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EVAN JONES: Hi.
I'm Evan Jones with Google Cloud,
and I'm really excited to have Joy with us here.
She is a data educator and a supervisor at the Children's
Hospital of Philadelphia.
Welcome to the show, Joy.
JOY PAYTON: Thank you.
It's great to be here.
EVAN JONES: Yeah, it's really exciting.
A lot of things are happening virtually these days,
and interviews are just one of them,
but thankfully, we both have really good internet
connections.
And we've got a treasure trove of questions to ask you,
particularly about certification and your background.
Do you mind if we just jump in?
JOY PAYTON: Yeah, fantastic.
Let's go.
EVAN JONES: All right.
Tell me a little bit about yourself
and what brought you to this certification,
and how it's related to your work, if you don't mind.
JOY PAYTON: Sure.
So as you stated, I work for the Children's Hospital
of Philadelphia.
And we are a customer of Google Cloud platform,
as well as other cloud providers.
And two years ago, I was sent to Google Cloud Next,
which was a great opportunity.
and I really enjoyed it.
And as part of the lead-up to the conference,
I received an email inviting me to consider
applying for this diversity cohort that was intended
to help broaden the appeal and broaden the class of people
who were certified as Google Cloud experts.
And that was something that really appealed to me.
And it appealed to me because, number one,
for my own professional growth and education,
I thought that would be very useful for me--
EVAN JONES: Absolutely.
JOY PAYTON: --yeah, as well as the fact
that I am a data educator, and it's really important to me
to multiply everything that I'm able to do and teach
others and deputize them, in turn, to train still others.
So it just seemed like it was a real opportunity
to, in my local community, at the Children's Hospital
of Philadelphia and beyond, to really grow
some education around cloud computing.
EVAN JONES: What would you say to those folks who
hear the word examination or certificate,
and they might not have a strong background in data
or have the technical skills, but they look at you
and they say, you know, if she can do it, I can do it,
let's go do this thing.
I'm going to sign up.
I'm going to be the next cohort that's coming out, Joy.
What would you say to those people
who have a little bit of-- at Google, we
call it imposter syndrome, which is you walk into a room,
and you feel like everyone else in the room
is smarter than you, has done all this,
and they deserve to be here, and you might not.
You feel like you don't belong there,
even though absolutely, with everything of their core being,
they need to be there and they should be there.
How would you motivate those people
that are going to be joining that next cohort after you?
What would you say to them?
JOY PAYTON: Well, I have two sound bites.
One is, don't believe everything you think.
EVAN JONES: I like that one.
JOY PAYTON: So just because you think
this is beyond your skills or you're
too far behind because you're over 50
or you never worked with computers,
or whatever the reason is, don't believe everything you think.
And also, if you're the smartest person in the room,
you are in the wrong room.
EVAN JONES: I love that one.
JOY PAYTON: You need to be with people that are smarter
than you and know more than you, and start
being comfortable with being uncomfortable.
I think that's something in this current--
this is being filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic,
and a lot of us are getting comfortable with being
uncomfortable.
And that's a real life lesson.
So I will say that imposter syndrome I don't think ever
really goes away, but I have learned to talk back to it.
And one of the things that I find--
because I've taught technology to children and adults,
and one of the things that I've noticed
is the emergence of the confidence gap.
And in my experience, this happens
around fifth or sixth grade, where some people,
predominantly boys, although not exclusively,
feel very confident in math and science,
and when they run across challenges,
like a really hard math problem-- so math
starts getting really hard around sixth, seventh grade,
right?
When they run across a hard math problem,
they think to themselves, wow, this is a hard problem.
I am super smart for tackling this hard problem.
And then there's a group of students, predominantly,
but not exclusively girls, who maybe,
because they've done well in school up to this point
without as much effort, realize that, wow, this is much more
effort than I'm accustomed to.
I must not be up to the task.
And that confidence gap I still continue to see in people.
And it's interesting to me because I work
with very, very smart people.
I work with people who are MD/PhDs.
I work with students who are in grad school
at Yeshiva, who are adult learners who
have important full-time jobs.
I work with very smart people, and they
have imposter syndrome.
And they feel like, wow, this is hard.
And I wrote some code, and it failed.
And what they don't realize because they're not
in this industry is, in tech, you fail all the time.
You fail and you fail and you fail.
And you finally succeed, but you don't get to rest in it
and roll around in how wonderful it
is because you've got to go on to the next thing
and start failing again.
And that's not like most jobs.
So I do a lot of soft skills, and helping
people get comfortable with failure
and get comfortable with not being great at things.
You're not going to be great at this when you start.
And that's fine.
You're not supposed to be great.
