Fellow sociologists and social scientists alike, often ask how and why I decided to choose a profession outside academia and how a doctorate in sociology prepared and enabled me to pursue a career in industry? Based on my experiences, I say that, in combination with the gradual changes in the institutional landscape, there were multiple push and pull factors th[...]

“Why?” When I first announced last year that I had made a full-time transition into the finance industry, this one-word question was the most prominent response I received. Before any of the people who knew me as a professor asked what my new role entailed, they wanted to know why I decided to pursue a career in an industry that—at first glance—seems far afield from my training as[...]

On a muggy summer night in South Carolina, I stand in pitch darkness surrounded by what could only be described as eloquently orchestrated chaos. It is the Battle of Fallujah night event, part of the United States Marine Corps’s 54-hour culminating exercise in recruit training known as “The Crucible.” My team is spread out across the field taking in the scene from different vantage points. I[...]

Becoming a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultant was not a career path I had considered when I was in graduate school. Like many graduate students, I had envisioned going into academia, but toward the end of my PhD program, my goals and priorities changed, and I decided to explore other options. After completing my PhD in 2018, I joined the Research, Professional Development, and Acade[...]

Since 2017, I have been the president of the Appalachian College Association, a nonprofit consortium of 34 small, private liberal arts institutions. I took this job after almost two decades of work as an academic administrator—from department chair to dean and then provost. While I never envisioned this career trajectory when I was studying sociology in grad[...]

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 co[...]

I never thought I would do anything with my sociology degree but be a professor. As a first-year PhD student in sociology at the University of California-Irvine, I willingly drank the “academic Kool-Aid.” I’d talk sociology inside and outside of class; in the department hallways; at the campus pub; at home. I knew it was a privilege to have the time, space, and lack of financial and[...]

I often know what I don't want before I know what I want—and making one of my biggest career decisions was no exception. I didn't choose a profession outside academia. Instead, I decided not to pursue an academic career. When I was deciding on my career track, my sense was that many of the faculty members I knew seemed unhappy. Further, I watched what they did and did not feel excited about t[...]

During the middle of the twentieth century, America was a divided nation, and a growing number of people were losing faith in established social norms and institutions. When I enrolled in Brooklyn College in 1964, I was apprehensive. I was drawn to sociology because it addressed my unease and framed it in questions about social order. The first time I read C. Wright Mills’s book, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press 19[...]