Zeb: Eventually, I just decided, partly because of my wife, she was going to a coding boot camp at the same time, and the work actually seemed really interesting and different, and perhaps most enticingly of all, it was really stable. There was a lot of hiring, and I liked the idea of just having a normal 40 hour a week job where I didn't constantly have to hustle clients, or look for contracts, or adjunct positions.
Zeb: And then I could sort of pursue the other stuff that I was also really passionate about on the side, which is Basically what I do
Matt: today. Hey folks and welcome to the grad school sucks podcast. I'm dr Matt Carlson your host of the show for grad students and academics who want to get a career in Industry today.
Matt: I've got a very exciting episode for you Today, I am interviewing software engineer, Dr. Zeb Larson. Zeb got his PhD in history before taking his career over to the software space. And in our conversation, we cover a range of topics, including his experiences freelancing in the curriculum development field, The benefits and dynamics of being in a coding bootcamp, how to find a great job after getting a humanities degree and the role of informational interviews in reinventing your career.
Matt: I think you're going to get a lot out of today's episode and be sure to click the links in the description of this episode to find Zeb Larson's LinkedIn page, as well as links to three of his articles that have been published. On Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle, which are about grad school and life after grad school.
Matt: Anyway, let's jump into the interview. I'll see you on the other side. Dr. Zev Larson, thank you so much for joining me. Uh, for those listening at home, Zev is now a software engineer and he got his PhD in history. And you continue to do some writing as well for places like Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed.
Matt: And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast and chatting with me.
Zeb: Thank you so much for having me on. It's my pleasure to be here.
Matt: So first things first, was there anything about your, the introduction that you want to add to give folks a bigger
Zeb: picture? I'd say that's accurate. I, so my background is as a historian.
Zeb: I graduated in 2019. I'd been doing all tech job applications and academic job applications concurrently prior to graduation, continued for a year, and then decided I wanted to go in a completely different track and become a software developer, which is what I'm still doing today. Yeah, that's great. The shortest version
Matt: of it.
Matt: And we got connected on It may have happened on Instagram initially, but then on LinkedIn, is LinkedIn where you would suggest people to connect with you if they want to follow along?
Zeb: I would say so, partly because on Instagram, I mostly just use it for fun, so I don't screen connection requests very carefully.
Zeb: And on LinkedIn, I mean, I, if, if, if it, if it's not complete spam, I respond very quickly. Absolutely. Yeah. If people want to connect, I'd love to connect
Matt: on there. Okay, great. Well, I'll have a link to your. Uh, LinkedIn account in the description of this episode. So if you're listening, you can scroll down and click on that.
Matt: So let's get started. Can you tell me what is it like to be a software engineer? What does a software engineer do? Actually, let's start there.
Zeb: That's a huge one. There are actually a lot of different things software engineers do. So in my capacity, I'm, I'm what they call a backend engineer. I work on applications as they most closely talk to our database.
Zeb: So in my current role, my team is responsible for document generation. And we have a WCF service. And you don't need to know what that acronym stands for. Half the time I can't remember either. But it, it, it talks to another application. And based on inputs that it gets, it processes a file that can be turned into a document.
Zeb: You know, it supplies all the inputs you would need to create it and apply it to a template. But there are lots of different software developers. So there are some people who just manage databases. They actually have to have a pretty, I think, firm grasp of computer science because you need to understand computational times.
Zeb: There are front end software developers, so if you go to a website, if you go to LinkedIn, hypothetically, you know, there are front end developers who manage that and sort of regulate the flow of information from the back end and package it so it can be presented on the front end. In a given day, I probably spend...
Zeb: 20 to 30 percent of my day actually coding and then the remainder either in meetings following up on requirements for something You know lots of times somebody gives you something, but then you actually have to figure out how to translate it into effective and workable code So I I spend a fair amount of my time having to do that and then sort of also keeping track of work That's coming down My team is lean at the moment.
Zeb: We have exactly six people on. So we just sort of take turns punching up different cards, technically in taking incoming work from stakeholders and then dealing with bugs because there are always bugs. There's always so many more bugs than you think there will be. Yeah,
Matt: that's funny. You say that I, so I currently work as a healthcare data analyst and I also spend the minority of my time coding and I spend more time cleaning data than anything else.