So hang in there, you're going to be fine,
don't panic when you make a mistake,
and don't believe everything you think.
EVAN JONES: I think that's perfect, Joy.
I love the get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Even to this day, I mean, a lot of people
look at the folks who work at Google
and, oh, you've got a job at Google, that's like--
you know, everyone there is a genius
and writing the next self-driving car application
or something like that.
I can tell you, every day, there's
a moment where I'm like--
you're running into that same type of wall,
that same type of wall where you're
in fifth grade or sixth grade, and you're up
against a math problem or a technical problem
or an interpersonal problem, and you feel a little bit
of that uncomfortability.
And I couldn't +1 or agree with your point more
of it's the step that you take next.
It's either you're going to run away from that,
or you're going to say it's all right to feel uncomfortable,
but I'm still going to do this anyways.
I think that's a perfect message out there.
All right, the certification.
I would love to ask you a few more questions on that,
if you don't mind.
JOY PAYTON: Sure.
EVAN JONES: How has the certification itself either
impacted the organization you work for
or the communities that you're a part of?
JOY PAYTON: Sure.
I mean, especially as an adjunct professor,
it's very important to me that the education that I'm giving
my students is the most cutting edge,
because it might take them two, three, four years--
these are adult learners who are very busy--
to finish their master's degree, which means that, by the time
they leave, what I taught them their first year is already
a couple of years out of date, right?
So I want to make sure that, the day I
deliver that lecture or share that Colab
notebook, that it is the most up-to-date I can possibly do.
And so I do a lot of advocating with senior folks
at my education institution, at Yeshiva University,
for adopting cloud platforms and saying,
this is where our students are going to be working.
So sure, they should certainly install Python
on their laptops, absolutely.
You know, if you want to have a SQL server spun up someplace
on campus, that's great, too.
But realistically, as far as job skills,
our students are going to be working in the cloud.
So how can we really leverage my skills and whatever topic
I'm teaching, whether that's learning to program in Python
or doing computer vision or some sort of data engineering
or data pipelines.
No matter what sort of topic I'm teaching,
there's a way to tie it to cloud in a way that really
is building students' abilities to understand the vocabulary
to be able to be autodidacts, right?
To have the terminology, to know the concepts
well enough to know what to search for.
You know, I always say that so much of what I teach
is telling people what to Google, and helping--
EVAN JONES: Absolutely.
JOY PAYTON: --people learn how to Google, right?
And I also tell people, you know what,
I Google this every day, too.
So if you think that I have the syntax memorized, I do not.
And--
EVAN JONES: People always get surprised--
so I do a lot of BigQuery and SQL courses,
and they always get surprised when
I'm presenting in the classroom and I'm
going to Google to look up, like, some of these functions.
They're like, wait a minute, you presented on an online platform
with ease and I'm like, I don't memorize this stuff,
but I know where to look.
Absolutely.
Couldn't agree more.
JOY PAYTON: Yeah, so I mean, that's
my life as an adjunct professor.
I would also say, I've had people
come to me at work or just in the community and say, hey,
I saw on LinkedIn that you are Google Cloud certified.
I want to find out more about this.
And these are often career changers or people
who discovered, to their surprise,
that they really liked DevOps or platform engineering
or some of the background engineering.
And maybe that wasn't the job that they were hired for,
but they realized that, wow, I have some technical skills
and abilities that I didn't know about.
And in fact, I had a conversation with someone
who has a lot of information science experience,
but is not a programmer.
She would not consider herself a programmer.
And she said, can I pursue this?
I said absolutely, right?
You know, there are specialty, professional-grade exams
for applications developers, but this initial associate-level
exam is just a great overview of lots of different things.
And I said, if nothing else, what it will do is give you
a chance to learn a lot, figure out what parts you like
and what parts you don't.
For example, I am so grateful that there
are network engineers.
I thank my lucky stars for them every day
because I could not do their job.
Right?
EVAN JONES: I feel the same way.
Any questions that I ever get on,
like, IP addresses and routing, like, private network traffic,
I'm like, ooh.
JOY PAYTON: I mean, I look up how do you write a CIDR block
notation, you know, probably--
EVAN JONES: Every time.
Every time.
JOY PAYTON: --at least once a quarter.
You know, sometimes it'll stick around for a little while.
So one of the things, you know, I've
had a very circuitous career path.
And along the way, I took 10 years out of technology
to do full-time volunteer work.
And so I worked in prisons and schools and homeless shelters
in Spain and Bolivia and El Salvador.
And one of the things that I really fell in love with
was the power of education to change people's lives
at every level, right?
I worked with women who spoke only their indigenous language,
did not speak Spanish, maybe only spoke Quechua or Aymara
in Bolivia, and realizing that just
their inability to speak Spanish kept them out
of the marketplace.
