The choice of a major can be daunting for any college student. For first-generation, low-income students like I was, it’s pretty common to lack good models for how to navigate academia and make that choice. I was fortunate to have a high school social studies teacher, Charles “Ray” Raymond, who was trained in anthropology and took me under his wing. Ray introduced me to the concepts of social constructs and social structure in an elective class on social problems. He recognized my sociological imagination and my concurrently growing interest in social statistics. Ray guided me to declare sociology as my major on my college application to the University of Arizona.
So, unlike many of my colleagues in this discipline, I’ve known since I was a senior in high school that I wanted to be a sociologist—what I didn’t know was what kind of sociologist I wanted to be or how to choose a career path to find my way to that point. As it turns out, social networks and structural constraints in the academic job market meant my career path chose me, rather than the other way around. And that career path happened to lead me to becoming a sociologist in practice settings.
Finding Opportunities Outside Academia
One of the myths that circulates the halls of sociology departments across the country is that the only viable career path toward success for would-be sociologists is one on the academic tenure track at a major research university. And this perspective makes sense considering that the majority of sociology PhDs are conferred by those institutions under the supervision of advisors who have benefited from that path and have interest in the status legacy of their departments. Of course, the prestige of such a legacy requires that there can be no parity between the many sociology doctorates awarded and the few new faculty positions funded in a given year. Unfortunately, this structure, combined with increasingly aspirational publication expectations required for entry, supports the perverse notion that any career choice for sociologists outside of academia is not aligned with success.
Fortunately, sociologists are often very successful in practice settings. My own career outside of academia started with a postdoctoral fellowship at RAND Corporation in economics and statistics. During this postdoctoral year, I immersed myself in the research-to-policy pipeline and saw the value that a sociological perspective could bring to the policy table. My work focused predominantly on improving economic models of influenza vaccine uptake, and my training in sociology helped to inform realistic scenarios that shape human health behavior, including factors driven by social networks and personal history. This will be of no surprise to those reading this essay, but it turns out that social structure and past behavior strongly shape people’s seasonal vaccine behavior and they should be—but were often not—factored into vaccine policy initiatives.
My sociological training in quantitative methodology—especially in statistical approaches to network analysis à la Carter Butts’s lab, coupled with my interest in complex data and health—landed me a job at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I was recruited to work as a staff scientist and methodologist in Laura Koehly’s Social Network Methods Section in the intramural research program at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).
It may not be well known among social scientists that working in intramural research at the NIH (or any other government lab) is a viable, and potentially very fruitful, job option. At the NIH, I was able to recruit, teach, and mentor fellows from all backgrounds and educational experiences, supporting a mission to diversify the scientific workforce while building a well-resourced research portfolio in social networks and health. While I was not on the tenure track (yep, the NIH intramural research program even has a tenure track), my work was about as aligned with a fully funded assistant professorship at an R1 institution as one could find outside of a university setting.
Shifting into Policy Work
Those of you who know me know that I love science. I have an insatiable curiosity for both simple and complex systems and relish in all aspects of conducting research. But there is more to science than just research, including: program and policy development, regulation, translation into practice, communication, and other activities that are critical components of the scientific enterprise. After years of being adjacent to these other components, I started to get a science policy itch. To help scratch that itch, I accepted appointments to both NHGRI’s Data Access Committee (responsible for overseeing access requests for human genomic datasets) and its Scientific Review Committee (an intramural analog of an NIH extramural study section).
These policy roles exposed me to a host of challenges—including a need for more rigorous statistical training; a biomedical research culture that was stymied by disciplinary silos; and a lack of strategy to diversify the age, gender, and racial representativeness of study participant pools—that, from my perspective as a sociologist, were ripe for social theory and training in social science to address. These roles set me alight on a path where I could leverage my expertise as a sociologist.
While it would be a few years, and many more studies and publications later, I eventually found an opportunity at the NIH where I could lean into science policy in a more direct manner. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was setting up a new Office of Data Science and Emerging Technologies in the Office of the Director, and they needed staff with expertise in genomics, data, and social science, as well as experience working with intramural investigators to help with getting the office off the ground.
The timing of my move to NIAID to fill this expertise gap coincidentally aligned with the start of the pandemic. By mid-2020, it was evident to pretty much everyone looking into slowing the spread of COVID-19 that the response to the pandemic would require both social action and a paradigm shift in biomedicine toward a more open, accessible, and transdisciplinary research and data-sharing culture. Having a sociologist charter and chair the NIAID Data Access Committee and serve as the Genomic Program Administrator was a risk, but it also availed the institute of an opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership on how societal considerations must be incorporated into data policy that is aimed at transforming the culture of infectious and immune-mediated disease silos. It was serendipity, albeit under grim global circumstances, that I was able to fill those roles during this time.
The Sociological Edge
Sociology provides a valuable framework from which many careers in government science and policy can be built. In my own work, sociological thinking and imagination, research methodology expertise, compassion for the diversity of human experience across the life course, and a deep understanding of inequality are all strengths of the discipline that I rely upon to guide my science policy perspective and influence my decision-making process.
I was able to apply these strengths to their greatest extent when I was appointed to be one of three NIH representative members to President Biden’s Scientific Integrity Fast Track Action Committee (Task Force) in 2021, which was tasked by the Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking (Presidential Memorandum) to write a report on the state of scientific integrity policies and practices in federal science. While scientific integrity had not traditionally been viewed as tapping into issues important to sociologists—including diversity of the scientific workforce and equity in the delivery of science—the Presidential Memorandum specifically instructed that these issues be addressed in the report. As a result, I was able to leverage my sociological strengths and expertise for my part in the work on the Task Force.
Shortly after the Task Force released its report, I joined the Science and Society team at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to serve as the Assistant Director for Open Science and Data Policy to serve under Alondra Nelson (another sociologist working in a practice setting). In this capacity, I am not only working to continue the important next steps toward protecting scientific integrity in federal science, I am also advancing priorities to make federal research and data more equitably open and accessible to all Americans. For a sociologist who loves science, the practice setting at OSTP is perhaps the ultimate opportunity for practicing sociology with broad societal impact.
For the Social Good
Finally, our discipline needs to advocate strongly for advancing sociology in practice settings and for elevating the status of sociologists who find themselves on nonacademic career paths. Practice settings offer so much more diversity in career options than the traditional academic path, and the need for sociological thinking in these settings is critical for the social good. Sociologists are needed in career government roles to protect against the social harms that periodic antiscience administrations cause.
The federal government, in particular, has myriad opportunities for sociologists—from post-baccalaureate summer internships that provide a taste of field experience in federal science, administration, regulation, and policy to postdoctoral research and policy fellowships, to career service occupations in research and program development, to political appointments in the highest policy offices. Practice settings contribute to the continued longevity and prominence of sociology as a discipline, and they should be weighed equally with academic jobs in any sociologist’s career calculus. Recent history shows that it is not hyperbolic to say that the welfare of society depends on sociologists working in practice settings.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association. Marcum is writing in his personal capacity and not as a representative of the United States Federal Government, the National Institutes of Health, or the Biden-Harris Administration. His opinions are his own.
