Conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1992.
Hosted by Will Bachman.

Episode: 32

Yuko Thomas, Head of Investor Relations

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Show notes

After graduating from Harvard with an AB in History and Literature, Yuko moved to London where she started a career in financial services. Prior to joining Tetragon in 2006, Ms. Thomas was an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs International where she was the Head of Human Capital Management Strategy and Management, Europe, and a Senior HCM Generalist and Chief of Staff for the Equities Division in Europe. You can connect with Yuko through Linkedin. 

 

Key points include:

  • 11:30: Distinctive elements of the Goldman Sachs culture
  • 17:29: The inspiration behind Yuko’s  anglophilia
  • 21:45: On being a trustee

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Transcript

 

92-32.YukoThomas

SPEAKERS

Yuko Thomas, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:01

Hello, and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe, class of 1992. I’m your host will Bachman. And I’m excited to be here today with Yuko Thomas, who some of you may know as Yuko Miyazaki, you go, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. So, I’m calling you today on a plus four, four number. I guess that means you’re you’re in the UK, what are you? What are you doing hanging out in the UK?

 

Yuko Thomas  00:32

Yeah, I live in London, London, England, and I have been here pretty much since graduation, I moved here in October of 1992. For a two-year stint, and I’m still here, more or less. But I work in financial services, like do Investor Relations at a company called tetragon. Financial Group. Yeah, so that’s why I’m here, I guess.

 

Will Bachman  01:01

All right. So tell me about your journey since graduation.

 

Yuko Thomas  01:07

Yes, so I studied history and literature. Sort of, of the late 19th and early 20th century, British history literature in particular, I’ve always been an Anglo file, for whatever reason. And I moved to London, not because I had a job or anything practical like that. But just because I wanted to live in England. And very luckily, love London, I feel very fortunate to live here. I think it’s the greatest city. And so here I am still. And so I moved here, I thought I would get a job, like something temporary, like working in a pub or a bookstore or something. And actually, there were no jobs to be had. And weirdly, and ironically, I ended up working at Goldman Sachs.

 

Will Bachman  02:11

That’s the classic approach. You know, if you can’t get a job at a pub, there’s always that fallback option of Goldman Sachs. Yeah, yeah. And how did that how did that happened?

 

Yuko Thomas  02:25

For better or for worse, it was actually, I do, oh, my first career to Harvard, in that, before I moved here. You know, contact, like a friend of a friend says, oh, you know, you’re moving to London. There’s this great alum, Jim Baker. Shout out to Jim, if you ever listened to this, who was the president of the Harvard Club of London as it was, then, which is now part of probably the United Kingdom. And he, you know, he’s, you know, very helpful to, you know, alumni and new graduates. And, you know, here’s how you get in touch with him. And it just so turned out that, you know, he was working at Goldman Sachs at the time. And so I met with him, he kindly bought me lunch. And, you know, I said, I think, you know, this is my, my resume. I, you know, I thought I wanted to be a journalist or work in a magazine or publishing or something like that. And he ended up calling me back saying, Oh, I see you speak Japanese, as well, yes. And, basically, you know, can you answer the phone in Japanese? I said, Yes, I can do that. And because the Japanese salesperson on his team had a lot of clients, and she was the only person there and every time there, they would call up, if she was on the phone or away from the desk. They would basically just lose business because nobody could take a message. Because a lot of her clients were just unwilling to leave a message in English or couldn’t. So that’s literally how I got hired to enter the phone.

 

Will Bachman  04:12

That is a good start. That’s a good start. And they would not

 

Yuko Thomas  04:14

happen now. That just simply would not happen now. But it was kind of cool.

