Are You There, God? I'm at Harvard

Why on earth are a bunch of successful midcareer professionals quitting their jobs and applying to Harvard Divinity School? Hint: It has nothing to do with heaven.

- NICOLE LAPORTE

In 2019 Jenn Louie was a high-level Facebook executive working on policy regarding disinformation and privacy. The social media company had just come off the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which tens of thousands of Facebook users' personal information was misused by digital consultants to the first Trump presidential campaign, and questions about the ethics governing Big Tech were front and center in Americans' minds.

Louie had joined Facebook after a decade working in Silicon Valley, feeling that the best way to solve a problem was to be on the inside of it. But now she felt conflicted. "I was going through a bit of burnout... I'd been doing tech policy for over 15 years, and I thought, If I'm doing my job well, I should be working myself out of a job," she says. "The world should become better." Instead, "I was trying to solve the same problems that I had started my career around. It was nice in some ways to be promoted, but I actually felt terrible." So she quit her job and applied to Harvard Divinity School.