Meet Anne Schwartz

Alexa Halim: Hello and welcome to Mind the Gap. A podcast that showcases a diverse group of Wellesley alums involved in tech. I'm your host, Alexa Halim, and today's guest is Anne Schwartz. They graduated from Wellesley in 2018, having majored in computer science and Arabic. After graduating, they went on to work at Peloton as a backend software engineer and also founded and became the program manager for Peloton Pride and Allies. Last year they became the program manager for the university at Peloton program. Outside of this job, they were also involved in the for undergrad conference as programming director and then as national conference lead.

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Alexa Halim: Welcome Anne. How are you doing today? 

 

Anne Schwartz: Hey, um, I'm doing pretty well, you know, beautiful day outside. Um, coming to you live from Brooklyn, New York. 

 

Alexa Halim: Are you enjoying the first few days of spring? I'm also in New York right now for spring break, and it's very nice to 

 

Anne Schwartz: Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah, I am. Yeah, definitely. It was so beautiful this weekend, so I spent a lot of time in the park and just outside.

 

Alexa Halim: Mm-hmm. The cherry blossoms are blooming, which is really nice to see too. 

 

Anne Schwartz: I know, I know. I love them, so it's beautiful here. 

 

Alexa Halim: So we'll start off with the first question. When slash how did you begin to develop an interest in the area you're currently working in? 

 

Anne Schwartz: So, at Wellesley I started out doing a lot of different things.

 

Anne Schwartz: Really, like you said, I studied Arabic. I. Didn't major in Arabic, but I took a lot of Arabic classes. Um, I took a lot of sociology classes and a lot of like literature classes, a lot of Russian lit, basically everything, which is why Wellesley is cool. And I, you know, kind of declared a, a Middle Eastern studies major, but then I got into a computer science class, the entry level, and I really loved it.

 

Anne Schwartz: That was the last semester of my first year, and it was just really collaborative. It was kind of where my, my first friends at Wellesley, uh, first year is obviously kind of hard and I, I felt really connected to my, my classmates and my entry level class. And so I decided to switch my major in my sophomore year to computer science.

 

Anne Schwartz: And it was really just like, About the collaborative aspect of the classes and that I love problem solving, and it was super satisfying to complete the problem sets and work on interesting problems in that area. I didn't really have like a plan at all with it. 

 

Alexa Halim: Awesome. And then the next question is, how is your transition from Wellesley into the workforce?

 

Anne Schwartz: So that's interesting. So my senior year, you know, I was in the recruiting process. It's crazy. I'm flying

everywhere. Just interviewing, interviewing, interviewing. Um, chaos for sure. And I got a bunch of offers, but I really wanted to live in New York. Like that was my first priority about what company I was at or what exactly I was doing.

 

Anne Schwartz: But I was really going for software engineering roles. So I got a bunch of offers, but the ones that were in New York were mostly in at big banks, and I actually accepted an offer in finance as a software engineer. And then I guess I went home for winter break and I decided that I couldn't do it. Like I couldn't do it.

 

Anne Schwartz: So I resignated my acceptance of that offer. And at that point I had no offers because I had just like let them all pass. So I had to start my application process over, which was really chaotic. Um, and I ended up applying to kind of like to top 50 startups in New York, and Peleton was one of them. And I didn't even know what Peloton was at the time.

 

Anne Schwartz: I, I grew up in Massachusetts and there was a Peloton showroom in the Natick Mall, which obviously you're probably familiar with. And. Yeah, I would always pass it and be like, what is this Peloton? Like, I don't know what this is. Um, but I got an offer there and it was good, and I decided to just go for it because I thought that a startup environment would be better for me.

 

Anne Schwartz: So in about July of 2018, I moved to New York. I moved in with my friend Iz, and I started work. It was a rough time for me. I was going through this big breakup and I was starting as a new software engineer, which is just really hard. I, I think like Wesley's education is so great for so many reasons, but the computer science education, a lot of it, at least when I was there, was.

 

Anne Schwartz: Really theoretical. It wasn't software engineering. It was like, how do you code? Well, which obviously helpful, but I just felt lost on a lot of different things. Um, and I needed so much support, like I couldn't do anything for myself. And fortunately, I had a really good mentor in the senior engineer named Jay and.