 

Will Bachman  04:19

And what do you know? And then, okay, so you’re answering the phone at Goldman Sachs taking messages beyond that, you know, something led on to a career investigation, and then

 

Yuko Thomas  04:29

they were they said, okay, here. Do you know anything about No, I remember, I walked onto the trading floor and this was, you know, back in the early 90s, of course, so it’s loud and they I’d never been on a trading trading floor before. It’s like, you know, a football field full of desks and people shouting into phones. I was like, What is this place? This is insane. I don’t know anything. And but that was fine. I guess everyone was very nice. It was actually a great place to work out. People were very kind and patient with me. And, you know, one day my boss said that the Japanese lady I was working with she said, Okay, go to the morning call and take notes. And so I’m, you know, literally just, you know, trial by fire. So I, you know, go in with my notebook. I’ll give people you know, from different countries speaking about companies I’ve never heard of in my life, you know, all different sectors, and it would just literally just take it all in working, like went along. So yeah, so I took started going to the morning call, I started booking trades. So I kind of, you know, worked up from being like an assistant slash Secretary slash, you know, trade assistants to kind of mentor they kept saying, well, here, do you want to speak to this client, he speaks English, he wants to practice his English on you. And I ended up working there for, like, almost 12 years, or something like that.

 

Will Bachman  06:06

And what were you doing at the end of those 12 years?

 

Yuko Thomas  06:10

Actually, I moved on from sales and trading. So the first three years or so what word equity equity sales effectively being a stockbroker. And I found that unsatisfying in some respects? Well, partly because, you know, I had basically learned on the job, I didn’t have an MBA, I wasn’t formally trained, no, didn’t really have the accounting skills. But it was also the fact that was very transactional. It was very, like, you know, every day you started from square one, and you were talking about somebody else’s research. And that wasn’t fully satisfying to me. So I ended up moving well, there were other things that happened, I met my husband actually in London. Also, he was working at Goldman Sachs. But he was American, he got moved to Hong Kong. So we moved to Hong Kong for two years. So we spent 98 and 99. In Hong Kong, which was great fun, I took some time off, and improved my tennis game. And then when we moved back to London, I re approached Goldman and said, Hey, I’m back. Is there anything for me? I need to work again. And then it but I said, I don’t really want to do sales and trading, you know, I think that’s not really the best fit for me. And they said, Okay, well, you know, how is this being called equities management is like, what is that it was, so it’s basically like, an in house consulting, to basically the equities division. So you know, the sales and trading division. And it was just sort of helping with, with special special projects, or if they had things that needed to be done that didn’t fit neatly into another department. And actually, I love that it was kind of it was more project plant led, which is something I really enjoyed doing. And one of the things I got to do is run the training program for the new hires, which was really fun. Because everybody was young. And it also allowed me to, because when I joined, you know, as I said, you would never get hired like that. Now, it’s much more of a whole machine, the whole graduate recruitment thing. You know, hundreds of interviews, math tests, all of that, you know, I would never pass on that. But I do remember thinking, okay, these are the things I wish someone had told me in the first day, week, month of my career,

 

Will Bachman  08:45

and what were some of those things? Well, what What did you wish you had learned, like someone had said to you, week, one week, day one,

 

Yuko Thomas  08:52

well, even even just basic stuff that I think, you know, companies now, you know, any large professional organization does this now, but it’s not obviously, obviously, Goldman Sachs is a massive, you know, professional, but in London at the time, it was very siloed. And, you know, London was still very much an outpost of, of the New York organization, especially in the Security Division. Yeah, Goldman was not a big player in in London, in the early 90s. In terms of European equities or, and so there wasn’t really a training program and the training programs were very much geared towards associates who had been to business school, whereas in the UK, you know, it’s not normal for people to go to business school. It wasn’t part of the traditional American Finance path where you’re at, you’re an investment banking analyst for two to three years. Then you go to business school and get an MBA and then you go back to a bank and become an associate All of the non US offices weren’t set up that way. So it was just really even basic things like, this is the organization. This is, you know, what we do, these are all the different divisions, this is, you know, what each division is doing and investing even simple things to like, you know, error of avoidance, like, if you’re doing trades, like, these are the steps you go through to, you know, not make mistakes, you know, how not to lose money, basically, I suppose. And also, like a lot of the cultural stuff, I think, you know, Goldman isn’t slash was famous for its culture. And, and that was a lot of what the New York printing program that I went on, taught me, but just finding another way to repackage that and kind of create a sense of community for the for the new recruits who are basically, in the UK straight out of college. And in the US, they weren’t like it people had worked for a while and kind of knew how to deal with things. People are different than London,