Matt: Fixing errors, you know, troubleshooting things. Yeah, that's interesting. And so you've been doing software development for, is it two years? Is that right?
Zeb: It's going to be three this fall, but yeah. So I went to a coding bootcamp. I started in, what is it? May of 2020. So right as COVID was just fully, you know, really taking over.
Zeb: And I had a job by September of 2020. Okay. And I have been at the same company ever since.
Matt: Very cool. So then let, let's jump back to that. Excuse me. So I know you. You went to get your PhD in history, and you became a lecturer, which, if I remember correctly, you did for about a year. That's right. So, can you tell me a little bit about the transition from, you got your PhD, then did a lecture, then to, I think you did some writing, but also, what am I going to do next?
Matt: That story.
Zeb: That's, happy to, and My journey here is a bit circuitous, but I think a lot of people who transition away from academia, their roots are circuitous. I actually started doing curriculum development about halfway through my PhD, which technically I wasn't supposed to. Like many of us, there are, there are requirements in grad school that I not take outside work, but I ignored them because I'm a bad kid.
Zeb: And I started doing that work. Yeah, about halfway through initially just to sort of pad my research budgets. But the more time I spent working in that sector, what I found was like, I was making enough money doing it and it was well paying enough that it wasn't really for my research budget anymore It was actually sort of starting to affect my standard of living Very positively, you know, finally not just subsisting on a grad student stipend And that was really sort of the beginning of me starting to think really seriously about I should have a strong plan A, and, and academia is kind of my plan B.
Zeb: Uh, there, there are limitations to, uh, trying to do that on a freelance basis, and I sort of only learned those lessons after the fact. Um, for one thing, if you work in a given, given subject area, uh, the work is cyclical. The way that school districts and schools and educational companies, uh, sort of...
Zeb: generate content is like every few years, so Uh 2019 was an awful year for me doing curriculum development work Which is partly why I was thinking about doing software development 2020. I had a lot of work actually I made Even in the, even during the height of the pandemic, I still had work offers just rolling in regularly.
Zeb: There, there were free, there were full time opportunities. I looked at there. What I found was that it's a very competitive sector and they like to hire K 12 teachers. And even with my experience there, breaking in was tough. And eventually I just decided, partly because of my wife, she was going to a coding bootcamp at the same time.
Zeb: And. The work actually seemed really interesting and different and perhaps most enticingly of all, it was really stable. Yeah. There was a lot of hiring and I liked the idea of just having a normal 40 hour a week job where I didn't constantly have to hustle clients or look for contracts or adjunct positions.
Zeb: And then I could sort of pursue the other stuff that I was also really passionate about on the side, which is basically what I do today.
Matt: And so curriculum development, who were you developing curriculum
Zeb: for? Initially it was just one company and they reached out to me. And my life might have gone in a very different direction if they hadn't cold emailed me.
Zeb: It's this company called Wisewire, and I'm happy to talk about Wisewire to any listeners that are interested. They do all, basically all subject matter. every grade band from kindergarten through university, but sort of most concentrated middle school and high school. Then I started finding about, about other companies in part because I made a few good impressions with project managers.
Zeb: And when that happens, they like to bring you on for other stuff because if you're reliable. They want reliable freelancers, right? Uh, so now, you know, i'm doing some work for a company called six red marbles Um editing assessments. I like editing work now because it it's a little bit easier with a full time job Sitting down finding time to write can be tricky when you already work full time, but editing is a little bit More forgiving that way, I think.
Zeb: I'm trying to think of other companies I've worked for. There are probably four or five that I have in sort of a wheelhouse, and at any given moment I might have one or two offers from them, and now that I've done it for a few years they just kind of roll into me, and because I'm not depending, like I don't, I don't need the money.
Zeb: I like having it because money is very nice to have. You know, I just sort of passively let it every, every six months I might check in and say, Hey, is anything on the horizon, but mostly to just plan my schedule more than anything. Yeah,
Matt: absolutely. So what, can you tell me a little bit about the bootcamp that you jumped into?
Matt: What was that like?
Zeb: Yeah, great question. It's called Tech Elevator. And they actually have, I say, I mentioned their name, a, they have multiple campuses in different cities, but also they have a national live remote campus, which Funnily enough, my sister and my brother in law have both gone through and then also gotten jobs.