It kept them impoverished.
It kept them under the control, sometimes, of domestic abusers.
And all the way up to people that I
saw in prison who were getting degrees and making
their lives better.
And so I've come back to full-time work
because I love technology and I love education,
and I'm lucky enough to combine the two.
And at the end of the day, what I
would love to do is go back into some of these lower
resourced areas and say, hey, NGOs,
I would like to help you boost your signal.
Let's take a look at your data.
How can you be in charge of your data story?
How can I help you?
There are resources that I can connect you with.
And not only can I help you, NGO, but can I also help
the community you serve?
What's the population you serve?
What are they like?
Because the wonderful thing about technology
is it's not the formal degrees you have, it's what you can do.
And this is one of the few industries,
I feel like, that that continues to be true for.
And knowing that I have the skills in Google Cloud Platform
to help other people at all levels,
including people with very low literacy,
computer literacy, that they can access this stuff
through a URL.
They need a strong internet connection,
which is not nothing, that can be challenging,
but with just a strong internet connection and a Chromebook
or a low-powered laptop, I can really
help someone grow in skills that will help them make a living,
help them provide for their families,
and also improve the lot of organizations
in under-resourced areas that are doing
really important, good things.
So--
EVAN JONES: That's so--
JOY PAYTON: --that's my dream.
EVAN JONES: --well said.
I love that dream.
And it's the dream of Google as a whole.
Their core mission is to make the world's information
universally accessible to anyone and everyone.
You know, not just people in the United States,
not just people of a certain class or a certain privilege,
as well.
So it reminds me when you speak, like the Chromebook and a URL
and the internet, and they access
one of your IPython notebooks and they're
doing a machine learning model that would have previously
taken an entire Google data center to do like 10 years ago,
now they're running on their laptop in a cafe
or something like that, too.
Being able to access that technology, and to your point,
to be able to access the educational resources
and those badges, like the certifications,
as well, is just such a powerful story, Joy.
Thank you so much for sharing not only your background,
but just the clear passion.
I thought I'm a passionate person.
Listening to you just gets me motivated to take
even more of these certifications, as well.
I certainly don't have them all.
So thank you so, so much.
Any closing words from your side to inspire the watchers?
JOY PAYTON: Oh, gosh.
Let me think.
Let me pause.
EVAN JONES: I put you on the spot, I know.
I'm sorry.
JOY PAYTON: You did.
Let me think.
I'm usually pretty quick on my feet, too.
EVAN JONES: No, I'll say mine, and then we
can close with yours.
So mine, at Google, we have a moniker,
and this is different than other companies that I work with,
is good artists copy, but great artists steal.
And so one of my favorite things you mentioned
is these collaborative notebooks for machine learning.
A lot of our courses that I put out,
I draw inspiration from a lot of the other works that
are out there.
Data science in particular is meant
to be a community of folks kind of achieving
a goal or an objective together.
So don't feel like you need to go it alone,
especially if you're looking at other people's resources,
as well.
And certainly, internally at Google,
we're constantly stealing each other's work
and making the insights together, as well.
So all right, close us with a pithy example or quote.
No pressure.
JOY PAYTON: So I come at this from a data scientist's
perspective.
So other people may come to GCP from a lot of interest
in high-performance computing or sort of network resilience
or other issues or areas of interest,
but I'm principally a data scientist,
so I'm going to give you the answer of a data scientist.
If you want to learn how to be a data scientist because you
think this is interesting, then you definitely
need to be involved with Google Cloud
Platform, because one of the best ways to learn data
is using big data.
And there is a great set of resources for you
in Google Public data sets in BigQuery, which is just
a great place to get started.
There's tons of tutorials that'll help you there
that are available at no cost.
The hosting of the data sets is at no cost.
And all the work that you need to do can be done in free tier.
So there are lots of ways that, even without participating
in a formal training process or signing up for an exam,
that you can grow your skills and really find a data
set that you're passionate about.
I tell people, if you love sports, look at sports data.
If you're concerned about hunger and poverty,
look for those data sets.
Find something you care about, and you will definitely
find some trends that make you scratch your head
or make you angry or make you excited
or make you ask questions.
So find some data, work with it, and change the world.
EVAN JONES: I love it.
That's such a great way to close.
All right, we have Joy with us from CHOP,
which is the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Thank you so much for taking this time
to talk a little bit about [INAUDIBLE]
and your entire background that's led you this far,
and carrying forward with you for your students
and adult learners that you're taking forward, as well.
Thank you so much.
JOY PAYTON: Thank you so much for your time, as well.
This was great.
Be well.
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