 

Will Bachman  11:08

that are not like intimately familiar with the world of banking, and only kind of vaguely know, Goldman Sachs from the outside. What is distinctive about the Goldman Sachs culture, from other professional services firms or either even from other investment banks? What, how would you characterize

 

Yuko Thomas  11:30

it was very collaborative. And then, you know, I suppose, you know, a lot of people who’ve been listening to this, and they’ll totally probably, like, I totally disagree with you. But at least my experience, so my, my experience being in London, and very much in the equities division and the securities division, but I think it did kind of, you know, applied to the whole organization where they were, it was very collaborative, and team led, you know, people wanted to see the whole organization succeed. And so even if, you know, people were in a different department, and it wasn’t necessarily like, you know, immediately helpful for them to, you know, spend their time showing you how to do something people did that, just as a matter, of course, and I thought that was very nice. And I paid the company I worked for now, Chapter gone is very similar in that way, which is why I’ve worked here for 16 years. It is, and I think that’s, you know, I’ve only it’s weird, I’ve only ever worked into two companies, but from what I can tell from my friends who work at other banks or other asset management firms, you know, that’s that’s not always the case. Maybe it’s not even normal. I don’t know. But you know, that. I’ve been lucky to end up in two organizations where it is, it is very collaborative. And you know, it’s kind of cliched sounding, but team oriented.

 

Will Bachman  12:58

Yeah. So, you know, that kind of culture, doesn’t a rock arise, magically, or by accident, it could arise from selection effects by picking people who are collaborative to come in, or could arrive by incentives, like our people measured and used may be compensated by how collaborative, their peers think they are, or is it you know, they’re compensated by the success of the whole division or something? So people want to support it. Tell me a bit about what do you think makes Goldman Sachs, that collaborative culture as opposed to other banks, which might be more cutthroat?

 

Yuko Thomas  13:40

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, and I would have been too junior at the time to really understand how the whole compensation thing work. But yeah, there were the definite sense that, you know, you know, just because your division did badly, because, you know, it was the wrong part of the cycle for that particular asset class, you know, the bank wasn’t necessarily going to fire all those teams. And I think there was, it happens, let’s be clear, and no, there weren’t when times were bad people did have to lose their jobs. But I felt like it was to a lesser extent that at some of our, our peer organizations and senior people talked about that too. And I think, you know, it was, it was very much in the training program, there was this whole mantra of, you know, you must go out and meet your colleagues like you are, you will be, you know, not just rewarded, but like, you’ll be punished if you aren’t seeing to be out, you know, networking with your colleagues and other departments and other functions. Like that was really emphasized very heavily at Goldman Sachs.

 

Will Bachman  14:57

So people sort of expected to go have lunch. Lunch with someone in a different group or breakfast or how to manifest? Yeah,

 

Yuko Thomas  15:06

we would. Yeah, like you would in the Associate Program. You know. Every morning at the morning meeting, you know, the leader of the program would go round pointing at people and say to you, who did you network with?

 

Will Bachman  15:22

What did you do? Wow. So they would really call you out? That’s amazing. Yeah,

 

Yuko Thomas  15:27

yeah. So I guess that’s probably unusual. So yeah. And I was fortunate in a way that I knew some of my because I’d already worked in London for two years before I went on the associate program in New York. And so I and some of my colleagues from London had, in fact, moved to New York in that time, so they were there, and I could sort of leverage them to help me out. And so I laugh when I think about it now, but I take going up to the trading desk and and say, oh, you know, you’d be doing me a huge favor, if you know, you and the rest of the traders would, would come out with, with some of us on the trading training program, and I mean, okay, take it for what it’s worth, but you know, you have a bunch of 20 Something guys and a bunch of 20 Something girls, it’s like, Would it be okay, if we could all go and have some drinks? So they would be like, Yeah, let’s think about that. Okay. Yeah, so, but at the time, it felt much more like, oh, my gosh, if I don’t do this, I’m gonna get into trouble. But in retrospect, of course, it was, it was amazing fun, you know, so and some of my but my best friend from life or from that, that period, so great.