Zeb: So at this point, I'm kind of an evangelist for it. I do think that it works. Their shtick is this, and the curriculum changes a little bit with every cohort because they're always trying to improve on it. Which is best practices, but it was 13 weeks long. You pay to take it. And it's a mix of sort of nuts and bolts, computer science.
Zeb: This is how an object oriented programming language works. This is how a database works. This is what an API is, and this is how you do front end design. The idea being that you. come out of it prepared to be what we call in the industry a full stack developer. You can do a little bit of everything. That was, I'm trying to think about how much work that was.
Zeb: I actually feel like out of all the things that were difficult about it, the workload was the easiest. I mean, if you've done a PhD, you're really used to just like sitting and going in a problem until you solve it. That, that part wasn't bad. The professionalization aspects of it were difficult just because.
Zeb: I had been so socialized by grad school, right? And the tech works differently. You need a LinkedIn. You need a well populated LinkedIn. You need a one page resume. You know, you don't send, and I, I knew this already, but I didn't, I didn't have one for tech. You know, you don't send your CV out when you're applying for jobs in most cases.
Zeb: In fact, that's really just kind of a no no. And then, but that, that paid off because in the course of professionalizing at a networking event, I met a manager at a company who hired me, and that's where I am today. So, TechElevator did a lot to sort of try to set people up for success, and that, that worked well for me, and actually somebody else from my grad program who did it, I think, not the next cohort, but the one after, he and I sort of talked about it, and he did the same thing, and he got a job too.
Matt: Do you think tech bootcamps like that are something that grad students should look to if they want to break into
Zeb: tech? I think so. It depends. I mean, so I'm coming from a humanities background, right? I knew literally nothing about software engineering before I broke into that. I saw what my wife had done, and I sort of got to pick up on little bits and pieces of what she worked on, but I would be lying if I said I...
Zeb: Walked away from that understanding really what the work was. So if, yeah, if you don't have any real background and you're thinking about tech, it's useful also because I mean, there are even other careers in tech, like working in quality assurance, where having a, having some kind of software engineering background would be useful.
Zeb: And I, I'm fully confident that anybody who has a PhD could do that work quite ably. You would just sort of need to be trained on, how do I put it, both the hard skills and also sort of the soft skills and shibboleths of that industry. The downside is, I mean, I, Not all bootcamps are created equal, so you would really want to do your homework on what are the actual placement rates of this, how much do they professionalize, again, that really helped me having to learn the lingo of what it meant to be a software developer, so that I wasn't just talking like an academic or a writer, because...
Zeb: I mean, those, those were a part of me, but I don't think that's why I got my job, if you know what I mean. Yeah, absolutely.
Matt: So, I'm curious now, if we were to go back a little bit more, when in your PhD did you start thinking, because I assume you were wanting to become an academic, is that correct? Okay.
Matt: That's correct. When, when did that... When did either the desire or like you seeing the likelihood or chance of it happening? When did that start changing for you
Zeb: pretty early on? So I always wanted to be an academic and I mean really up until 2019 like if I had gotten an academic job and it It wasn't a terrible job.
Zeb: I was starting to get kind of picky, but if, if a reasonably good job had come along, I would have taken it. I think though, early in the process, it just became obvious, and this would have been about 2014, 2015 for me, job placement numbers were not recovering from the great recession, which was starting to make me very, very nervous.
Zeb: Like when I, when I started in my master's program in 2011. Yeah, there weren't very many jobs in history, but the recession had just been a couple years ago. It didn't I kind of could rationalize, and the people around me could rationalize, things will get better. And then, three or four years later, they weren't getting better, and they've never really gotten better.
Zeb: And this is one of those things that I always I, I drive home, I think, in my own writing about higher ed is if you actually study this industry from a macro level, it's just not very healthy and there's no reason to think in the short term that it's going to get any healthier. So that, that was one part of it.
Zeb: Another was that. Especially after I started doing curriculum development work, I sort of appreciated that I could do other things. I think there's a narrative, and perhaps it's stronger among humanities individuals, but maybe not. I don't know. We're really good at being academics, but also that's kind of all we're good at.
Zeb: I think there's sort of a narrative of self loathing that takes root over time, and well, this is the one thing I'm good at, so I've got to stick with it. And by going out and doing something else, even though it never became a full time career for me, I could appreciate that. That's not necessarily true as it turns out.
