My Protégé Experience
By: Amy Chen
Tags: Public Speaking, Learning, Protege, Toastmasters, Mentorship

Thank you, Toastmaster, for introducing me. Hello everyone, I am Amy again, the product design researcher at Citrix based in the Santa Clara office. Today, I will talk about my experience as a protégé, a new vocabulary that I learned from this Toastmaster’s project.

Before this project, I never distinguished a manager, a boss, a coach, or a mentor. To me, these four terms were synonyms. If you had heard my speech regarding my leadership styles, you knew I was a very obedient worker. The manager was the boss that I had to obey. The manager was also a coach, aka a mentor that gave me work instructions. I never thought about the difference.

My definition of a mentor changed after I read the materials from this project. Now I know that the mentor should be the one who guides me to reach my long-term goals. And a coach is someone who helps me achieve short-term aims. Keeping this new definition in mind, I found I had a lot of great coaches who provided guidance and training to polish my certain skillsets. However, I had very few mentors.

The protégé experience I will share with you today is about a person that most of our old Toastrix members know: Daniel Hor.

Daniel was not my manager and definitely not my boss. He was a co-worker who got on board on the same day as I did. He was the only senior researcher here in the Santa Clara office. I didn’t notice how much mentorship I received from him until I started this project.

Daniel, as some of you know, was very enthusiastic about helping others. He always volunteered to do a lot of work. Without me asking, he always provided me with his supports and advice. He became my mentor in a subtle way that we both didn’t notice.

There was no official protégé and mentor relationship between us. But as the only senior researcher near me, he guided me naturally and spent his working hours and personal time to understand my needs.

When he was still in the company, we would have lunch together every day and share what had been happening in our lives. I would ask him not only the research questions but also the broader questions from how to become a senior researcher, how to improve as a user experience professional, to how to live a happy life. Being in the industry for about eight years and having a kid and his own family, his abundant life and work experience helped me explore the possibilities of my career and my life.

He was not a coach that would give me tasks. He would not focus on helping me polish a small set of skills. As a mentor, he usually just gave me his feedback on what I was doing and shared his experience so I could find commonality and learn from it.

I remember one time he reviewed my diary study and gave me a lot of feedback on details for the best practice. However, I didn’t have time to change anything, and I needed to start data collection right away. He told me that it was ok. I would learn to see if my way worked, or I would just suffer from the data analysis because of the structure of the study, and I would still learn in a hard way though. In the end, I did suffer, and I did learn. I appreciated his honest feedback and his chill attitude on “things might go wrong, but you would be fine, and you will just learn.”

Besides his attitude to work, I also learned from him to try not to be afraid of controversy. If you know Daniel, he is interested in conversations even debates. He was never afraid to share his opinions even on topics like religion, politics, and sexualities. And he always encouraged me to do the same and tried to be curious and ask questions all the time.

From him, I truly see the value of communication. Communication might not solve all the problems, but if people are just too afraid to talk, we might miss what others are thinking, and we will solve nothing.

Being not afraid of learning from failure, never avoiding sensitive topics, and being curious are the three things Daniel has taught me. They are beneficial traits for not only my career but also my life.