 

Will Bachman  16:51

So I want to get to your second employer. But before we move there, tell me about anything about so you were an anglophile. You’re now living in London, you’re a history major focused on, you know, British history and literature. Any tell me about anything that you did kind of in your first decade there in London, of getting to know the country, the City Theatre, learning about architecture, walking tours? Tell me anything to that you did that was kind of inspired by your Anglo philia?

 

Yuko Thomas  17:29

Yes, well, I’m glad you mentioned theatre, because then that is something that does take up quite a lot of my non working hours, I suppose. I was not personally a theater kid. I cannot act. I’ve never had any interest in, you know, being on the on the stage. But I’ve always enjoyed attending the theater. You know, my parents would take me to plays when I was young. And London is one of the great theatre cities in the world. And not just London. I’m finding recently. Just last weekend, I was in Leicester, at the curve Theatre, which is an amazing regional theater. So yeah, I’ve, I got a lot of plays. I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to become involved as a, as a trustee of a new theatre company here called wise children, which is won by Mr. Rice, who is one of the great British female creators of theater working today. And for those of you who are in the US, she will read and her new show Wuthering Heights, another great piece of, of British literature. She’s made a stage adaptation of it, which is fantastic. It had rave reviews here. And that’s coming to the US later this year and touring next year. Hopefully, I’ll think, you know, going well. Yeah, so yeah, I, I got a lot of shows.

 

Will Bachman  19:03

That’s fantastic. I want to hear about both. So tell me about the kind of types of plays you’d like to go to. We’re talking kind of the main stage sort of, I guess it’s the West End, like sort of our equivalent of Broadway, off off Broadway. And

 

Yuko Thomas  19:18

it’s crazy. Well, both of my daughters for whatever reason, probably because my husband like they’re both really interested in theater and stage stuff. And we we go see all like anything and everything is crazy. So we love musicals that we just saw Billy Elliot, as I mentioned, at the Leicester curve, which just opened a new production is amazing. But we also we frequent our local drama school, because, you know, London is like New York, you know, you have world class training institutions like lambda, and Rada and Guild Hall. And so one of the things we do a lot We live very close to lambda, which is the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and And you can see amazing plays there for seven pounds. So you know what’s not to like? So we go to a lot of those shows, but then equally we will, you know, it is expensive. Theater is expensive. New York is worse. London is still pretty expensive. But you know, so we pick and choose what we see. You know, but we’ll, we’ll go to plays like I love the Old Vic. I saw a play there last year called Camp Sigfried, which I think was written by somebody with a Harvard Connection. That was terrific. So yeah, that’s a dramatic play. Last night, I went to see The Glass Menagerie with with Amy Adams in the West End. Yeah, so you know, all kinds of stuff. I mean, you know, I keep lists of the things I go to see I go to the school plays local theater. You know, we have friends who do have amateur dramatics? Yeah, kind of it’s all. It’s all worthwhile in some way, even if, even if the production isn’t great. I feel like I always learned something.

 

Will Bachman  21:09

It’s a nice idea to keep a list of what you’ve seen. And, yeah, because it’s easy to forget some shows, right? Like, what do you record? Like the date and the name of the show? Or even like the list of the actors? Or what would I do?

 

Yuko Thomas  21:21

Well, I like I list the date, I see the show the name of the show, and where I saw it.

 

Will Bachman  21:28

That’s a nice way to remember, right,

 

Yuko Thomas  21:31

I was 20. Something like 22 shows.

 

Will Bachman  21:35

That’s a lot. That’s fantastic. Tell me about being a trustee of this new company, or or data would tell me about that.