Zeb: I'm also good at this other thing and it it pays Pretty well. I could imagine myself doing this. I don't know. I don't know that this would be a bad life Yeah, I'd say those were two. I would have been pretty early in my process and I would also just add to that seeing all the negativity around around searching for other careers actually sort of turned me off of grad school over time.
Zeb: I mean, I, I don't, I think everybody has a different experience this way, but I saw sort of a lot of quiet poo pooing of the idea that you would want to do something other than get an academic job, and that actually sort of made me more resistant to wanting one over time. Maybe that doesn't happen to other people, but it made me suspicious of people who were pushing that message.
Matt: Yeah, that's interesting. So I want to jump into some of the writing you've been doing before we get there. Could you tell me a little bit about like the lifestyle or maybe the salary range that people could, if they went into curriculum development yet, or if they went into like software development, they could get.
Zeb: Yeah, happily. So I can, I can speak about that from a couple of different tracks, working freelance, doing curriculum development. I have a sort of rule for myself, and I've had this since probably about 2018, that I don't really take work if the pay doesn't average out to about 50 an hour. Now, working as a freelancer and as an adjunct, there were times that I took work for less than 50 an hour because I felt like I needed the money.
Zeb: Now, I just kind of refuse to. My time is at a premium, so I sort of expect to be Especially because I'm coming in with a certain amount of expertise that you should pay for on the full time tracks You know, I've never had one of those jobs But the people that I talk to you know people who work as editorial directors or full time writers 60 or 70, 000 really is not unusual As a software developer, I mean, the salary band in that industry has gone up so tremendously, even in the last few years.
Zeb: Like when I started at my current company, I was actually starting in a QA position and I started at 70, 000 a year. And I had two or three pay raises in that first year. And then I became a software engineer in, let's see, that would have been August of 2021. And that raised my pay to 86, 000, I think. It's very normal in that industry to accumulate raises pretty quickly.
Zeb: I don't know, my wife has had a pretty parallel experience that way. I don't know that that's exactly typical, but it does happen. So you, I mean, comfortably, I, I would be suspicious of wanting to work for a company for anything less than 55, 000. I would be wondering why they would be paying you so little.
Zeb: Yeah.
Matt: So one thing I just thought of was, so there's been a lot of tech layoffs being done in the past six months and you know, it's become, I see a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, people talking about, you know, they never expected to get a pink slip or whatever and they got one. What is your view on, I guess one, are you concerned at all that for yourself?
Matt: And then what is your view on how important is job stability
Zeb: in your overall career? Great question. So, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about myself. I think it would be just the height of arrogance to think, well, they'll never let me off. I'm indispensable because, I mean, my personal motto is, nobody is actually indispensable.
Zeb: You always have to go through life sort of prepared for the possibility that that could happen. Here's what I'll say about tech. At the moment, it's unstable. Companies are laying off. They have been for a few months now. Most software engineers are a little nervous about it. I think the long run is that it recovers kind of the same that it did after 2008, kind of the same that it did after, after the dot com crash.
Zeb: And from, not that you have tenure in this industry, you know, again, here's an example. Somebody I worked with, he'd been with the company for 19 years. He had a fairly high up position as a systems architect and he was laid off. I mean, as I don't know that anybody's indispensable, but he actually, I think, came pretty close to being indispensable.
Zeb: That being said, he had a job a month later. So, and, and our skills, I just don't think are going to go permanently in decline, at least, Not in the short to medium term future. So it's, my job is stable in the sense that the career track I'm in, I feel like, is fairly stable. My company could lay me off, but I also think I could ultimately find work again fairly quickly, whereas if I was an, if I was an assistant professor who didn't get tenure, I would be deeply skeptical that I would ever get a job like that again.
Zeb: I mean, I, I think statistically we know that that wouldn't happen. So. So let's
Matt: jump into some of your writing. So I know, I know you've been writing at some of these places like the Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed. What have you been writing about? Do you have favorite pieces you want to talk about? Etc.
Zeb: Yeah, so, and, and I do, I mean, I also write, I write about politics, I write for Teen Vogue, I write a, I write about food history sometimes just because I, I don't know, I'm kind of a foodie, but, but writing about higher ed became sort of a thing.
