The poem that helped me leave Google for Harvard Business School

Google is a special company by every measure — in its scale, its people and its impact. The decision to move on wasn't easy to make. However, the time has come to say see you later to the free food and amazing colleagues.

I was introduced to the concept of engineering serendipity last year and it has stuck with me ever since. In essence, I believe that we can shape a path which increases the probability of having meaningful collisions. The best way I could think to engineer serendipity for myself was by pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School — and so for the next two years, I'll be an MBA candidate and Sainsbury's Management Fellow at Harvard Business School.

Below I'm sharing the 'essay' I submitted when applying for the program. When I decided to apply for the MBA, I was filled with self-doubt. I was comparing myself to other candidates and thought I wouldn't fit the bill. I don't have the typical consulting/banking experience and, admittedly, I scored well below HBS' average GMAT score.

However, I came to terms with the above and decided to give it my best shot. I decided that I'd make vulnerability my difference and so I put myself on paper. With this mindset, the written piece flowed very naturally and came together in one sitting at a café.

This piece may be a tough read — making it difficult to share publicly like this. However, I hope that through sharing this I'm able to "help others express themselves, heal and grow in the way that I did".

N.B. at time of writing, I was still working @ YouTube.

shattered glass

weighed down my duvet

a shield from the

friday mass.

Duvet peeled off from head to toe

carried the remnants of a window

and 6 lives

alas.

It was the morning of Friday, December 27th 2013. It was my annual trip to Lebanon to visit family, but this morning was particularly memorable. As I lay in bed gripping the corner of my bed, with the duvet protecting my head from the blasting AC, a deafening sound ripped through central Beirut that morning as a car bomb assassinated a politician and took the lives of 5 others in a park in my neighborhood, just opposite our house. The bomb shattered my window and rained shreds of glass over my bed. The duvet ended up protecting me from more than just the AC. I remember jumping out of bed and over shards of glass into my grandmother's arms. She stood still in the corridor screaming my mother's name. My parents and sister had just driven out of the building and in the direction of the explosion. For those few minutes our world stood still as their fate was being decided. Luckily they were spared. They left the car in the middle of the street and ran amidst debris back to the house.

To this day, I sleep in the corner of my bed gripping the duvet over my head. I haven't fully healed and don't know when or if I ever will. My subconscious takes over and I still experience bouts of anxiety. However, the process of healing has been transformational. I was drawn to the practice of mindfulness and yoga as mediums for self-exploration and expression and have become an avid advocate. Also, during this time, my attachment to online personalities on YouTube deepened. Fundamentally, I realised the importance of expression — and escape — in healing, identity formation & community building. However, unfortunately, the above explosion wasn't my first such experience in Lebanon — it deepened wounds from a prior summer. Seven years earlier, in July 2006, a war broke out and my family was forced to evacuate. We drove to Syria, which at the time, ironically, was welcoming Lebanese refugees. Throughout that time, my parents encouraged me to play games, read, write — to escape the war. I took to poetry. It became my means of expression and allowed me to truly evacuate the scenes of war.

I hugged a notebook in the back of

a van that navigated bombed highways

towards queues of people on the border that

danced to the music of fighter jets'

heavy bass.

Looking back at these experiences, I am well aware of my privilege. Millions of young people around the world don't have the access to safety I had and have yet to find an escape, like I have found. I am constantly in awe of family members, like my grandmother whose strength has carried her through decades of war and countless incidents like the car bomb that shook my house. I also deeply identify with the many young people who rely on different media to heal and escape.

I was trained as a mechanical engineer at Cambridge, which leads many to wonder why I am working on content partnerships in the Middle East at YouTube. My work has brought me great meaning, because I am able to bring an escape to others in the region. I am deeply drawn to how my role enabled me to work with creators who are using their voice to positively impact their communities. During my time, I was able to help surface and grow creators like Lowi Sahi, an Iraqi vlogger who now entertains and educates a community of over one million youth and Fly With Haifa, a hijabi YouTube creator who travels the world building bridges across cultures and who I brought to host the Nobel Peace Prize concert. In Saudi, I pioneered the first-ever event with an all-female panel addressing a mixed audience of hundreds and became the EMEA-wide representative for the newly formed YouTube for Good team. My efforts have been recognized numerous times internally and externally through recognitions like Founders of the Future, Inspiring YouTuber Award, the Google North Star Award and others and I have become a regular speaker on the topic of young people and the internet — especially around self-expression and the social impact of online content creation — and was recently the youngest keynote speaker at UNICEF's Global Innovation Forum.

My experiences instilled in me a relentless drive to enable other young people across the region to heal and help heal through self-expression. On a daily basis, I am able to place a megaphone in front of content creators who can do this at scale. My background in engineering and my analytical capabilities have also led to many opportunities across a variety of high-impact projects, from a 20%-role with the YouTube Strategy team where I led data analysis on a major shift in user metrics we were witnessing in Europe to a 20% product manager role on an experimental curation feature, and my upcoming move to a regional Strategy and Operations role on a business-critical Marketing team.

Self-expression matters. It matters most. It allows me and many others to push through traumatic experiences. For many of the creators I've worked with, it is what helps bring laughter to troubled youth, build bridges across chasms and push society forward. The HBS MBA program will provide me with the toolkit, network and confidence to become a fuller, better equipped and more self-aware contributor to the business community and society at large. And through the program, I hope that my growth will help catalyze my efforts to build businesses that can one day help others express themselves, heal and grow in the way that I did.