 

Yuko Thomas  21:45

Yeah, that was a, I feel enormously, like humbled that they chose me, but So Emma rice, I had the opportunity to meet her. And an event and she was very gracious and kind. And so I this was when she was doing her first, like, when she had just started her new company, had her first play, also called wise children on at the Old Vic. And so I joined their mailing list. And then as part of the mailing list, they just said, we’re looking for new trustees, you don’t have to have a background in the arts. In fact, you know, maybe, you know, it might be better if you don’t have a background in the arts or in theater, because they’re looking for other skill sets. And so I applied, and miraculously, they picked me. So what I can bring to them, hopefully, is some knowledge of finance and the financial markets. So I’m working like with their accounting team, and there’s another trustee who has been working on the management and the financial side as well, too. So like, you know, trying to help them figure out, you know, how to invest cash that they get. And, you know, just, yeah, so I’ve only been a trustee for like, some, like two years, but it’s just really interesting to, to hear, you know, what goes into managing an arts organization. It’s very, very different from the financial world in many ways. And so it is, it’s different. It’s the same, I suppose it’s just, it’s just another industry that I Yeah, it’s really interesting to see under the hood, if you like, the kinds of things that they have to think about. And if you’re, you know, if you’re there, they’re supported theorists, they’re what’s called a national portfolio organisation. So that means they get money from the Arts Council, just funded from lottery ticket sales. So you know, obviously, there’s a lot that goes into them having to apply for that, and the standards they have to uphold. And so it’s the trustees job to make sure that they’re, you know, adhering to all of the things that they say they’re going to do. And so that’s really interesting.

 

Will Bachman  23:54

Let’s turn to your current employer and your role in investor relations. Tell me about that.

 

Yuko Thomas  24:01

Yeah, so I have worked here for just gotten 16 years, and our company’s called tetragon Financial Group. One of the co founders, actually is also a Harvard grad class of 87. But, yeah, I had been working, you know, happily that we’re at Goldman, and the founder is a friend and you know, I think he was he was looking for somebody to the company was much smaller back in what 2006 was looking for Yeah, to somebody else to bring onto the investor relations team. And so in many ways, it wasn’t that different to some of the things I had done before looking after clients, you know, which I had done in my early days of sales and trading. And there’s a lot of projects led things in In investor relations, there’s a lot of communication, there’s a lot of reporting. And so I’m the head of IR for tetragon, which is looking after we’re a listed company, basically. So it’s a listed fund of alternative investments, trades on the London Stock Exchange and on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. So it’s looking after the shareholders who buy the stock, if they’ve got questions about what we’ve reported. You know, there’s research analysts who write about the stock that we have to speak to. And then we have a lot of one of the things we do, one of the main investments that the fund holds is actually taking ownership of other asset management companies. And so those companies invest in their their some of our hedge some or hedge funds, some invest in real estate, some invest in infrastructure, all sorts of different types of assets. And so we also, our team looks after those companies, and the clients underlying along those two so. So it’s, yeah, it’s very varied. Yeah, I think of it is partly a communications job. And, you know, it’s administrative as well, too. So looking after all the, the money going in and out of the funds and documentation and stuff like that. So that’s what I do.

 

Will Bachman  26:25

What’s a common kind of inquiry that you get from from the clients?

 

Yuko Thomas  26:34

Ah, well, I’m, Well, luckily, the share price is up this year, which is unusual. So weirdly, it’s gotten quiet, because people tend to be much more proactive about getting in touch when the share price is down. But yeah, what do we get? You know, we pay a pretty good dividend, but people always want more of a dividend. They’ll say, Well, why, you know, we did have to cut our dividend at the beginning of 2020. During the first part of the pandemic, and you know, so we have shareholders get in touch and say, you know, I really, like the yield I was getting, you know, would be great to see the dividend go back up, or there’s questions about what’s in the portfolio. You know, we invest in a lot of fairly sophisticated assets. And so, you know, sometimes people have questions just about different parts of the portfolio, the assets that are in them. So I’m trying to understand, you know, why something performed? Well, or not so well, in a given quarter? Yeah, pretty standard stuff. And sometimes it’s just really boring administrative stuff. Like they need some numbers for their tax form. Can we provide that we do that, too. So

 

Will Bachman  28:01

let’s turn to the segment of the show where we talk about what courses or professors did you have at Harvard that continue to resonate with you that shaped your life in some way?

