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 familial commitments that might pull away my focus from graduate work. So, I threw myself in whole hog.
The only twist I had to navigate was that I knew I wanted to study digital technology through a sociological lens, and I was not aware of sociologists doing this work in 2010. I learned later that many faculty at the time who did study digital technology felt frustrated by their fellow sociologists’ lack of interest in their work and fled to other departments—such as communications, human-computer interaction, and informatics. But I wanted to prove to my sociology colleagues that the study of digital technology use was important—to the field and to the world.
Sociology faculty in my department gave me the training I needed in social theory and traditional sociological methods, but I needed help on the digital front. So, I sought out faculty in other departments who could point me to the right literatures, theories, and relevant methods. I found professors in departments of education, informatics, and anthropology who were doing this work. Taking their classes and getting to know them helped a great deal in my training.
But these faculty helped me in even more ways. They connected me to opportunities I had no idea existed. During one spring meeting an anthropologist with whom I was working asked what I was doing that summer. I indicated that I was probably going to tutor or find some kind of research gig to pay rent and make ends meet until classes resumed. This professor suggested I consider applying for tech internships. “What are those?” I asked. I began to uncover what I soon realized was an entire hiring ecosystem for scientists in the tech industry, with one such pathway beginning with a tech internship. All of the big companies—Google, Facebook (now Meta), Intel Corporation, Microsoft, and more—offered them, and the pay as an intern was substantial. I could make more in three months as an intern than I made all year as a funded PhD student.
I landed my first internship at Yahoo! Labs, a since dissolved research hub within the company. It was basically a group of fewer than 10 social scientists, almost entirely trained in human-computer interaction (HCI) … and me, the lone sociologist. I was brought on because of my interest and budding expertise in youth studies. At the time, teens were fleeing from Facebook to Instagram and nobody knew why. Social scientists at Yahoo! and elsewhere were trying to sort out these patterns in teens’ technology use to inform the future of the industry.
What I learned that summer, and at most internships I have held since, was not core social science training. My doctoral training served me well in terms of all aspects of study design and execution in these positions. Rather, I learned what it means to be a social scientist in industry and how to carry out my research projects with other people. Why do I have to do a research kickoff with a group of people on my team? How do I actually run meetings? Why am I expected to interview people with my team watching? What format should the output of my research be if not an academic paper? And what does “TL; DR” mean? (“Too Long, Didn’t Read.”)
How I Learned to Do Research with Nonresearchers
Although sociology prepared me to do high quality research, I realized very quickly that I was not trained in how to collaborate with researchers who are not social scientists. My summer internships exposed me to a few of the ways people without sociological training did translational work through collaborations.
When I interned at Yahoo! Labs, our small group of researchers all sat together in an office and primarily worked with one another. The goal for researchers in this lab, as far as I could tell, was to do research that could potentially help the company but that we would also ideally publish in journals on human-computer interaction. I remember that I was aspirationally also working on a sole-authored paper, as is the ideal in sociology. “Why would you publish alone?” asked one HCI colleague there. I sensed some suspicion that publishing alone was not seen as a good thing. Almost all of my colleagues’ work was done collaboratively, and they also primarily published together.
After I finished that summer internship, the lab dissolved. As I sought out future internships, such as at YouTube (which is part of Google), I noticed a marked shift in the way that other tech firms structured how researchers did their work compared to at Yahoo! Labs. At YouTube and the rest of Google, for example, researchers tend to report to other researchers, but work primarily on teams of non-social scientists working on a specific product. What that means is that researchers are working on teams filled mostly with engineers, designers, and product managers.
I was so lost. Who were these people? What did they do? Fortunately, I had a fabulous intern host who patiently demystified the world around me but was also gifted at positioning research within ongoing work that other people on our team were doing. For my first project at YouTube, I was tasked with developing a research design. As I worked on this project, colleagues helped me identify areas of my work where I could include nonresearchers on my team. These steps included: kicking off the study, finalizing the study plan, collecting data, analyzing data, and sharing a final report. To do research well, I learned, meant creating touch points with nonresearchers at each step.
Consider, for example, the study kickoff. My manager set up a meeting with key “stakeholders” to describe the study and discussion about what made it interesting to different constituents. What challenges related to the topic were product managers struggling with? How could research help them? What worries do they have about what we might find, or not find, as part of this work? I ultimately ended up treating these discussions as an input into the study approach I adopted, noting the assumptions people had about the human behavior we sought to understand, and the deadlines or pressures with which they are dealing that could relate to this work.
I came to realize that the entirety of the research design and execution was up to me. I was, in fact, the trained social scientist there to do the work. But checkpoints with the team helped me understand the context of study reception. I learned how to ensure that people listen to, and act upon, the research social scientists do. The context in which the study is done and with whom it is shared is an essential part of the dissemination of findings. Publishing a paper doesn’t necessarily reach a broad audience. People are not trained to read those papers like sociologists, and the language authors use in their papers isn’t the same as the language readers use day-to-day in their jobs and in their lives. We, as scholars, need to find other ways to connect and communicate with people and get them excited about our research by using a shared language.
Working with Designers Has Been a Career Highlight
As I have said in other forums, I do not think that the tech sector is “the solution” for sociologists looking for careers in a rough academic job market. The tech sector has its issues much like academia does. But why do I stay? This is something I have thought about a lot, particularly as well-meaning colleagues periodically try to lure me back to full-time academia. I do think there is a lot of potential in bringing sociological thinking into the tech sector and that I can help facilitate this work.
But I also love working with designers. Designers, much like researchers or engineers or product managers, are a well-defined role in the tech sector. They exist on nearly every team, and they are expected to be close collaborators with researchers. Designers are artist-innovators and come from a wide variety of backgrounds including people with art school training, from design innovation schools, and who have independently assembled a growing portfolio of tech design work. My longest collaborator at Google worked for many years as a visual artist before shifting into tech, and he still moonlights in creating 3D art and video for personal projects.
Designers use different tools to mock up new possibilities. Consider whatever screen you are using to read this essay. How did you open this magazine? What happens when you clicked this, or that? Where did it take you? What did it look like to read this? What happens if you zoom in or zoom out? A designer is charged with thinking this all through and creating an architecture that guides people through particular experiences using digital technology. They build the digital houses and walkways people use to navigate digital tools.
But how do designers know what the “house” should look like and how it should work? This is where researchers come in. Some of the studies we run help designers think carefully about the day-to-day lives of the people for whom they are building. What do people need when they are trying to accomplish a particular goal? What is it currently like to accomplish this thing in their day to day lives? How could it be different, and perhaps even better, for them?
I will always remember one of the first research talks I gave at Google, where a designer in attendance was so excited by my findings that she designed a new feature overnight to solve some of the challenges I discovered in my work. As she showed me the feature the next day, I was in awe of how beautiful and well-constructed the prototype was—design is a craft and she was incredibly gifted. But I could also feel my research throughout the work that she did. The designer told me how particular research findings gave her the inspiration to build different parts of the prototype that she thought might change how people would approach the problem in question. It was an incredibly deep engagement with my thinking as a researcher and a new way to bring my research findings to life in nonacademic contexts. It felt incredible.
Is the Tech Industry for You?
There are lots of initiatives spinning up to help social scientists explore careers in industry. I personally do not think it is ever too soon to poke around and see if you would enjoy this kind of work. Consider joining TechnoSoc, a community I helped found to provide some of this education and peer support. Stay tuned, too, for a new ASA Community that will be a resource for sociologists interested in working in practice settings.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
