From January to December of 2021, I served as the Interim Executive Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. Interim means temporary: it was a one-year appointment. But all along there was an expectation that I would move into the role on a “continuing” basis, meaning a five-year term without the word interim to let people know not to take me too seriously. Initially I thought this was likely, and others at the university thought the same.
The institute had been searching for a director for several years. At the beginning of the search, there had been great expectations and lofty visions of the hero and savior that would take on the job, but the search had failed repeatedly. When the pandemic hit and lockdowns followed, the need to appoint someone internally came sharply into focus. We played a game of tag for a little while and I became it. There was a part of me that wanted to do it and part of me that didn’t, but one thing is for sure: I had absolutely no idea what the job actually entailed.
Once I started, I was quickly overwhelmed. All of a sudden I had 50 staff members under me, compared with zero at all points prior, and an annual budget with twice as many figures as I’d ever had to worry about. Believe it or not, this part actually wasn’t so bad because the senior staffers at the institute (who are the true heroes in this story) mostly took care of these things. But there were a whole lot of other things on my plate, and I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had no training to draw on; I was trained to prove theorems, but there were no theorems involved. Mostly it was about money, building relationships with government and industry to get it, and fighting with others at the university about it. My days were packed with meetings, and in the beginning my goal was merely to get through each one without looking like a complete idiot. There were definitely a few for which I did not succeed.
But the real problems started once I gained my footing, because of how hard I leaned into the job. In fact, I gave it pretty much everything I had. I wanted to succeed, and that meant the institute succeeding — and it wasn’t long before there wasn’t really any difference between IQC and my life.
By July, things had become completely insane. There was so much I needed to get done that there was no hope. I hadn’t even thought about research in 6 months. Then the shit really hit the fan, and I thought I’d lost a $25 million line of funding that the institute depended upon. I would be the first director in nearly 20 years to fail to secure that support. As a result, I crashed and burned. I will spare you the details of what that looked like, except to observe the tragic irony of having executive signing authority over a nine-figure trust and simultaneously being physically incapable of forcing myself to stop crying. This was undoubtedly the lowest point of my career.
People that care about me helped me, for which I am both fortunate and grateful. When my assistant learned what was going on, she wiped my calendar clean so I could take a week off to recover. The weird thing is that I got the impression that, as the assistant to a couple of directors before me, as well as several department chairs prior to that, she had seen this before. At some point I realized that, with the pandemic and everything else, I’d neglected to take any vacation in about 18 months, and that must have been a contributing factor. So keep this in mind: Sometime you have to take a break. And if you don’t, you’ll have to take a break.
I did eventually recover (although it took longer than a week), and in the process I came to the realization that taking this job on a continuing basis was simply not something I could do to myself. I felt terrible about letting the institute down, just when it was finally about to get a new director, and it was very difficult to tell my colleagues that I would not be taking the job on a continuing basis — but to say that a weight had been lifted off my shoulders would be an understatement.
There were more challenges and struggles to come in the second half of the year, and I wouldn’t say that I necessarily finished strong, but I completed the term I’d agreed to serve. A much more level-headed person than I stepped up, and I was able to hand the institute off to the next director in what I believe was a better state than when I had started. By the end, I’d lost about 15 pounds and half of one of my eyebrows fell out. (So in case you noticed this in one of my earlier videos on the Qiskit YouTube channel, that’s what happened to it.)
My communications director and guardian angel throughout this experience had warned me about this sort of thing right from the start: “This job will take everything you give it.” That was wise advice and I should have listened.