Operating with Openness and Spirit — Alumni Profile, Shazi Lyle ’15

Shazi Lyle ’15 taught me about birth control. The lesson was on a basketball court shaded by pine trees, during a slow, middle-school summer. Shazi was a legendary counselor at my all-girls sleepaway camp, known for being the editor of the camp newspaper, the drama counselor, and for her incomparable outfits at the annual Disco Social.

Between improv games, Shazi found time on certain Sunday afternoons to host her famous “Things You Should Know” sessions, open only to older campers — which is how I found myself on the basketball court that day. The talk covered a range of topics, from sexual health, to gender identity, to navigating high school, after which Shazi and other counselors fielded questions. It was a non-judgemental place to learn — and it wouldn’t have been possible without Shazi’s vivacious energy and openness.

This verve for learning has guided Shazi’s journey from her childhood in Brooklyn to her experience at Amherst, and now throughout her career, in which she’s followed a passion for operations and sexual health.

A Focus on Education

When she was a child, Shazi’s mother ran a preschool out of their Brooklyn apartment, which she described as “super foundational.” Throughout her life, her parents taught her to prioritize education “before anything else.”

When she was in third grade, Shazi’s parents heard about Prep for Prep, a rigorous educational program for students of color that “prepares them for success” at private secondary schools, in the organization’s words. She eventually attended Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn beginning in seventh grade.

When it came time to apply for college, her college counselor from Prep for Prep recommended Amherst for its open curriculum and strong programs in theater and psychology — Shazi’s prospective majors, in line with her goal of becoming a therapist. Shazi said it didn’t hurt that purple was her favorite color.

She visited Amherst on a trip with Prep for Prep and recalled hearing from students of color in an informal session in the Octagon, where the students spoke openly and frankly about their Amherst experiences.

“I don’t know how they pulled it together, but it felt like they gathered every student of color to greet us,” she said. “From the onset, everything sounded golden … I got in and that was, like, the happiest day of my life. I still have my packet somewhere.”

Shazi moved into college on her birthday, which was also the day of Hurricane Irene — she recalled that then-President Biddy Martin dubbed her year “the class of Irene.”

Immediately, she “loved everything about being in college,” she said. “I was obsessed with it.”

Shazi quickly realized that she didn’t, in fact, want to major in psychology or theater. After her first year, she declared English and Sexuality, Women’s, and Gender Studies (SWAGS).

In those majors, “I learned so many things that I still reference today,” she said, mentioning the research and data analysis experience she gained in SWAGS alongside the content she got to explore.

“I definitely took a lot of classes with queer professors and around queer identity, and that made everything even better,” she said, referencing courses she took with Eliza J. Clark Folger Professor of English Judith Frank.

When not in study sessions or Vampire Diaries marathons, Shazi was also involved in Women of Amherst, a group that held discussions about women’s experiences on campus, sexual wellness, and gender-based violence. In the latter half of the year, the organization turned into a performance group, putting these discussions into practice with their own rendition of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” using some of Ensler’s pieces as well as their own.

Shazi reflected that Women of Amherst showed her the importance of “a forum where people can just be like … ‘I am identifying as a woman and this is what that means to me,’ … [and it] was welcoming to anyone,” an experience that impacted her future roles as a facilitator at camp and in her career.

She wore a few other hats on campus, including a brief stint working at Val in her freshman year.

“The role that they assigned me was I was cleaning the … larger cooking ware, and I was the size of some of the pots that they use for sauces, so I was like … in it,” she remembered.

Camp Connections

Throughout Amherst, Shazi returned to sleepaway camp in the summers to work as a counselor. She’d been attending camp since she was a young teenager. “I don’t know what it was about camp … but I felt the most free to be myself [there],” she said, “Camp is really where I stepped into my own.”

During her summers as a counselor, Shazi began to offer “Things You Should Know” sessions when she found the sexual education options at camp lacking in nuance and positivity.

“We spent nights … thinking of every possible way … to be informative and let them know that … questions are welcomed and real,” she recalled, “and so we got really real with them about our experiences … We were using as many resources as we could to guide these conversations.”