Zeb: I, I started doing, this would have been in like 2018, I think, because I was really concerned over how poorly it seemed many humanities, PhDs were being prepared for And it's funny to me because there's a lot of rhetoric around, Oh, career diversity is really important. Oh, you know, people with a history PhD can go out and do anything.
Zeb: And I, it's not that I think that we can't go out and do anything, but I don't think we're necessarily well equipped to go out and do everything in the world. So I think the piece that I'm, I keep coming back to and I keep sort of, I, I probably shouldn't agree too much with my own analysis, but one that I like, uh, there's a real problem, I think, in academia, also to an extent, sort of in the all tech, uh, career industry of, um, an over reliance on anecdotal data, you know, I think most people's career advising in grad school coming from a faculty member is very narrowly rooted in that person's experience.
Zeb: Anecdotal experiences of how they got a job. And I think that's a problem for lots of reasons. They confronted a fundamentally different job market in most cases. Not that theirs wasn't bad. I think, I think hiring to be a professor has always been kind of terrible. Unless you got your job in 1965. Which case...
Zeb: Congrats, but I don't know that you have much to contribute to this particular conversation. I would also say, you know, as little as they know about that, they know even less, typically, about careers outside of academia. So, that's part of what disincentivizes them from talking about it, but I also hear, I heard this, Over and over again when I was at Ohio State that, well, if things don't work out, you can get a job at an archive.
Zeb: That's really not true. It's not true for lots of reasons, because most of the industries that humanities PhD students go, they're also really competitive. Lots of people want to work as a, as an academic librarian, or in a museum, or for a non profit, and the reality is those industries are contracting, uh, fiscally.
Zeb: They already have a lot of people who want to work in them. And on top of that, most of them are already in degree programs that specifically train them to do those jobs. So, and I, I think about how this applies where I'm going sort of with this is, I would urge grad students whenever they're thinking about anything career related to try to study it from that macro level and not just rely on one person who got a job or what worked for one person either in a faculty position or outside of academia just because I think you, you really bump up against the limits of survivorship bias very, very quickly.
Matt: Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If there was like one or two, maybe three articles of yours that you've written that you think grad students should check out, I can put links in the description if that would be helpful, too.
Zeb: That might be, yeah. I would say, yeah, that piece on On anecdotal advice, and partly because I want to send that to every advisor in the world, uh, to encourage them to stop doing it, because I, I don't think it's productive for faculty jobs, I don't think it's productive for, for non academic jobs, I, I, you know, we really need to rethink that.
Zeb: That would be one. There was a provocative piece I wrote that we ought to get rid of requirements that grad students can't have outside employment when they're in grad school. I actually accept there are some legitimate criticisms of this, but I, I think, What I found trying to find a non academic career was one of the biggest hurdles.
Zeb: Relatively little experience outside of academia. And, and hard experience and hard skills are the biggest currency that you can have in a resume. References certainly don't hurt you as well. And if your only experience is working in academia, especially on the humanities, that really limits you. It, it just makes it so much harder to convince somebody to take a chance.
Zeb: And perhaps as a third piece, there was something that I wrote, was it last summer, for the Chronicle about an attempt to, by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to, uh, sort of create curricular reform for grad students. And the reason I'm interested in that is, A, I'm always trying to keep track of what's going on right now.
Zeb: Are departments actually taking meaningful steps to better prepare students, or is it... Kind of still in that realm of window dressing and pretty pretty rhetoric that doesn't amount to much and what I saw from doing that Research was actually it seemed like departments and grad schools could do more and in some cases did which also drives me crazy About the moments that they then don't keep doing that, especially if if money from a funding institution runs out So yeah, I'm always curious for people's reactions about that because I want to know That's how this is working out for them.
Matt: Yeah. Well, I'll grab links to those three and put them in the description here so people can click on those and check them out. Uh, while you're, while you were talking, I was thinking about. So for the listeners at home, you know, I, I mentioned this before we started recording. I do get a certain amount of typically humanities folks reaching out and saying, Hey, I feel like there isn't anything I can do with my degree.
Matt: And I realized that it's unlikely that I'll become a professor. So for. Let's say grad students specifically in the humanities. What, how should they reframe their thinking? What are some things they should do, like while they're in grad school, to prepare for going to the job market? Maybe for something they didn't expect to do, etc.
