Shaun Olafson
Why did you choose your program at UBC and what did you enjoy most about it?
I had a unique pathway through my undergraduate degree at UBC. I first attended UBC in 2006 and was interested in computer science. At the same time, I was opening a childcare business with my partner, and I left UBC in 2008 in order to manage the business full time.
When I sold the business more than a decade later in 2020, I decided to return to UBC to finish a degree. I returned midway through, and Arts Academic Advising let me know that I would need to declare a major. Given my interests in technology and my work in finance (I had become a director of the Greater Vancouver Community Credit Union during the intervening years), I was torn between studying economics and some form of computer science.
The Interdisciplinary Studies (IDST) program was brought to my attention by my advisor, and I investigated it as a potential bridge between my topics of interest. I was eventually able to work with the Dean of IDST to structure a program of study that worked as an intersection between economics, philosophy, and computer science by focusing on Economics and Cognitive Systems courses.
In terms of what I enjoyed most about the program, I loved the ownership I was able to feel over my program after selecting my areas of study and building a curated course plan for it. I also really appreciated the blend of practical and theoretical study, and how relevant the things I learned felt to my life and interests. I ended up getting to practice the business and finance elements that are big parts of my life, while also studying subjects that interest and concern me deeply, like the science and ethical philosophy of artificial intelligence.
What were some of your most meaningful experiences at UBC?
The Cognitive Systems portion of my degree included some standout experiences. Of note, in COGS 300, Dr. Márton Soskuthy led a machine learning competition. Contestants formed teams and had to train digital agents (little cubes rendered in Unity) to compete at an adversarial ball-collecting task. The variety of approaches and styles was huge, and the tournament itself was a lot of fun. I am a competitive person, and the format of the unit led me to really dive deep into machine reinforcement learning, reward landscapes, hyperparameters, and neural network composition.
What choices did you make at UBC that contributed to your career success / journey?
My career started before my I completed my degree, and I only just recently finished the degree, so this question may not have as satisfying an answer for me as it does for others. Still, I feel that completing my degree alongside my career did have crossover benefits.
Benefits conferred from working prior to/while studying included a context for the practical things I learned and experience to inform the theory I learned. This pathway also afforded me an appreciation for the comparative luxury of studying which felt like “work” prior to my career but later felt much more like play and self-development.
Benefits stemming from studying alongside my career included a richer social network, variety in my thoughts and activities, and intensive, boot-camp like improvement in my time-management skills.
What was your first job after graduation and what other jobs did you have before your current position?
My first job began around the same time I started working towards my degree. I was directing a childcare centre that I opened with my partner in 2008. As the business grew into multiple centres in Vancouver, my work evolved from very general (doing everything from accounting and tax management to sales, furniture construction, wall repairs, cooking meals, and mopping the floors each night) to far more specific (overseeing my team of managers who supervised the teaching teams, and mostly working on big-picture thinking, governance, strategic planning, partnerships, etc.).
Besides my main work overseeing the childcare centres over the years, I also took on board positions at the Greater Vancouver Community Credit Union and the Vancouver Reggio Association. I also founded a non-profit society at the start of the pandemic in 2019, the Emergency Relief Society of Vancouver, to help get food and medicine to vulnerable populations.
Is your current career path as you originally intended? What challenges did you face in launching your career?
Not at all. I don’t think I ever could have predicted going into childcare, for example. I had been, however, interested in entrepreneurship and the concept of being independent from a figure of authority ever since a negative experience I went through with my first manager during a summer job I had when I was 16.
My partner in the childcare business was an early childhood educator, and she was unhappy at the centres she was working at, thinking they were somewhat behind the times compared with what she’d learned in school. Since I was really thirsting to get into business, we partnered with the straightforward idea that I would handle the business side of things (incorporation, taxes, sales and the like) while she ensured that our classrooms and environments were world-class. Of course, in practice, we ended up swapping “hats” very often, and both of us built out our skillsets in the direction of the other over time.