 

Anne Schwartz: You know, I was, I started at the bottom. I started completely helpless. Um, and I think it really took me six months to get into my groove. But at the same time, Peloton was such a cool place to be. Like, it was a young company. I mean, it was founded in 2012, but it didn't really experience a lot of growth until about 20 17, 20 18.

 

Anne Schwartz: Um, it was pre i p o and. There were a lot of cool people my age working there. Um, on my team I made really good friends with a guy named who I've stayed friends with to this day. And we just had a cool thing going on there. Like the environment was really special and from the beginning I really had the space to create and grow.

 

Anne Schwartz: Inside and outside my role and junior people got a lot of respect and autonomy within the organization, which I loved, and I think it really made me know that I made the right choice. You know, we're sending my offer within finance and getting into a startup environment because truly finance is not for me, and I felt really at home there.

 

Alexa Halim: Mm-hmm. I guess, can you talk a bit more about kind of the difference that you found within the environments between finance and then also with the startup that you eventually chose to go with? 

 

Anne Schwartz: Yeah. I mean, for me it starts from as simple of a place as just like what you are wearing. Finance is just a very formal environment.

 

Anne Schwartz: It's very professional and. It's also pretty rigid because it has to be like, there's just a lot of money. I don't

really love super hierarchical and rigid structures in an organization. You know, finance traditionally has that and. At Peloton, I was connected to people high up within the organization all the way to the c e O, our president as an organization, our chief content officer, everyone from the time I was there when I started, I was 21 and I loved those connections.

 

Anne Schwartz: And also people took me seriously, even though I was just starting and I think. My impression of finances that you kind of have to do your time being kind of no one. And then you know, you can ascend and there's definitely like a more expected path, but at the same time you have to spend time kind of deferring to others.

 

Anne Schwartz: Um, and that's just not really my vibe. So, I, I really loved that I could have relationships with anyone, that I could talk to, anyone that I could build, things that I wanted to build inside and outside my role, and that's what made it a good environment for me. And, you know, there are pros and cons there.

 

Anne Schwartz: Like, I would say that within more established organizations there are programs in place that, you know, haven't even gotten to Peloton as of now, like internal mobility programs that are super structured or just various things. Um, that Isop built at Peloton while I was there, including our like equity and inclusion programming and.

 

Anne Schwartz: That's just something to consider. You know, I, I didn't mind it personally because I liked that I could be there while it was built and also help build it. But if you're looking for something, a place that. Already has things in place for you, and it's gonna be super secure and solid. A bigger organization and maybe a finance organization might be better for you.

 

Anne Schwartz: But for me, I was just a little chaotic, wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted to do, wanted to be working in a really young and casual environment and for a product that I really liked, and Peloton ended up being a pretty great place to do that. 

 

Alexa Halim: Awesome. Could you describe a little bit about what, I mean you're not in this role anymore .

Alexa Halim: But how specifically what you did every day, kind of as a software engineer. 

 

Anne Schwartz: Yeah. So, I started as a software engineer on a team called Performance Engineering. Um, it kind of changed names several times, but our team built tooling to help Peloton scale its systems. So, for example, every year at Peloton, there's a.

 

Anne Schwartz: Thanksgiving spin class, which is funny. It's called Turkey Burn. And that's kind of when we see the most riders in the year in the us. And so every year there's a big push to be able to scale the systems to be able to accommodate that traffic. So my team, while I was on it, built a tool that allowed us to simulate.

 

Anne Schwartz: Classes like that happening, new feature releases and also just highly scaled up environments before they happened. So we built internal tooling and we helped other engineers within the organization use it to test out their features and, um, different environments before they happened. So they knew that when they released them into production, everything was gonna be okay.

 

Anne Schwartz: So a typical day, I mean, It wasn't really a typical day, but it started off with a team meeting stand up. Everyone got together. We talked about what we were working on, what was going well, what was not going well, and then I. Launched into a, you know, time, both coding and in meetings. Um, for the rest of the day.

 

Anne Schwartz: I also did a lot of presentations and working with other engineering teams to help them onboard onto our teams. So communication, verbal and written was a big part of my job as an engineer. Just, you know, breaking down complex or, you know, specific topics that my team knew about very well to, to engineering teams, um, that didn't, and.

 

Anne Schwartz: Creating great user experiences for the engineers within my organization. So that was, that was pretty much it. 

