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 that led me to my current position for now—outside of the traditional tenure-track path.
On Push Factors
I begin with what I view as some of the contributing push factors for me. In 2020, I published the article “Unmet Promises: Diminishing Confidence in Education Among College-Educated Adults from 1973 to 2018,” which charted how public confidence in the overall institution of education has declined over the past 45 years. In particular, those with a college degree are less confident in education and their confidence is diminishing. There appears to be tension between the individual and collective benefits of continuing education. But this is coupled with the changing economic landscape of education, such as the increasing cost of schooling and the uncertainty of employment, potentially leading to more skepticism of the institution’s long-term stability and legitimacy.
The academy is changing. Sociology is not alone. Many have suggested that the institution is in crisis and that the experience of many senior faculty is a ‘relic of the past’—due to decades of declining funds, declining enrollment while conferring more doctorates (article may require log in), declining tenure track positions, the growth in administration, and the ongoing shift toward contingent faculty employment. Often when there is a tenure track opening, regardless of location, candidates now expect to compete against hundreds, if not thousands of other well-qualified applicants. And, while the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected colleges and universities in unequal ways (article may require log in), it has overall resulted in a decline in real wages for full-time faculty.
Within our discipline, the ASA Task Force on Contingent Faculty Employment, which was appointed in 2019 to address and capture aspects of this change, suggested that, “…between 1995 and 2011, full-time tenure-track positions fell from 42% to 28% of all instructional positions in the United States…[and]… part-time and full-time non-tenure track faculty comprise 61% of instructional positions at four-year institutions, 84% at two-year institutions, and over 99% at for- profit institutions. This has profound implications for faculty working conditions, career prospects for graduate students, undergraduate education, academic freedom, and the governance of institutions of higher education…” [emphasis added].
Discussions around sustaining the discipline are lively, indeed, albeit not much different from those of recent past. A potential problem with much graduate training in sociology is that it is often narrowly tailored to reproduce tenure-track faculty inside the academy, even as there is a mismatch between graduates and appointments. After multiple years of specialization, there is often little opportunity for professionalization, collaboration, and the ability to recognize transferable skills outside the academy. I think this is a missed opportunity for sustaining the discipline, given the current employment trends and increase in opportunities in industry. While I prepared for many years to enter the academic market by presenting research at dozens of conferences and publishing in peer-reviewed journals, in the end I chose not to. I went to industry instead. As the reader will gather more below, neither career path is a fallback plan, and both require years of dedicated research and engagement to strategically set up multiple options for recognition and consideration.
On Pull Factors
I now turn to some of what I view as the pull factors to industry. My first experience with research outside of academia began in the 2017–2018 school year. I received an email from a recruiter at Facebook, shortly after one of my manuscripts won a paper award. They expressed interest in the research I was doing in my PhD program and asked if I would be interested in a summer internship.
At the time, I had never heard of sociologists doing research in industry, and I did not have a social network outside of academia to gather narratives of experiences to get a fuller understanding of what that could mean. I recall grappling with whether going on such an adventure would be detrimental to my sociological identity or rather a great opportunity and fit.
I waivered—for months. But with the support and encouragement from several of my mentors, I said, “yes,” to the opportunity and moved to the Bay Area. That summer I was matched with a mentor who provided me with much autonomy and helped broaden my methodological toolkit, and I learned about research in the tech sector. At the end of the 2018 internship, I secured a coveted “return-offer” for the following summer to join the New York office. After completing both internships, I was offered a full-time position upon defending my dissertation.
Throughout my internship experiences, I learned what it would be like to be a full-time researcher in the tech industry. A few notable pull factors stood out. Location and salary were large among them. The benefits industry offered far outweighed those available through potential academic appointments. A particular draw was the ability to choose where to live, rather than having to be willing to move anywhere for the job. To me, it also felt like my research could have a wide and immediate impact. Seeing my recommendation sections quickly materialize into positive changes was professionally gratifying. So too was the ability to work across multiple disciplines in a collaborative and supportive culture.
In combination with these pull factors are my personal circumstances and experiences, which may help the reader contextualize my decision-making process. I was raised in poverty, and I am a first-generation college student, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and a former foster youth. I went to graduate school to better understand and try to make sense of inequality, to question poverty and injustice, and to help make positive change in real people’s lives. Working in industry offered me the opportunity to address these important issues, along with the ability to support and be close to family.
