutions to problems that haven't been addressed before, and thus implicitly help to advance or shape technology outcomes. That is primarily how I spent my early engineering days.

Today, I channel that same curiosity within my current role. We are in the tech space, so my zeal to understand emerging technologies enables me to connect the dots, contextualize the topic at hand and formulate thoughtful strategies. 

When I was in an R&D role, I would think about the future with a narrow but focused lens. Whereas, today, in a strategy role, I’m still thinking about the future, albeit a much broader scope and applying different points of view.  

El-Khatib: I understand that you have three generations of STEM in your family. How did your parents nurture your sense of curiosity and discovery, and how did you carry that on for your own child?

Suryanarayana: From a young age, both my mom and dad let my siblings and I pursue our interests. In other words, they didn't force us down a particular path… And where it really made a difference for me was that they encouraged us to always try out something new and told us that it was okay to fail... That helped me develop a sense of confidence and belief in myself [...], which had a big impact on fueling my adventurous spirit.

Let me tell you a story. In middle or high school, my parents came to a parent-teacher meeting, and my father was the only dad who stood up and said, “my daughters are going to be (STEM) professionals when they grow up”. That spoke volumes. It was very progressive at the time. I'm very grateful because it empowered me to carve my own career path. And, to this day, my mom, who’s over 80 years old, is a master Sudoku player. She keeps her mind super sharp.

Naturally, I've carried this support forward with my daughter. Over the years, my husband and I have shared our love of science with her. And I think that's very contagious. If you think about it, science, technology, engineering, and even math is all around us. Whether we're driving a car, making a phone call, in the garden watching a bug on a plant — it's all STEM. Science surrounds us. And that curiosity, if nurtured, [leads to a variety of career choices in STEM]. 

Interestingly, my daughter was very passionate about how the brain works, and she would try to learn whatever she could about the brain. So, I'm not surprised that today she is a medical doctor pursuing a career in neurosurgery. Again, it’s that innate love of science and math combined with a desire to imagine and explore has made it fun for all of us in our family.

El-Khatib: What does work-life balance look like for you, and how do you maintain it?

Suryanarayana: Balance is a loaded word. For me, it’s more about work-life integration. Trying to integrate the different aspects of my life as smoothly as possible.

Being a mom, a sister, a daughter, a wife, a manager or an employee in the office, a friend, and a community worker — it's very hard to juggle and find the time to do all the things that we want to do, whether it's at work or at home. So, what I've tried to do is integrate the different facets of my life by fully focusing on one particular task at a time. If I'm working on something, then I focus 100% on it.

Moreover, we go through various phases in life. So, the integration looks very different in each phase - when you have a small child, versus when your kids are in high school or when you have deadlines in the office… What has worked for me is to make micro-decisions: decisions in the moment that, once made, I can fully focus on. Lastly, I also try to find small moments during the day to recharge.

El-Khatib: As a female leader in technology, would you mind sharing how you succeed in this industry as well as how you learn and grow?

Suryanarayana: [One way is by] leveraging our projects, our experiences, and our team collaboration as avenues for learning and achieving great things collectively…

Success comes from the soft skills around collaboration. You can be the smartest person in the room, but if you are unable to work with others or cannot communicate effectively, then you're going to be challenged and it's going to hold you back…Clearly you have to excel in your role, e.g., be an expert on a topic, but it's also the soft skills that will ultimately enable you to be successful…

In other words, combine your STEM capabilities (hard skills and technology skills) with humanity skills (understanding the implications of the technology that you are working on, how it can benefit the world) to make a lasting impact.

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Speaker bios:

Yasmine El-Khatib

Yasmine El-khatib first joined Seagate in 2015 as an intern for the Seagate research group, developing edge and object store technology. She has since gone on to work on Lyve, and now Seagate systems, as well as founding the Longmont Chapter of Seagate Professionals of Color. In her spare time, she enjoys learning new arts, including anything from knitting and painting to weaving medieval chainmail.

Lalitha Suryanarayana

Lalitha Suryanarayana is Seagate’s VP of corporate development and strategy. She leads initiatives relating to mergers and acquisitions (M&A), equity investments and strategic new opportunities. Prior to Seagate, Lalitha served as VP of strategy and M&A for Infineon Technologies, Americas.

Lalitha's 30-year career spans leadership roles in product management, strategic business development and technology R&D within the semiconductor and telecom industries. Most recently, she was recognized among "Women to Watch" by the IEEE Women in Engineering. She earned her master's degree in electrical engineering from New York University and an MBA from the University of Texas, Austin. She has 50 issued patents, multiple publications, and a technical book to her credit.