 

Alexa Halim: Mm-hmm. And then now you are the program manager for the university at Peloton program. So could you talk a little bit about what led you to transition into this new role and what this kind of entails?

 

Anne Schwartz: Yeah, so that's a whole multi-year story. So when I started at Peloton, like I said, I was 21, we were a startup. We had fewer than a hundred engineers. For instance, like now we have several hundred, I think maybe even over a thousand. And at the time we had no one working in equity and inclusion work specifically.

 

Anne Schwartz: And so our had of brand marketing kind of took an interim role doing that kind of work, and she was looking for people to help her start up. The whole program and I really, I volunteered my time to do that. And I think for me as a queer, non-binary person, it came from a place of looking for community for myself at Wellesley.

 

Anne Schwartz: Like I really had that, I played Frisbee. It was a big way. I had community and it was obviously super queer and. I was looking to find those people in my workplace. And so one of the first parts of our inclusion strategy at Peloton and at a lot of different companies is, um, building out employee resource groups.

 

Anne Schwartz: So those are kind of identity focused communities that provide support and also advocacy for different folks within a workplace. So, I ended up starting our first ever employee resource group, Peloton Pride and Allies, and I program managed that and led that for about three years, and I got to do all sorts of work in the process.

 

Anne Schwartz: Um, everything from benefits audits and improvements helped create world class benefits to support. Trans and non-binary people seeking gender affirming care at the company. Um, great family building benefits. I helped double those. So it's, it's pretty comparable to other leading tech companies. People can build families.

 

Anne Schwartz: I did a lot of community building and events work, a lot of internal education work building. Both learning and development trainings and also onboarding modules, so new people at the company could become acclimated to the culture at Peloton and hopefully know a little bit about inclusive language. I did product work.

 

Anne Schwartz: I spearheaded the project to add non-binary gender options to all of our platforms, and it was really cool. You know, I. Both built community across the entire organization because the folks that were in my group, which started out as about 15 people getting lunch in New York and now is a couple hundred people in the us, Canada, the uk,

Australia and Germany, where Peloton House locations.

 

Anne Schwartz: I, so I built excellent community across the entire organization, including people really high up within the organization. My executive sponsor for Peloton Pride was our Chief Business Officer, Brad Olson, who was a great mentor to me, and it kind of led me to think about what I actually wanted to do.

 

Anne Schwartz: Software engineering never really felt fully right for me. I really like to code. For me, it's more of a. Means to an end instead of the end in itself. You know, I was never going to be that senior engineer who just loved to learn about theoretical computer science. Like that was just never gonna be me.

 

Anne Schwartz: And to me that was a signal that I should make a change. And like I said earlier, at a startup, they're. Are not a ton of systems in place for people to make moves like the one that I did. Um, and so it took years and a lot of rejection and hard conversations. You know, I, I talked to teams all the way from d e I to people analytics, to employer brand, employee experience, and interviewed and was rejected from roles internally, which really sucks because, you know, those are people you're actually working with.

 

Anne Schwartz: And eventually I got to interview for a role on a team called University of Peloton, and University of Peloton was a team that was building up two major programs at the company. They were dedicated to hourly team members at Peloton. So those are the folks working in retail, working in member support, people delivering our products and people working in our warehouses.

 

Anne Schwartz: And it came out of a company anti-racism pledge, which dedicated 20 million to disproportionately investing in the learning and development of hourly team members, which also is our largest and most diverse part of the company. So I thought the work was incredibly impactful for me. One of the biggest things that a company can give anyone is just money.

 

Anne Schwartz: And that's financial security, right? And to be able to help build generational wealth and give people access to economic mobility like I. That meant a lot to me. And personally, I felt connected to the work because I knew how hard it was for myself to make a career change. And a lot of the University of Peloton programming was designed to help others make major career shifts from hourly to salary positions at the company.

 

Anne Schwartz: And I. Just felt connected to the work. So I got the chance to interview for it. And of course, my Peloton Pride and Allies work was one of the ways that I qualified myself. But also, like you said, I worked with Alpha Undergrad a significant amount. So Alpha undergrad is the nation's premier career exploration conference for lgbtq plus undergrads.

 

Anne Schwartz: We have four conferences, marketing, business tech and engineering, and they're all volunteer led. And Ron and I. Got the chance to be a programming director for the tech conference in 2020 and actually lead the conference in 2021. And that involved me managing a team of 12, which was the first time I ever managed a team.