Sustaining the Discipline
I am now a senior quantitative researcher at Meta on the Instagram Research Team and a visiting scholar at The New School in New York City. I lead quantitative research on Instagram’s Ranking Team, which broadly focuses on understanding and measuring how people’s attitudes, beliefs, or stated needs are shaped and how they relate to their actions or behaviors over time. I identify ways to build more equity, integrity, and trust in rankings and algorithms in consultation with partner disciplines, such as engineering and data science. With one foot inside and another outside of the academy, I aim to build stronger and more valuable relationships between these two worlds.
A typical researcher in the tech industry helps teams create, clarify, and test hypotheses. They also streamline communication of findings to expert and lay audiences, often leading to larger and more widespread impact from their research. These skills are at the core of doctoral training—from setting up theoretical frameworks to employing rigorous methodological approaches in data collection, statistical analysis, synthesis and presentation of complex data results in readable and meaningful ways. And researchers at Meta can and often do publish academic research externally, across a variety of disciplines.
Making the transition to the tech industry is about applying these skills in a new way and in a new environment. As I alluded to above, this information was hard to come by when I began my path. As a result, a small group of us begun a member-led community that studies digital phenomena and/or studies social life using digital methods. We are a diverse grassroots collective of students, faculty, and researchers. We started with a handful of members and have since grown our free membership to nearly 1,100 colleagues aiming to help one another with questions we have about research, readings, teaching, jobs, internships, methods, and much more. We actively organize community activities and host all of this primarily on Slack (Sociologists of digital things).
A recent outcome of our group was an open letter to sociology faculty that we published on Social Science Space. In it, we detail how many graduate students have many reasons to look beyond academic appointments, such as the many that I described above. However, some are hesitant to ask their advisors about working outside of the university. And their departments often lack these information resources for students. This contrasts with other related social science disciplines, such as psychology, political science, or economics.
Not only do sociologists have a crucial role to play in industry, but I also believe it may be a key lever for truly sustaining and growing the discipline. Here are some of the recommendations to faculty in our open letter:
1. Help make students feel safe to consider and learn about jobs outside of the academy. Many students tell us that their faculty will provide them with fewer opportunities or support if they knew they were considering nonacademic jobs. Yet several pressing realities—the job market not least among them—necessitate that they take steps to prepare themselves for a range of career options. Many students who learn about nonacademic research jobs choose to remain in the academy, but for those who choose to leave, the absence of support and training puts them at a serious disadvantage when it comes to applying.
2. If you don’t know how to advise your students for non-academic jobs, ask for help. Many of our fellow social science disciplines include this sort of professional development and exposure to their applied colleagues as a matter of course. A common line of questions we hear are around basic information: what does a researcher do outside of sociology departments? What are the skills in demand? One helpful way we find to answer this question for students is to walk through open job ads for different roles and focus on the skills that are prioritized in the listings. Are these skills that your department helps students develop? If not, is it something you could invest in? Small acts like these can make a world of a difference to students.
3. Relatedly, invite social scientists working in industry to speak at your department—and encourage faculty to attend, too. So often, many of us talk to students who are eager to connect with us—but we want to work with faculty to develop department resources, too.
4. Internships are key. Help your students get them. Many sectors have research internships for graduate students and supporting students early in their studies to get at least one summer of internship experience can give them crucial experience necessary to develop the skills a hiring committee will look for, while also giving them the opportunity to try out a role and see if it is work that is interesting to them. It’s very difficult to hire someone with a PhD in hand but with no existing research experience in that setting. An internship is a practical and effective way to solve this problem because PhDs with internship experience can often hit the ground running in a senior role as a new hire.
I recently had the opportunity to write for the ASA’s Sociology of Education Section’s newsletter. There I focused on my experience as a first-generation college student. I think the words are relevant to close here, too. To graduate students in particular: “Explore multiple options. Be open to new experiences and don’t limit the possibilities … Don’t lose sight of your roots and continue to pay it forward regularly and often.”
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not their employer or the American Sociological Association.
