Let Your Stars Guide You – How to Walk Down the Unconventional Road?

How does an anthropologist with a PhD end up working in a US tech company? What was the path, and which decisions shaped this route? What kind of stars were there to light and show the way?

Dr. Laura Hirvi, Strategy Manager, Public Policy Europe at Meta, will take us along that road.

Her PhD research took her to Sikh communities in Finland and California, where she studied how people build identities across borders. She then led the Finnish Institute in Germany from 2015 to 2021 and sat on the board of the global network of Finnish cultural and academic institutes. After running the Virtual Reality Association Berlin Brandenburg for a year, she started working at Meta, first builing the European Metaverse Research Network and now shaping the strategies of the European Public Policy Team.

Her story asks a question that many careers leave unanswered: when there is no obvious next step or clear job title, how do you choose and move on? And who opens the doors that you could not have opened on your own? What role do networks play in all of this?

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A on careers, networks, and the decisions behind unconventional paths.