 

Anne Schwartz: So it was quite an experience and put together an entire conference ourselves. So I learned a lot about talent acquisition and events, coordination and building and people management. And I used all of that to, you know, Become a strong candidate for the role that I got as a program manager with University of Peloton.

 

Anne Schwartz: So yeah, I started that role in kind of October of 2021. But as you know, Peloton went through massive

layoffs. So unfortunately my entire team was wiped out in February, which was really hard. So, Now I'm in the process of looking for a new role, which has been challenging, but also also exciting. You know, I spent almost four years at Peloton.

 

Anne Schwartz:  I kind of grew up there and it. Definitely was like about time for me to make a change. 

 

Alexa Halim: I think it's really interesting to hear you talk about doing different things within having a full-time job, but I guess I'm wondering how are you able to manage both your work at Peloton and then also like out for undergrad?

 

Anne Schwartz: Um, Yeah, I mean, it was kind of like out for undergrad was my hobby. You know, as a software engineer, you have a pretty flexible schedule, depending, I mean, I did, I wasn't working too many hours. I had a lot of flexibility in my days. I had an unlimited time off. You know, these are privileges associated with the role, and so I, I did have plenty of time to work on things outside of.

 

Anne Schwartz: My job, but you know, that's like what I chose to do as my hobby. Like that's what I chose to do with a lot of my evenings, and it was a huge community building thing for me too. You know, you're working with a team of 12 over the course of a year to build this big thing and. It was, it was really special.

 

Anne Schwartz: Like I love those people and I'm so glad that I did that work. But yeah, it was my hobby, you know? It was what I did with my free time for the most part. 

 

Alexa Halim: I guess my last question is, what advice would you give to current Wellesley students? 

 

Anne Schwartz: What advice would I give to current Wellesley students? I would say simply that when you're a new engineer, Or a new product designer or PM or anything, it's gonna be really hard and you're gonna feel like you don't know anything and you don't have any word from the team.

 

Anne Schwartz: And I feel like no one talks about that time period when you feel like bad, but you know, it probably is gonna happen to you unless you're, you know, you might be some kind of superstar and respect for that, but, That's just something you have to go through in the process of becoming a great engineer or a great product designer or a great program manager, and with the right support system, you'll become excellent at it.

 

Anne Schwartz: And then I think just be generous to the people around you who are also in the process of learning. You know, you'll get the chance to mentor interns and maybe eventually manage folks on your own. And I just say be generous to people who are in the process of learning because we've, we've all been there and it's hard.

 

Anne Schwartz: And mentorship means the world. And also just there's so many opportunities within tech. Like if you are not feeling it, you can do whatever you want, you know? Especially at a startup or a smaller tech company, there's so much space to build and create outside of your role. Just start doing things. You know, don't, don't be afraid to talk to people at any level within the organization and give them your assistance or help or thoughts about programs that could be built, because they're more likely to say yes than you even think.

 

Anne Schwartz: And if you wanna make a change, You'll be able to do that, you know, might take years and it might be really frustrating, but you'll be able to do it and it's worth it to do something that you really wanna do if you have that privilege and space in your life. 

 

Alexa Halim: Mm-hmm. Awesome. Do you have any advice for students who are in the recruiting process, especially considering you're also looking for new physicians?

 

Anne Schwartz: I mean, honestly, the recruiting process. It's horrible. I mean, you know, you're, you're grinding on leak code or whatever you're, you're reading, cracking the coding interview or whatever, and I, I kind of hated when people were telling me like, the world is your oyster. Like, that's just not, I just don't like that because it's hard, but, It's also achievable and you do have the education that you need to do it, and also, you don't have to be an engineer right away if that doesn't happen for you.

 

Anne Schwartz: You, there's so many o other roots in Tu tech or within tech, and so be generous to yourself and rest and hang out with your friends and have fun. Don't let this consume your life because it's really not worth it, even though I know that it feels like that's impossible. 

 

Alexa Halim: Awesome. Thank you so much. Such wonderful insight and so interesting to hear your story.

 

Alexa Halim: That concludes our episode of Mind the Gap. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. A special thank you to this episode's guest, Anne Schwartz for chatting. This episode was edited by Annick Gilles, Alexis Parker, and Alexa Halim, and brought to you by our executive producer Smaranda Sandu.