From that start, I pursued various opportunities that arose along the way, including beginning some board work by becoming a director and joining the board of the credit union that first took a chance on our childcare business by giving us a loan when no banks were interested in supporting us. That was a major theme of the start of my career. I was 19 when we opened, and it was hard to get landlords, financiers, city permitting departments, and other authorities to take us seriously. We had to cultivate very mature and professional mindsets to be able to create a level of comfort in these types of stakeholders.
What do you like about your current job and what do you find challenging? How does it relate to your degree?
My current job as director of the Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology is one where I once again get to partake in varied and meaningful work. I enjoy having changes of pace and genre in my work, and being part of starting a new school ensures that I shift gears often.
I also have lots of freedom in terms of how I structure my time and work. This is both a wonderful benefit and an enormous challenge. I suppose I technically have the freedom to do very little, and let the school run into the ground. That is a clear failure scenario. But, I also have to think about taking on too much and hitting the same type of failure which would be making the school unsustainable.
Balancing my own skills and time against those of our growing team is probably the balancing act at the centre of my work that I would point to as an answer to both of these questions.
From your experience, what has been the value of having an Arts degree?
I would say that I am in a unique place insofar as I completed my degree quite a while after beginning both it and my career. I am therefore in a position to say what I think many say even when they complete their degrees early on in their careers: “It is not so much ‘having’ the degree as it is ‘having done’ the degree.”
I mentioned the difficulty that I experienced, early in my career in business, in convincing landlords to rent spaces to us, financiers to extend us loans, cities to give us permits, and so on. If I had not spent a year or two studying prior to that, I don’t think I would have had the maturity or self-confidence (and certainly not the justified self-confidence!) to signal my credibility to these key stakeholders, let alone my customers.
Of course, all the work that followed benefited in a general way from my higher level of education, but I highlight these early interactions for two reasons. First, they were somewhat binary and opened the door to make further work possible. Second, they happened early enough in my life and career that they had significant impacts on the rest of my life and work.
Even small degrees of change result in wildly different trajectories when they happen near the origin. I like that I’m able to reflect on how my time at university reasonably contributed to these positive outcomes, even before a degree was conferred. In this sense, I can reasonably speak to the benefits of education in general, apart from the whole “getting the piece of paper” thing.
What advice would you give to students and alumni interested in breaking into your industry?
My life motto has generally been: “Bite off more than you can chew and chew as fast as you can.” I’m not sure how well-advised that is, but it has yielded a lot of opportunity and success for me. I think there is a lot to be said for ideating, assessing risk, and thinking long-term. But at the end of the day my advice for getting into my industry, or virtually any industry, is to simply start.
“Starting” can take on many forms. I think a combination of learning about what’s happening in your target industry and how it’s happening (something that you are likely doing automatically if you are passionate about the industry) and feeling out the barriers to entry is a good start. Follow the string towards going live with a startup in the industry until you hit a wall. Feel out the wall, look for ways over, around, or through it. If your experience is like mine, standing close enough to the ever-shifting labyrinth of walls and mazes that is any modern market, the walls near you will eventually shift, open, and you will get sucked into the middle of it.
One more thought, I have heard many horror stories about partnerships, but I have worked with partners in all my businesses, and I’m quite sure I could not have done it without them. There are benefits of complementary skills where ideally a good partner will have some overlap with your skillset, but also complements you with skills you don’t have to the same level. Yet, over time, I have come to appreciate to the same extent, or even more, the emotional benefits of partnership. Entrepreneurship is stressful. Having someone to lean on and to get through the hard times with you is invaluable. You can always hire out for skills you don’t have, but you can’t buy the kind of solidarity and mutual support that a partner brings to your life and business.
What advice would you give your first-year self?
University, and UBC in particular, are fertile grounds for building relationships and seizing opportunities. I mostly kept my head down and focused on getting through my classes, but if I had lifted my head up and looked around a bit, I would have found a lot of friends, clubs, and opportunities to get involved in all sorts of fascinating activities from group travel to educational and internship opportunities. If I had a do-over, I would have availed myself of more of these resources and opportunities.
