The Tribune

By NICOLE BURROWS

EVERY month of this year, PolitiCole is using this space to rally Bahamians living abroad (starting in America), to find out their hopes and plans for their native Bahamaland. If you are a Bahamian living in the United States, please write in via email or Facebook to be interviewed.

NAME: Jason McSweeney

LENGTH OF TIME IN THE UNITED STATES

“I’ve been here in North Carolina from August 27, 1994. Almost 22 years... 21 plus; school from 1994 to 2000, and work from 2000 to now.”

BAHAMIAN IDENTITY

“I was born in The Bahamas to a Jamaican mother and a Bahamian father. You know there’s that policy for children of non-Bahamian mothers and Bahamian fathers that you take the citizenship of your mother until age 18 and then you can choose to apply for Bahamian citizenship if you want it. So, I was a Bahamian resident, a Jamaican citizen, after 18 became a Bahamian citizen, and then I went to college a few years later. I eventually became a US resident, and recently, a US citizen.”

FIELD OF WORK

“I work in technology, really in finance, but I’m on the tech side of finance. The team that I manage is officially responsible for ‘infrastructure application support and project delivery services’. It means that we provide support for every line of business for a major US bank. The service we provide is data consolidation, data enrichment, and data validation. Big data is the new age of technology.”

“We take information from multiple applications and consolidate the data in those applications, and then make it available for distribution. We also do some level of data validation and data cleansing. It’s important for us to know our clients so we can protect them and ourselves. From the bank’s perspective, you’ve got a lot of data. What I do allows me to consolidate your data footprint and expand it for you... in other words, over the entire life cycle of you being a customer, to better service you as a client, yes, but also to ensure that we know who our client is when it becomes necessary to report to regulatory agencies, for our security as well as the customers’ and the greater public’s.

COLLEGE EDUCATION

“I graduated from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Charlotte. I left Nassau, The College of The Bahamas (COB) with an associate’s degree in civil engineering. I came to UNC Charlotte to study civil engineering, did two years of prerequisites in math and physics. I stopped, and went to a community college to expand on my tech skills so I could get a job and pay for school. I stayed with that job at the bank in the interim, went back to school, which was paid for by the bank, and I completed my degree. I left the School of Engineering because it didn’t call me as much as it originally did. I got a math degree, with a minor in physics, went back to corporate America full time and continued working.”

RETURN TO

THE BAHAMAS

AFTER COLLEGE

“It wasn’t a very pretty experience. Because of my mind-set, I wanted to see how things were first, and I went back home over the summers and tried to interact with persons in the information technology space. I saw there were a number of global institutions in The Bahamas, but it was very difficult to get a foothold with contacts in those companies. You know, in the United States it’s fairly easy if you’re looking for jobs to find out where they are. You go online: Indeed, Monster, LinkedIn. In The Bahamas, it continues to be a situation where, unless you know someone who knows of an opportunity, it’s not as easy to get plugged in, especially remotely. Coming back home is a matter of faith; you give up everything you have and try to ascend the mountain for where your hopes and dreams will take you.

I reached out to folks, sat down and spoke with one person in particular about my qualifications at the time. I was responsible for small wealth management company acquisitions at the bank. My contact in The Bahamas was very forthcoming in terms of describing the (similar) work he was doing. His company wasn’t an international brand, so he had to ‘beg, borrow, and steal’ for opportunities. But he essentially said that, in order for me to work for him, he wouldn’t be able to pay me what I was making. I would have to start all over again. So I decided to continue looking around.

“As a young Bahamian, the mountain you have to overcome to be thought of as relevant is significant. Because you’re competing not just against established and offshore companies, but there’s that Bahamian mind-set that doesn’t line up with success, which you also have to overcome. Your capability should be the most relevant. There should be policies and processes that afford you the opportunity, regardless of where you come from. Ultimately, it wasn’t in my best interest to come back; I would have taken a significant loss in revenue to do so. My wife would have been willing to accompany me back, because at the time we didn’t have any kids yet, but it was the local mind-set that was a deterrent.

