Engineering, liberal arts opened a world of opportunities for this alumnus
Chadwick Eason applies a global mindset to the problems he solves each day.
Eason’s office at Samsung Electronics world headquarters in Suwon, South Korea is about 11,000 miles from the South American markets where some of his colleagues operate.
As a project manager at one of the world’s largest electronics and appliance companies, Eason, A.B. ’13, a mechanical and materials sciences and engineering concentrator at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), oversees HQ’s development and distribution of social media marketing video content throughout Latin America. He also manages the company’s global social media optimization tool.
“In social media, customers can get bored of your brand in an instant,” he said. “If your company cannot produce uniquely compelling content and also maintain a consistent brand image, consumers will lose sight of what your brand is. It is hard to get it right, but to be able to help Samsung’s offices around the world walk that fine line is very rewarding.”
At Samsung, Eason oversees HQ’s development and distribution of social media marketing video content throughout Latin America. He also manages the company’s global social media optimization tool. (Photo provided by Chadwick Eason.)
Eason, whose interest in engineering was sparked during grade school, never expected to pursue a marketing career. From a young age, the native Virginian had a fascination for the history and diversity of Asian cultures, which only strengthened when he began studying Japanese at Harvard. As his interest in Asia deepened, he sought opportunities to study and work abroad.
He traveled to Shanghai after his freshman year for a renewable energy conference, and then returned to China the next summer to complete an internship at an IT company.
After declaring a secondary concentration in East Asian studies during his junior year, Eason took off for Japan, where he worked with a program launched by classmates, called HLAB, in which American university students taught liberal arts-style courses to Japanese high school students to showcase the power of creative vision.
Eason taught an electrical engineering seminar—his students tore open a Nintendo Game Boy Color and PlayStation Portable to study the circuitry inside some of their famous gaming devices. With those lessons, he sought to make electrical engineering more relatable.
“It felt good to be able to foster creativity in that environment, especially by applying the skills I’d developed through my engineering training,” he said. “That gave me the confidence to dive deeper into pursuing a career in East Asia.”
Everything fell into place for Eason when he landed a post-graduation internship at Samsung, working on the printing division product planning team. He continued to work closely with engineers in R&D, as well as marketers, when he took on a permanent printing solutions role.
As he incorporated engineering principles into product planning, Eason felt drawn toward the unique challenges of marketing and content creation. He wanted to apply his leadership skills by working with external partners, so he jumped at the opportunity to manage part of Samsung’s global social media marketing and content creation initiatives.
In that role, he draws on the creativity and collaborative skills he honed through hands-on SEAS courses as he develops content for a constantly evolving audience. Among Eason’s recent successes is a series of dynamic product videos that mimic Samsung’s 360-degree cameras to offer fresh perspectives on how customers can interact with appliances.
The Latin American markets he serves and the North American agencies he manages are geographically and culturally worlds apart from the corporate offices in South Korea, which requires Eason to constantly balance customer needs and organizational goals.
“Samsung is such a large corporation—the campus where I work in Korea has over 30,000 employees alone. Fostering effective collaborations with people on campus and on a global scale, on so many different projects, is the biggest challenge I face,” he said.
Eason enjoys the unique challenges of working for a large, multinational company. Samsung was founded more than 70 years ago. (Photo provided by Chadwick Eason.)
But Eason enjoys serving a global customer base, and working for a firm that is at the cutting edge of the electronics and appliance markets. The challenging mechanical engineering curriculum at SEAS gave him a sense of humility and helped him conquer his fear of asking questions. He advises current students to buckle down and study hard, while keeping one eye fixed on enriching opportunities that may appear on the horizon.
“Your life is not going to be limited to just one subject, no matter how entrenched you think you are in that single area,” he said. “Take advantage of the opportunity to learn and experience different things; those experiences gave me the means to combine different ideas and apply them to my life.”