 

Yuko Thomas  28:13

Well, um, yeah, cuz I’m glad I listened to some of you. Because I was like, Oh, I’m not going to remember anyone’s name. So I didn’t think about that a little bit. Well, so I did history and literature of Britain broadly. But then I ended up writing my thesis about two mystery writers, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers. And I think what made that possible? Because I wouldn’t have when I came to Harvard, do you think do you think literature we’re talking about Shakespeare and, you know, James Joyce, and you know, all these sort of classical writers, I suppose. And it never occurred to me that I could write something academic about basically more like popular culture. And there was a class by a professor called Mark Dolan. He’s one of the few professors whose name I really do remember, and he ran a seminar course was a smaller course, which was basically about, like deconstructing detective fiction. And you know, and I think one of the reasons why I am an Anglo file is you know, my parents had every single Agatha Christie novel ever written. Yeah, in their house like, and they read constantly and they love mystery novels, though. I’m pretty sure that a lot of why I was so interested in in England and so yeah, that was a great the, you know, that people were willing to, you know, some at Harvard was willing to take a serious academic look at the popular culture. I think that’s much more common now, but I feel like Maybe back in the 90s that was less common. So I really enjoyed that. I loved Helen benders introductory English course. I still remember that. And I was just rereading the essay that she wrote about the importance of arts and education, which and I totally agree with her. I feel like that the arts have been very much have fallen out of fashion as it were. And, yeah, so I think those were the two main ones. I also do remember one history class I took, which I remember for the wrong reasons, because it was really boring. But fortunately, forgotten that professor’s name. So, but I do remember. Well, it stayed with me because I feel like it was such a missed opportunity. And it was, but I also feel bad that I didn’t have the confidence to, like, go to that professor’s office hours and say, I have no idea what you’re talking about. So

 

Will Bachman  31:09

that is a shame. Tell me what that is a shame from getting so intimate with Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie writing a thesis on it. Tell us something about detective novels that you learn from that whole process that you now have kind of a different perspective on detective novels than an ordinary smart person picking one up and just reading it

 

Yuko Thomas  31:32

for gosh, oh, I don’t know that I remember anything deep from it. I suppose it was just taking a more considered approach and just looking at the different devices, I suppose that mystery novels employ. Because, you know, the writer knows who done it, right. And it’s creating, I guess, there’s different narrative structures that are fooling the reader. And taking a deeper look at, at sort of maybe some of the techniques. I don’t remember the ins and outs of that, but I think we must have studied that, because that kind of stays with me. And now maybe, maybe someday I’ll write one, but But yeah, just sort of understanding those. And I remember also, there was very much the role of the sidekick, you know, like the, the Watson type character. That was, I think, something that we did talk about formally, because that was a very popular device, particularly in older detective novels where you always had, and I think, I think, if I recall that sidekick person is quite important in fooling the reader, right, because, you know, Watson’s kind of stupid he’s not. He’s not Holmes, right. So he’s, you know,

 

Will Bachman  32:59

he’s the standard.

 

Yuko Thomas  33:00

Well, yeah, exactly. Right. We’re all Watson. So it’s sort of like, oh, yeah, like, that’s the important clue. And then you kind of you’re taken in by that, right. And then it’s sort of like, no, no, no, no, no, you you’ve missed the important part of the puzzle all along. So I guess. Yeah, it was it was fun.

 

Will Bachman  33:20

What else besides now, outside of academics? What else if anything, in your experience at Harvard has really been important your life, either extracurriculars, or, or just sort of anything that you did while in school?

 

Yuko Thomas  33:36

While at Harvard? Yes. Um, well, you know, I do a bit of interviewing for Harvard sometimes. And I get asked, like, what extracurriculars did I do? And I feel embarrassed because I feel like I if I had it to do all over again, I would have done so much stuff. So you and I, at the reading, I remember we talked about the fact that I comped the crimson and ran away. Because I realized it wasn’t for me, that I wasn’t cut out to be a journalist. But to do that for a while, I did. I did work at the Institute of Politics. That was fun. So I was an usher at the form series of the IOP which

 

Will Bachman  34:16

got so many. Yeah, those things.