WHY THE DIFFERENCE IN SKILLS AND

REMUNERATION IN THE BAHAMAS

“The school system is a big part of the problem. Very few schools in the Bahamas stress those core STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills to develop a pipeline of students with the skill set necessary to go on to higher institutions, with advanced baseline skills. My son is in first grade and he’s doing communicative properties in math. What I did in grade seven, he’s doing in grade one. The sooner you start these advanced topics, the more able children are to adapt to a new point of emphasis as times change. Mind you, when we were in high school (St John’s), we had a chance to challenge the boundaries; I remember programming in seventh grade computer science class. But my son is doing that now... in his first grade.

“The Bahamas Ministry of Education should be trying to get STEM as the basis for education. Places like India, China, the Philippines, are doing it to elevate the education baseline of society to be more competitive abroad. Their large populations force them to do it. If they don’t, the strain on the country, society, and economy will cause their countries to go bankrupt... because the government can’t support everybody, at least not without the people trying to support themselves.

“Unfortunately, we do the minimum amount in The Bahamas. That is not how you survive or grow. The skills aren’t there. The value placed on the skills isn’t there. The money to pay for that value is not there. It’s the life cycle.

“We can’t give up on those who missed rudimentary reading, writing, and counting, but we definitely have to try to catch the kids early on. We could start a regional revolution that others would want to emulate, but it appears we don’t care. Losing that concern causes us to lose our humanity and our boundaries where we become more like animals, and then you end up with problems like an out of control murder rate.

DESIRE TO

RETURN HOME TO THE BAHAMAS

“I would love to move back to The Bahamas. It’s where I was born, what I know, what I love. My best memories are there. I want to make it a better place. I want my child to grow up there but it won’t happen. So I want to retire there; I want to teach there. When my son goes to college, I have to think about what I will focus on from that point forward. And I want to help elevate that educational baseline to a place where we’re competitive with the world in terms of being inventive and creating things the rest of the world consumes. Because that’s how you make it big in the world. Either you’ve got some natural resource like oil, or you are inventing things the world requires. Imagine if we created the cell phone. Or the next revolutionary tech gadget. The youth won’t have to struggle without a decent level of support from the system. The better the system, the better the life for the people. We need to create an environment for them to aspire to become better than they are.

GETTING FROM

HERE TO WHERE WE NEED TO BE

“It’s a collective achievement. Look at Elon Musk (a business magnate). People look at him and say he’s so weird. But think about the most inventive minds in the world; you (got to) be a little off the norm to be inventive. You have to move from the norms to the abstract possibilities. Elon Musk is almost doing it by himself, of course with the companies he created. He’s on every facet of the inventive scale. And he’s just one person.

“Imagine if we were to develop out of our soon to be 500,000 Bahamians, 5,000 who thought like that. We send them to every island and all they do every day is think that way. Imagine how that could affect our society. Every person is critical. Any child can become an Elon Musk. We need to try to spur this inventiveness in our kids with programs and the opportunities to grow and not tell them “when I was a kid, we didn’t do it like that”.

(While PolitiCole is interviewing Jason, his son comes over with a gaming problem, and Jason reveals how the game he thinks he’s playing is actually a math problem. Jason volunteers every Monday morning at his son’s class for 1 and a half hours, and his wife - of American origin - does the same on Thursdays.)

COMPARING POLITICS IN THE BAHAMAS

“Both major parties are the same – PLP and FNM. They’re rooted in the same past. Maybe, initially, they had different ideals, but at the end of it all they’re not making a dent in the social and economic progress of The Bahamas. Really, we need a new form of thinking to deal with the challenges the country and people have to overcome. We should be more about solutions than we are about differences. No one wants to inherit an economic or a social system that is failing or is a failure.

BAHAMIAN

LEADERSHIP

“We need a strong, educated leader, someone capable of bridging gaps between people. The leader doesn’t necessarily have to have all the answers. The leader just needs to know how to find the answers and who to engage to get the answers. A leader’s job is to be a motivator, not to crack a whip. Leaders ask: ‘How do we do this together?’ You can be an authoritative leader, for example, on crime, if you have a real solution, but we don’t need that across the board. The command style works for the military. Outside of that realm, it’s about open collaboration. Our leader must be capable of identifying people with appropriate skills, putting them in positions where they are most likely to succeed, and giving them the tools to ensure their success in those roles. That’s the leader we need.”

• Send emails to

nburrows@tribunemedia.net