Interview with Amazing HBC Alum Catherine Qin
Recently, we had the wonderful opportunity to talk with Catherine Qin, an amazing and thoughtful alumna of HBC, current President of the HBC Graduate Board, product marketing manager at a San Francisco-based tech startup, and fantastic mentor to us and to many of our current members. Catherine shared with us her experiences at Harvard and with HBC -- and in particular her experiences in writing and co-directing two original full-length story ballets for HBC. She also reflected on some of the challenges the dance and tech world face and provided advice for how to move forward in the post-pandemic era in a constructive way. We really appreciated Catherine’s insights and wisdom and hope you will enjoy her responses to these 15 questions as much as we did!
❤️Audrey and Amy
1. What is your name?
Catherine: My name is Catherine Qin.
2. When did you graduate from Harvard?
Catherine: I graduated in 2017.
3. What did you concentrate in when at Harvard?
Catherine: I concentrated in English with a secondary in Economics.
4. Can you describe your current occupation and how you arrived at your job?
Catherine: I am a product marketing manager at Samsara, a San Francisco-based startup in the logistics and operations tech space. Before I joined Samsara, I was at Microsoft for a couple of years working in a variety of business and marketing roles. I had the chance to work on everything from augmented reality and virtual reality to search engines and browsers to video gaming, So I really got the full gamut of experiences while I was there.
5. What is one of your favorite parts of your job? Maybe you could describe one of your favorite projects.
Catherine: My favorite part of working at Samsara is the company's mission, which is focused on bringing innovation to under-innovated spaces. That's something that I've always found fascinating since I joined the tech industry. Having seen the different areas and product spaces that other tech companies operate in, what's unique about Samsara is that we’re bringing this high level of innovation and creativity to industries that traditionally have been overlooked by tech companies, such as trucking, warehousing, and manufacturing. The positive impact that our products can have on the people and processes that keep our economy running is what gets me up every day.
6. How many years have you been dancing for? And can you describe your dance background?
Catherine: I've been dancing since the age of three or four years old, so over 20 years at this point. My first dance experience was one of those parent-child movement classes, a “Moving Munchkins” class at my local rec center, which was my first exposure to dance and to ballet. I then grew up dancing at my local ballet studio, Lexington School of Ballet in Lexington, Massachusetts, which I credit for teaching me all the foundations of ballet I know today. After graduating from high school, I joined Harvard Ballet Company my first semester at Harvard, which became the pinnacle of my dance experience when it comes to the level of community and self expression that HBC offered. Since then, I have been dancing on and off outside of my day job, through classes at Pacific Northwest Ballet and contemporary dance studios when I was based in Seattle, and, these days, at Alonzo King LINES in San Francisco. Even though dance is not my full-time focus, I continue to look for ways to keep moving and supporting dance, wherever I am.
7. What about your dance experience do you think has impacted or continues to impact your career and work today?
Catherine: The art of storytelling is one of the most valuable skills I've taken with me. It's really shaped, and continues to shape, the way that I think about my day job, which, on the surface, is not at all related to dance or art in general. A lot of the projects I worked on as part of Harvard Ballet Company really encouraged me to think outside of the box, to think from the audience's perspective, and to think about the interplay of artistry with human emotion and motivation and a lot of those things come into play in a field like marketing, where your primary role is to be a storyteller. I definitely see that underlying a lot of the work that I do, even in a space as far removed from dance as tech for logistics and operations.
8. What role did HBC play in your college life?
Catherine: HBC played such a huge part in my college life! As current HBCers can attest to today, it's such a core community for the dancers who are part of the company. There are not only the artistic and aesthetic elements of finding ways to express yourself, having the opportunity to choreograph, design a set, or create a script, and collaborating with artists outside of the dance community, but on top of that, there's the deeply social element of the Company and the way that it brings together everyone from freshmen to seniors grad students, and artists from the greater Boston area. There are so many incredible lifelong friendships and connections I've made from being a part of HBC and especially from serving on the Board and becoming so involved in the day-to-day operations of the Company.
9. We know that you wrote a full length story ballet for HBC, which is amazing! Could you tell us a bit about what that process is like?
