🚧 Last updated in Summer 2021.
Find me @ThomasDGarnier / thomasgarnier.fr / [email protected]
So after two years serendipitously living around Europe (🇫🇷🇸🇪🇳🇱🇧🇪) and visiting ~15 countries, deepening my views about cultures, people, and workplaces, I moved to Vienna 🇦🇹 a year ago, thanks to the Erasmus Young Entrepreneur program to incubate my business project by collaborating with a locally established entrepreneur.
In the meantime, I've pursued a personalized Master's degree that I remotely crafted with the help of top universities worldwide; mostly around Ethics and its links to Sustainability, with a generous focus on Privacy.
In fact, when I was studying in Utrecht 🇳🇱, I wrote a short thesis draft (available on request) on Ethical Marketing in the Era of Online Privacy Concerns. Meeting Carole Cadwalladr in Edinburgh at TED pushed further my thinking on the impacts I want to have on the World. Diving myself into this Gap Year of Applied Learning — as I like to call it — thus provides me with an amazing opportunity: polymathically gaining state of the art academic knowledge, whilst finding ways to aggregate those expertises together professionally.
It means every morning I studied online one of the courses I curated for the semester from unis like Stanford, London Business School, Yale or Amsterdam. At the end of each course (after the exam), I got an official certificate from those universities signed by the lecturers there. I would go to the main library of the University of Vienna to feel like a local student 😇.
Here are the courses I followed for the Fall semester:
And for the Spring period:
Update on Jan. 4: I was also accepted to the 2021 edition of the twelve-week long #CopyrightX course offered at Harvard Law School by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The course explores the current law of copyright; the impact of that law on art, entertainment, and industry; and the ongoing debates concerning how the law should be reformed. Divided into sections of 25 students, taught by William Fisher and a Harvard Teaching Fellow. Update on May 24: I PASSED THE EXAM WITH HONORS!! 🎉
Update on July 16: I was lucky enough to get a scholarship for a summer school to explore Psychology in Economics at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg 🇩🇪 where I got to deep-dive into how those two areas of research interact and can help understand human behaviours in times of global challenges. The two weeks were fantastic and I passed the exam with an A grade (1,3) as well.
In the afternoons (for the Erasmus Young Entrepreneur part), I worked with a company called SuperSocial.at, a consultancy agency focused on the SDGs and social impact that works with NGOs, UN & EU institutions. I mainly supported as a content strategist, using a wide-ranging set of knowledge and skills to manage and implement communication projects. I collaborated with SuperSocial's CEO: Mathias Haas on a daily basis. He's helped me iterate and test my business idea: a communication agency that leverages the latest research to spark SDG-related action with high ethical standards.
The company is now launched, say hi to 367ppm!
My work with SuperSocial included collaborations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Austrian National TV Broadcaster (ORF1), the ERSTE Bank Foundation & the Vienna University of Economics and Business (through the NGO Academy), and Worm Systems.