Zeb: I, yeah, first of all, I absolutely feel that fear. I feel like that fear haunted me for just years. So I'm really, really sympathetic to that one. I would say So the soft skills that people have and that are, I think, honed in doing a PhD are really valuable. I think the best thing to do is to start investigating career tracks early on.
Zeb: I think it's impossible in your final year of grad school to apply to multiple different industries concurrently. And expect it to work out as anything more than like a Hail Mary. Uh, it takes a lot of practice and preparation to sort of tailor yourself in that way. I've thought about this for myself.
Zeb: Here's an example. Um, if I had really wanted to pursue curriculum development as a full time career I probably should have gotten an instructional design certificate while I was at Ohio State. The reality is, as a curriculum developer, I have a tremendous amount of content knowledge. I'm not going to be modest about it.
Zeb: I do have experience as a writer and editor. That's valuable, but in terms of, sort of, practical knowledge of pedagogy, my grad program gave me nothing. I learned more about how to actually teach people doing curriculum development than I did in five years of grad school, which, A, is a problem. But B, if I really wanted to make a go at that industry, that I should have in like 2016 said, you know, okay, I'm, I'm going to take some classes on this through the university.
Zeb: I'll figure out a way to, yeah, I'm, I actually think I could probably could have gotten the university to just pay for it. And I would have been better prepared to go after that. I only learned about that by doing informational interviews with people once I was sort of already working in that space. So Really take a critical look, you know think about and social media is useful for this I'll beat up on social media a lot But it's useful for sort of seeing all the different things that people do linkedin is good for that So start taking notes on those and then just reaching out to people about, like, how they got into it, what they might have wished they'd done differently to get into it, because, again, like me, I have ideas about how I would have gone about it at least more efficiently than I did, and start doing that kind of early in your grad program.
Zeb: I mean, you, you really just need to make a strong plan B, and that's really your plan A. Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah. I, so I was smiling while you were talking because that's one, that's probably the number one thing that I hammer to grad students is like, you've got to meet people who have already crossed the brink and gone into industry.
Matt: Not even, I think it's great to even meet people that aren't even in the profession that you were thinking about because you, you don't know what you don't know. And the amount about the industry world that at least I didn't know before I got there was just enormous. And I still only know a very, very small amount.
Matt: So. What would you say for grad students who, let's say, don't love talking to people? And that, and that was me. Because informational interviews, I think to some, do sound a little intimidating, maybe.
Zeb: I completely get that. You know, in grad school, I hated conference networking. Thinking about just what, how I would do it for academia.
Zeb: I hated the feeling of approaching a scholar to try to talk to them. That, that never really worked for me. It helped me to think in terms of, I'm not approaching this person to ask for anything. I'm not asking them to give me a job. I'm not asking for a favor. I am just doing this to sort of learn more.
Zeb: If I thought about it in terms of a cup of coffee or that I could keep it. Say over email or LinkedIn messages that sort of helped me and, and then just sort of treat it like a homework assignment. For some people that might be like literally just writing the questions down ahead of time so that you don't have to feel like you're coming up with them on the fly.
Zeb: I would say that's one part of it. If you see other opportunities to get creative with how to get around that, I would absolutely pursue them.
Matt: Yeah, I, I remember when I first started doing, searching for like a career in industry and I only reached out to people I already knew and they, they connected with me with a few more people.
Matt: And honestly, that's the one thing that I wish I would have done better on the job market was do more informational interviews, grow my network more. I happened to get a job without using a network in, you know, in the referral way, but. So many people get jobs through professional referrals. It's just such an important thing, and to just learn.
Zeb: Yeah. Yeah, I mean if I had wanted to become a grant writer, I would have needed to do all I mean, because I think I'm a good writer, but not all writing is equal. Academic writing isn't grant writing. Academic writing isn't even the kind of curriculum, right, I do. You would need to sit down and actually meet some grant writers and think about how how they accomplished this.
Zeb: And the thing I would, uh, part of the importance of starting early with this process, I think I might've been talking about this on LinkedIn at some point is if you wait until you're desperate for a career to try to approach somebody, you're not giving that any time to let it sort of flower a little bit.