Shaun Olafson
Why did you choose your program at UBC and what did you enjoy most about it?
I had a unique pathway through my undergraduate degree at UBC. I first attended UBC in 2006 and was interested in computer science. At the same time, I was opening a childcare business with my partner, and I left UBC in 2008 in order to manage the business full time.
When I sold the business more than a decade later in 2020, I decided to return to UBC to finish a degree. I returned midway through, and Arts Academic Advising let me know that I would need to declare a major. Given my interests in technology and my work in finance (I had become a director of the Greater Vancouver Community Credit Union during the intervening years), I was torn between studying economics and some form of computer science.
The Interdisciplinary Studies (IDST) program was brought to my attention by my advisor, and I investigated it as a potential bridge between my topics of interest. I was eventually able to work with the Dean of IDST to structure a program of study that worked as an intersection between economics, philosophy, and computer science by focusing on Economics and Cognitive Systems courses.
In terms of what I enjoyed most about the program, I loved the ownership I was able to feel over my program after selecting my areas of study and building a curated course plan for it. I also really appreciated the blend of practical and theoretical study, and how relevant the things I learned felt to my life and interests. I ended up getting to practice the business and finance elements that are big parts of my life, while also studying subjects that interest and concern me deeply, like the science and ethical philosophy of artificial intelligence.
What were some of your most meaningful experiences at UBC?
The Cognitive Systems portion of my degree included some standout experiences. Of note, in COGS 300, Dr. Márton Soskuthy led a machine learning competition. Contestants formed teams and had to train digital agents (little cubes rendered in Unity) to compete at an adversarial ball-collecting task. The variety of approaches and styles was huge, and the tournament itself was a lot of fun. I am a competitive person, and the format of the unit led me to really dive deep into machine reinforcement learning, reward landscapes, hyperparameters, and neural network composition.
What choices did you make at UBC that contributed to your career success / journey?
My career started before my I completed my degree, and I only just recently finished the degree, so this question may not have as satisfying an answer for me as it does for others. Still, I feel that completing my degree alongside my career did have crossover benefits.
Benefits conferred from working prior to/while studying included a context for the practical things I learned and experience to inform the theory I learned. This pathway also afforded me an appreciation for the comparative luxury of studying which felt like “work” prior to my career but later felt much more like play and self-development.
Benefits stemming from studying alongside my career included a richer social network, variety in my thoughts and activities, and intensive, boot-camp like improvement in my time-management skills.
What was your first job after graduation and what other jobs did you have before your current position?
My first job began around the same time I started working towards my degree. I was directing a childcare centre that I opened with my partner in 2008. As the business grew into multiple centres in Vancouver, my work evolved from very general (doing everything from accounting and tax management to sales, furniture construction, wall repairs, cooking meals, and mopping the floors each night) to far more specific (overseeing my team of managers who supervised the teaching teams, and mostly working on big-picture thinking, governance, strategic planning, partnerships, etc.).
Besides my main work overseeing the childcare centres over the years, I also took on board positions at the Greater Vancouver Community Credit Union and the Vancouver Reggio Association. I also founded a non-profit society at the start of the pandemic in 2019, the Emergency Relief Society of Vancouver, to help get food and medicine to vulnerable populations.
Is your current career path as you originally intended? What challenges did you face in launching your career?
Not at all. I don’t think I ever could have predicted going into childcare, for example. I had been, however, interested in entrepreneurship and the concept of being independent from a figure of authority ever since a negative experience I went through with my first manager during a summer job I had when I was 16.
My partner in the childcare business was an early childhood educator, and she was unhappy at the centres she was working at, thinking they were somewhat behind the times compared with what she’d learned in school. Since I was really thirsting to get into business, we partnered with the straightforward idea that I would handle the business side of things (incorporation, taxes, sales and the like) while she ensured that our classrooms and environments were world-class. Of course, in practice, we ended up swapping “hats” very often, and both of us built out our skillsets in the direction of the other over time.