 

Yuko Thomas  34:19

I know, I think I mean, Jesse Jackson came to speak Mikhail Gorbachev book like I do, you know, just being able to be in the room. While that was happening. That was pretty cool. And I got paid for it. That seems insane. I worked on the Weidner library barcoding project.

 

Will Bachman  34:37

What’s that? Yeah. How did that work?

 

Yuko Thomas  34:39

Oh my god. So that was bringing Harvard into some kind of technologically advanced age, which involved literally sticking barcode stickers onto like millions of books.

 

Will Bachman  34:53

Okay, so how did that work? This is fascinating. So

 

Yuko Thomas  34:57

you would get you would get paired up with a buddy, because if you didn’t, you would probably fall asleep and get lost in the stacks. And no one would find you for 10 years. Like, yeah, they would literally say, okay, these are the stacks you’re working in today, they would send you a list. And they would give you like sheets of stickers. And I think your buddy had a one of us had like a log, I don’t know, I feel like we were working in pairs, but we had each had like something we were supposed to do, I guess it must have been, we were sticking the barcode on. So I think there must have been a list of titles. And then we would have a bunch of like two identical barcodes, and then one would go on the book and one would go on the list, I think of how it worked. So one of us would have the list. And the other one would actually stick the sticker on the book. So you would basically just be done with that looking for the titles and sticking the labels onto them. But it was kind of mindless in a good way. Like, you know, when you’re doing like a repetitive physical task, like, you know, ironing or mowing the lawn or something, it kind of frees your mind up because you don’t it doesn’t take too much mental energy to do that. But so you could kind of just have a chat with your buddy as well. So

 

Will Bachman  36:11

the most about me if I had no idea this was going on when we were students, I must have had an army. Think about how many books there are in Weidner and yeah, to undergraduates walking around for every single book.

 

Yuko Thomas  36:24

I must I did that, like sophomore junior year, there weren’t that many of us. I don’t know, I don’t remember how I found out about the job. But it was like, Well, that seems to be my books. They’re nearly the books. Yeah.

 

Will Bachman  36:39

And they probably had to go through and do the whole thing again, now to get those sort of RFID sort of scan. Oh, yeah, I’m sure in the books. Yeah. There’s a lot of books.

 

Yuko Thomas  36:51

I’m thinking back, I’m not sure that sticking stickers onto some, like 19th century book is a really great idea. But I don’t know.

 

Will Bachman  37:00

Well, you probably saw some just random books that maybe no one had opened since it was put on the shelf there.

 

Yuko Thomas  37:06

Yeah, I’m sure I don’t remember any of the title. I don’t even remember what section we were working in.

 

Will Bachman  37:12

All right, well, that seems actually kind of more fun than some campus jobs. Walking to the stacks of Weidner you go if folks wanted to connect with you, or just find out what you’re working on, or see your profile online, or reach out, what, what sort of online links or information would you like to provide for anybody who wanted to follow up with you?

 

Yuko Thomas  37:37

Well, I am on Facebook. So I am on the Harvard money to Facebook group. So you can find me to that. I don’t really have a website or anything, but I’m in LinkedIn as well. So I am. I am, I think also on the Harvard Club of the UK website, because I also volunteer there. So that’s another thing I do in my spare time is volunteer for the Harvard Club for UK. Crime. I think I might be on there as well. But yeah,

 

Will Bachman  38:13

okay. Well, we will include your LinkedIn profile link in the show notes if you want to connect with you. And thank you so much for joining today, listeners. If you go to 92 report.com. That’s nine, two report.com. You can find out about the latest episodes and sign up for the newsletter. We’ll let you know about the latest episode. You go thank you so much for joining. This was really fun hearing about your life in the UK.

 

Yuko Thomas  38:43

Thank you. Well, thanks for having me.