“That was a huge game-changer for me in terms of what I thought of myself as a leader, and what I thought of myself as capable of,” she said.

When she graduated from Amherst, Shazi didn’t have a specific idea of her career goals, but, in her words, “was very much like, ‘Well, I know what I’ll do for the summers.’”

Postgrad Pathway

Upon returning to New York, Shazi was excited to get a job as a bookseller at Barnes & Noble — or so she thought. It turned out that the job was actually working at a Starbucks within the bookstore, which she found less fulfilling.

“I think everyone should have a customer service job where they’re face to face with the customer,” she said, “But I was like ‘I don’t want to be here for a very long time.’”

She then moved to a job at a healthcare startup, working in member services. While she enjoyed helping people navigate the healthcare system, it proved to be a less-than-ideal work environment.

“That was my beginning of working in startups and figuring out that culture,” she said. “We had so many on-the-job perks to kind of sell it … because the work itself was so difficult.”

On the phone each day, Shazi found herself face to face with “well placed frustration” for the injustices of the healthcare system. While the company could “gloss things up really easily,” it wasn’t solving bigger problems.

This, combined with a series of bad working conditions, pay issues, and growing layoffs, led Shazi to leave the company.

She looked to next steps. First, of course, Shazi went back to camp — and has continued to do so whenever she can. She also worked as a substitute teacher (including in my eighth grade math class) and tutor, but found that teaching wasn’t for her.

While searching for jobs late at night, Shazi stumbled upon an opening at Unbound, a sexual wellness startup.

“I applied at like, three in the morning because I thought I was having a fever dream when I was reading the job description,” she recalled, “It was like, ‘Do you want to talk about sexual wellness with people?’ … And one of the prescreening questions was, ‘How would you describe a vibrator to your grandma?’”

Unbound was looking for someone to work in customer experience, which Shazi had enjoyed in past jobs. “I love getting people from point A to point B,” she said.

It was a perfect fit. She was hired at the end of the interview.

She joined the small team at Unbound, which at the time was selling mostly third party products; now, they’ve shifted to selling their own products like vibrators, lube, and wearable sex toys.

In Shazi’s description, the company “is really about being as inclusive and positively radical about your sexual health as possible, embracing all of the weird, awkward questions that actually aren’t weird and awkward — they just feel like that because no one is talking about them.”

To me, it sounds quite a bit like the Things You Should Know sessions on the basketball courts — but a little more grown up.

“It was just really new to me to be able to be so frank about pleasure,” she said, “Even in college, pleasure wasn’t in the conversation … there was always a very clinical approach [to sexuality] … it’s used so often as a weapon against people or a way to divide, but it’s fun. We should have more fun with this.”

Over time, Shazi’s role at Unbound shifted from customer experience associate to Senior Operations Manager, and then the Director of Supply Chain, focusing on the life cycle of Unbound products.

It was an unexpected turn, but Shazi said “it was fascinating work” that brought exciting endeavors.

She found herself sawing apart vibrators to make sure their battery life was secure. As she took charge of shipping, she navigated laws in certain U.S. states where it’s illegal to have more than a certain number of vibrators — and laws in some countries where it’s illegal to have them at all.

She expressed gratitude for all her experiences at Unbound. “It’s been really fun to … be on the ground floor of something so meaningful.”

Looking Forward and Back

Shazi left Unbound earlier this year and now, still in New York, runs her own operations consultancy as she continues to seek out new opportunities. She’s consulting for other sexual wellness companies and putting her operations and supply chain skills to use.

“I would love to stay in sexual wellness … [and] operations,” she said, “My time at Unbound taught me that operations is pretty much my bread and butter. I just love organizing and being able to tell a story through data.”

As our interview came to an end, I asked Shazi for some advice — as I have many times since I was 11. This time not just for myself, but for all Amherst students.

“It sounds so generic, but find your community, whether that is you making one that doesn’t exist currently on campus for an affinity group or an interest, or it’s like you have a group of friends that you deeply love and trust,” she said. “Invest in that … Make that a priority every day. Because when you graduate … having those people to convene with, to talk to, to just laugh with, that is really the essence of life.”