From that start, I pursued various opportunities that arose along the way, including beginning some board work by becoming a director and joining the board of the credit union that first took a chance on our childcare business by giving us a loan when no banks were interested in supporting us. That was a major theme of the start of my career. I was 19 when we opened, and it was hard to get landlords, financiers, city permitting departments, and other authorities to take us seriously. We had to cultivate very mature and professional mindsets to be able to create a level of comfort in these types of stakeholders.
What do you like about your current job and what do you find challenging? How does it relate to your degree?
My current job as director of the Vancouver Independent School for Science and Technology is one where I once again get to partake in varied and meaningful work. I enjoy having changes of pace and genre in my work, and being part of starting a new school ensures that I shift gears often.
I also have lots of freedom in terms of how I structure my time and work. This is both a wonderful benefit and an enormous challenge. I suppose I technically have the freedom to do very little, and let the school run into the ground. That is a clear failure scenario. But, I also have to think about taking on too much and hitting the same type of failure which would be making the school unsustainable.
Balancing my own skills and time against those of our growing team is probably the balancing act at the centre of my work that I would point to as an answer to both of these questions.
From your experience, what has been the value of having an Arts degree?
I would say that I am in a unique place insofar as I completed my degree quite a while after beginning both it and my career. I am therefore in a position to say what I think many say even when they complete their degrees early on in their careers: “It is not so much ‘having’ the degree as it is ‘having done’ the degree.”
I mentioned the difficulty that I experienced, early in my career in business, in convincing landlords to rent spaces to us, financiers to extend us loans, cities to give us permits, and so on. If I had not spent a year or two studying prior to that, I don’t think I would have had the maturity or self-confidence (and certainly not the justified self-confidence!) to signal my credibility to these key stakeholders, let alone my customers.
Of course, all the work that followed benefited in a general way from my higher level of education, but I highlight these early interactions for two reasons. First, they were somewhat binary and opened the door to make further work possible. Second, they happened early enough in my life and career that they had significant impacts on the rest of my life and work.
Even small degrees of change result in wildly different trajectories when they happen near the origin. I like that I’m able to reflect on how my time at university reasonably contributed to these positive outcomes, even before a degree was conferred. In this sense, I can reasonably speak to the benefits of education in general, apart from the whole “getting the piece of paper” thing.
What advice would you give to students and alumni interested in breaking into your industry?
My life motto has generally been: “Bite off more than you can chew and chew as fast as you can.” I’m not sure how well-advised that is, but it has yielded a lot of opportunity and success for me. I think there is a lot to be said for ideating, assessing risk, and thinking long-term. But at the end of the day my advice for getting into my industry, or virtually any industry, is to simply start.
“Starting” can take on many forms. I think a combination of learning about what’s happening in your target industry and how it’s happening (something that you are likely doing automatically if you are passionate about the industry) and feeling out the barriers to entry is a good start. Follow the string towards going live with a startup in the industry until you hit a wall. Feel out the wall, look for ways over, around, or through it. If your experience is like mine, standing close enough to the ever-shifting labyrinth of walls and mazes that is any modern market, the walls near you will eventually shift, open, and you will get sucked into the middle of it.
One more thought, I have heard many horror stories about partnerships, but I have worked with partners in all my businesses, and I’m quite sure I could not have done it without them. There are benefits of complementary skills where ideally a good partner will have some overlap with your skillset, but also complements you with skills you don’t have to the same level. Yet, over time, I have come to appreciate to the same extent, or even more, the emotional benefits of partnership. Entrepreneurship is stressful. Having someone to lean on and to get through the hard times with you is invaluable. You can always hire out for skills you don’t have, but you can’t buy the kind of solidarity and mutual support that a partner brings to your life and business.
What advice would you give your first-year self?
University, and UBC in particular, are fertile grounds for building relationships and seizing opportunities. I mostly kept my head down and focused on getting through my classes, but if I had lifted my head up and looked around a bit, I would have found a lot of friends, clubs, and opportunities to get involved in all sorts of fascinating activities from group travel to educational and internship opportunities. If I had a do-over, I would have availed myself of more of these resources and opportunities.