Zeb: Like there are people that I was introduced to in the curriculum development space who didn't give me any work for a few years. I met them in 2018, and suddenly I started getting work from them in 2021. Not out of any kind of malice, it's not like I did anything to earn it, it just, that was when they had an opportunity for me.
Zeb: But if I had just wanted that connection solely in that moment, they wouldn't have even had anything to give me in the first place. And also, people don't really like... A purely one sided transaction. If you try to approach somebody as I need you to give me something, but I have nothing in return, that's just going to come across as punctuous, unpleasant.
Zeb: Yeah. It's going to be kind of a repellent interaction. So, yeah.
Matt: Well, I just, for, for any grad students listening who do feel a little apprehensive about informational interviews, I just want to say that my experience has been. The PhDs on LinkedIn are very open to chat. Obviously there will be people who are busy or they ask you to schedule out like a month or two in advance, or maybe they can't meet live and they just, you know, they'll answer your questions over messaging, but I've probably over 50 percent of the people I ask, I end up actually chatting with on a video chat, which to me is like.
Matt: A huge conversion rate. I mean, I feel like so many PhDs in industry feel like, you know, in academia, we have a community and so they kind of feel like there's this kind of new, less defined community of PhDs out in industry. And I think we, there is a sense that we kind of not look out for each other, but it's not, it's not as cold of a request as you might think to reach out to someone who got a PhD in your field and is a couple of years ahead of you in an industry.
Matt: It's actually something that at this point, I expect to get that and it feels like other PhDs kind of feel the same.
Zeb: I completely agree with that and yeah, sometimes I'm too busy to meet immediately that happens. I might have to schedule out or I might just be, I might not have enough bandwidth in that moment to do anything more than messaging.
Zeb: But A, most of us remember what it's like and it stinks. So there's a lot of sympathy for helping other people get through the sort of miserable part of it. I'd, I'd also say it's a good way to then start meeting people in that industry, like that's sort of your foot in the door. I will refer people to other software developers I know who've been in the industry longer and can speak to it with more expertise or more expertise to a, you know, dimension that I don't work on.
Zeb: I'm not a front end developer. I know lots of front end developers. It's a really good way to start to break in and most people are, in my experience, very friendly on that account. Yeah, yeah,
Matt: very friendly. So folks, please feel comfortable reaching out to people on LinkedIn. If you've been listening to my conversation with Zeb, where we're talking about informational interviews and the importance of doing them, you might be asking yourself, well, how do I actually do an informational interview?
Matt: What questions do I ask? How do I structure it? And what do I need to remember at the end? Well, I want to encourage you because I've got a one page PDF, I call it my coffee chat guide. It has lists of questions that you can ask industry PhDs to gather the most information possible about different career paths and fields that you could go into.
Matt: I also have three important reminders. That I think any PhD who's doing a coffee chat or informational interview should be sure to do at the end of their time talking with someone. And this guide is free. If you want to download it, you can go to gradschoolsucks. com slash coffee chat guide. Or you can just click the link at the bottom of the description of this episode.
Matt: And now, back to our interview. On that note, I do want to respect your time and we are getting to the end. What are some, any other thoughts, any lingering tips, tricks, things you wish you would have done differently, things you think grad students should know before they graduate and need to find a job?
Zeb: I would say, okay, so here's something that I did that I don't think worked for me.
Zeb: I was very secretive about everything that I did that was not academic. I put none of that on LinkedIn. I didn't connect with people on LinkedIn. Sort of out of this, and it, even at the time, I kind of knew it was paranoid, but I still did it. This thing, oh, what if my advisor finds out that I'm doing this non academic work?
Zeb: Or what if he sees me connecting with these people on LinkedIn? Which is really absurd, but definitely was not going to happen. I shortchanged myself doing that. LinkedIn, just as an example, it would have been a lot more effective for me to build referrals early on if I had developed that LinkedIn network from the get go.
Zeb: So, as much as you can, don't do that kind of career development work in secret. It just makes it so much harder to network and to do the things that are actually the most effective for it. It's scary because not every advisor is going to be supportive of that, and I am really sorry for that. But at a certain point, I mean, at least my attitude towards the end was, I have to watch out for my own best interests here, and if they aren't doing that, I'll do what I have to, to make sure that I'm not, you know, starving as an adjunct in a year.