Catherine: When my co-director, Lilly Riveron, and I took the helm of the HBC board as undergrads, we were both excited about carrying on the torch of a new tradition that HBC had started a few years earlier, that of bringing new narrative ballets to the stage. Most people are familiar with the most famous of classical story ballets like The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, but we were interested in taking narrative dance and applying it to not only classic tales, but also contemporary works of art . The result was two original story ballets we created during the two semesters we served as co-directors: The Jungle Book in the spring of 2015 and The Giver the following fall. The Jungle Book was the experience you alluded to, in which we wrote an adapted script based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and turned that into something that could shape a story ballet on stage. As part of this experiment, we had the chance to collaborate with an amazing array of actors, musicians, and set designers from across campus and even outside Cambridge to breathe new life into an old story that everybody knew and loved. We were fortunate enough to be able to build on that experience the following semester, when we put a modern, multimedia twist on the 1993 novel The Giver. Of the many highlights of that experience, the most memorable was getting to share our creation with the author herself, who came to enjoy the show and meet the entire cast afterwards!
10. What is one of the biggest challenges you think the dance world faces today?
Catherine: This is a really good question... There are so many challenges that dancers face in the world today. One that immediately comes to mind is the need to compete for audiences’ attention. There are so many different types of arts and entertainment platforms available to us as inhabitants of the 21st century -- at any given minute, we can choose from Netflix or any other streaming service, we can play video games or watch movies, or we can find countless other means of social interaction and arts consumption -- that I think the traditional form of theater and dance on a physical stage is increasingly at risk of becoming an obsolete mode of experiencing art and exchanging new ideas. This is a problem that I don't know anyone necessarily has a clear solution for, other than dancers and choreographers who are experimenting with different forms of media and bringing digital tech into traditionally physical spaces. I’m excited to see how dance evolves in conjunction with new capabilities in tech, but I also think that could in and of itself present a challenge as well.
11. As you're also part of the tech world, what do you think is one of the biggest challenges that the tech world faces today?
Catherine: Tech has a lot of work to do when it comes to being honest with itself about its impact on the world. The traditional narrative projected by the tech world is that tech is fundamentally good -- that innovation can only serve to improve the conditions that we live in. But there's also a more sinister side to what technology can do to the marginalized and underprivileged and those who are in positions of less power -- and that is something anybody who works in tech has a personal responsibility to self-reflect on. We should be aware of the ways in which tech is not only helping but also hurting and act in ways to bridge the gaps we have contributed to, whether it's the wealth gap or otherwise. As tech plays a bigger and bigger role in society, the increasing overlap between tech, social, and economic policy will make it more incumbent on those of us in the industry to be more active participants in mitigating the harm that we might be causing.
12. What is one of your favorite parts of being HBC Grad Board President?
Catherine: One of my favorite parts of being on the Grad Board is having a means of staying in touch with what the Company is working on. I love the fact that even though I'm no longer part of that undergrad community, I can still be privy to all these amazing developments and the ways in which the Company has evolved since I was in college. What's been particularly valuable and inspiring for me to see is the ways in which HBC has dealt with all the challenges throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and how it’s rallied to come together and experiment with all these unique ways of communicating, rehearsing, and performing despite being completely remote and virtual for over a year. It's been a great way to find inspiration in what our Company continues to do with each new generation of dancers.
13. What is something that you missed during the pandemic and are happy to return to?
Catherine: I really missed dancing in studios with other people! For a large part of the pandemic, I lived in a very small high-rise apartment, so I didn’t have the luxury of space to move in my own home. Before Covid, I definitely took for granted the ability to walk 15-20 minutes to open studios in the city and take class with people from different dance backgrounds and personal backgrounds from all over the city, to be able to forget about the outside world and just move for an hour or two. That's something I'm really looking forward to returning to in the Bay Area, where I'm now based.
14. If you had to describe HBC in a single word, what would it be?
Catherine: “Home.” HBC really was a home for me in college. Even now, I continue to feel such a strong sense of connection with everyone in the community, even with those I’ve never met in person but whom I still feel so attached to and invested in. That's a testament to the way that HBC creates, if not a physical home, then a metaphorical and emotional home for so many dancers that pass through the gates of Harvard.
15. What advice would you give to current HBC members during these uncertain times?
Catherine: Continue to look up and move forward. All of you have done an amazing job of pushing through a lot of challenging obstacles and circumstances over the past two years. Thinking back to last spring’s show, where you all used drone footage with group choreo to create a cohesive sense of unity to end the show, that is just one example of the many ways in which you all have shown so much resilience -- of mind, body, community, and artistry. That resilience is what I would encourage everyone in HBC to continue holding onto, to not lose sight of.