Matt: Absolutely. So there, there was one thing that I, I was thinking of to come back to chat with you about, and that's going back to your passion. Let's say you graduate, you studied something you're interested in as a, as a PhD, you loved your work, you graduate and you go quote, get a job. And it's not in whatever you studied or were interested in.
Matt: How do you bring the passion that you had as a grad student into your current life? That's a
Zeb: great question. I, and I think about this a lot because prior to doing this, I didn't really think I would have any interest in software development. Like I saw it very instrumentally. It will buy me a better life, and I can have some work life boundaries, and with what remains, I'll pay attention to my passions.
Zeb: Which is fine. For the record, it worked out pretty well. What I discovered, actually learning how to code, actually becoming a software engineer, was there were things I liked about it. The design element. There are wrong ways to write code and you find out very quickly what those are because your code won't work But then at a certain point you you get to this Juncture where you're writing something and you have to make a decision about what the best way to do something is And that's subjective.
Zeb: There are things that, there are pieces of evidence that can argue for it one way or another. But ultimately, you have to think kind of creatively about the best way to accomplish something, and what best even means. That kind of passion, that actually hit something for me from grad school. The, the feeling of getting to lay something out, and make a case for it, and make...
Zeb: Make decisions that weren't just sort of math, like I thought software engineer would just be a lot of math and that was it, and that was wrong. I found that that actually carried over very neatly from grad school into this. I would also say, I take a certain, and perhaps this is maybe a slightly perverse pleasure at times, but in figuring out exactly what the requirements of something is or why it's breaking, that, that kind of attention to detail and puzzle solving.
Zeb: I found very gratifying in my new job, and actually, I would even say that that was something I wasn't always getting in grad school. You know, you're writing a dissertation, it's this open ended problem that you have for months and years on end. Lots of times I can walk into work, work on a problem, and then I get to leave it behind.
Zeb: There's the, there's the feeling of having discreetly solved something in the course of a day, and then just getting a walk away from it. And I have actually gotten a lot of comfort out of that. Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. I love that feeling. All right, Zeb. Well, let's, let's get you out of here. Excuse me. Just to go back.
Matt: So Zeb Larson, Dr. Zeb Larson, you can find him on LinkedIn. And we'll have a link to that as well as three of your articles in the description, whether you're on YouTube or on the podcast. Zeb, is there anything you wanted to chat about that we didn't chat about today?
Zeb: We've actually covered a goodly amount in the last 40 minutes or so.
Zeb: I would just say if anybody wants to reach out to me about anything that I've talked about today, please feel free. And if there are career tracks that seem adjacent to what I've talked about, please reach out about those as well. I'm always happy to set up other informational interviews because... I have accumulated at least a network of other people who know how to do things really well and I'm happy to, you know, share some of that knowledge and that wealth thereby.
Matt: Absolutely. Well, alright, thank you so much Zeb. Last question for you, what is one thing that grad students should do before they graduate? Could be fun, could be serious, one thing you think they should consider doing. Ah,
Zeb: one thing they should consider doing. I think, okay, so this is me. I love to write.
Zeb: Something that I got a lot out of grad school that I wish I'd done sooner. Think about how, what kind of, how your research would translate into something popular that could be published. I got a lot of pleasure out of taking things that were in my dissertation and being able to boil them down to, I don't know, 1, 500 words or whatever, and put them out in the world.
Zeb: It's really gratifying to see how people who aren't academics Are interested in or have questions or even push back in a productive way on what you've done. It makes the process feel so much less alone because grad school is really isolating. So I would say, you know, find ways to talk about what you've done.
Zeb: Cause really it's all very cool. We're just not given many opportunities to demonstrate how cool it is.
Matt: Awesome. Great. Well, Zev, thank you so much for chatting with me. It's great to talk to you today. Thank you. It's been my pleasure. All right, folks. That was my conversation with Zev. I hope you got a lot out of it.
Matt: Be sure to click the links in the description of this episode to find his LinkedIn page as well as those three articles that he mentioned in our conversation. And again, if you are just starting the process of doing informational interviews with industry PhDs, I highly recommend you download my free.
Matt: Coffee Chat Guide, it's a one page PDF that lets you know exactly the kinds of questions that you can be asking industry PhDs to gather information as well as three important reminders to end your informationals interviews with. Alright, that's all I have for you this week, I will see you all next week.