Transcript
Speaker: Academic defectors.
Speaker: I'll never forget my graduation from my PhD program at Cornell in May of 2018.
Speaker: So my family and even some family friends had come up to Ithaca to celebrate this accomplishment and get a glimpse into what a PhD graduation looks like, which is a very different affair from undergrad, where you celebrate with your graduating class.
Speaker: In a PhD program, we felt camaraderie with our cohort.
Speaker: our matriculation buddies as opposed to our graduation buddies because we all graduated at different times.
Speaker: But beyond these logistical differences between a PhD and an undergrad graduation, perhaps the biggest difference of all, at least for me, was the vibe, to use a parlance of our times.
Speaker: Unlike my graduation from the University of Chicago, where I was happy and taking smiling pictures with my friends, my PhD graduation felt more akin to a death march, not least because I hadn't technically defended my thesis yet, it was set for later that summer.
Speaker: And it wasn't just me.
Speaker: My mother pointed out that beyond the poofy hats, it was super easy to tell who was a PhD student graduating that weekend by the dour looks on all of our faces.
Speaker: Whereas the undergrads were cheerful, the master's students relieved and happy that was behind them.
Speaker: We PhDs looked like we'd been through a war, and if we saw another person in a poofy hat, we'd nod to each other in solemn understanding.
Speaker: So this is all to say that even if two PhDs have never met each other and had two completely different courses of study, we still share a lot in common with one another.
Speaker: And that's certainly true of today's guest, Dr. Oscar Pocasangre, who did a PhD in political science at Columbia University.
Speaker: He graduated in 2022 and his dissertation was titled The Political Consequences of Chronic Criminal Violence.
Speaker: He also completed his master's degree in public administration at Columbia University at the School of International and Public Affairs.
Speaker: As an undergraduate at Yale University, Oscar studied both economics and psychology, and as we'll hear in his fascinating story today, has always had not only a breadth of interests, but a dedication to keeping his mind and his options open that has ultimately served him well, both in and out of academia.
Speaker: So without further ado, let's hear the story of Dr. Oscar Pocasangre, PhD, who, given his clear-headedness and optimism, probably managed to enjoy his PhD graduation a bit more than I did.
Speaker: So where did you do your undergrad?
Speaker: So my undergrad I did at Yale, small school in Connecticut.
Speaker: I studied economics and psychology.
Speaker: When I was in undergrad, I was really into behavioral economics.
Speaker: So I wanted to find ways of combining my interest in econ with psychology.
Speaker: So I did a double major.
Speaker: It reminds me of Freakonomics.
Speaker: I don't maybe that's like a little too reductive.
Speaker: But I'm from UChicago.
Speaker: So obviously, like Freakonomics was kind of kind of a big thing there.
Speaker: But yeah, definitely.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that was one of the books that got me excited about econ at first and just
Speaker: realizing how many other things you can do with economics and like with an econ framework other than what you usually think if you don't know much about economics, like business or finance, but it can be applied to so many other fields.
Speaker: And I was really interested in this idea of like,
Speaker: nudges and changes in policies that can lead to changes in behavior and how you could apply that to poverty reduction in developing countries.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: So you're one of the rare birds that study econ not just to make money, but to actually make a difference.
Speaker: So what about Freakonomics in particular grabbed you?
Speaker: I'm assuming you read it based on this timeline I'm putting together here when you were a high schooler maybe?
Speaker: Like, oh, this could be something interesting I could study when I go to college.
Speaker: Probably.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it was probably like around high school or like early college when I read it.
Speaker: And I think for me, it was just like how you could apply econ to understand a lot of social problems and understand like this framework that helps you understand what causes what.
Speaker: It gives a lot of like rigor to basically understanding social relationships.
Speaker: And I remember there was a study in that book about lead paint and abortion or about the number of police officers in the street in crime and all these very creative ways of having creative research designs to answer these questions.
Speaker: And for me, it was just really eye-opening to see how you could apply all these tools to a bunch of different questions out in the world.
Speaker: And I was particularly interested in
Speaker: taking that to development economics.
Speaker: So like, how do you understand like what, what works in reducing poverty?
Speaker: And when I was in college, I took a class, I think it was called the economics of developing countries or something like that.
Speaker: And it was a lot of using experiments and very creative research designs to understand the effects of different types of policies on economics.
Speaker: savings rates or health outcomes or education outcomes, like test scores.
Speaker: That's, I think, one of the things that got me really excited about research.
Speaker: It's like, whoa, you can use research to save the world and to understand how policies work.
Speaker: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker: And it is really interesting to hear that you're interested in like this creative tapestry that you could weave using economics as a framework.
Speaker: And it's leading me to kind of wonder if you had any idea of what you wanted to study when you were going into undergrad.
Speaker: Of course, Yale is...
Speaker: Small school in Connecticut.
Speaker: What's unique about Yale, especially compared to the other Ivy Leagues, with the exception of Dartmouth, is that it has a really strong liberal arts program.
Speaker: It's not just like, oh, yeah, we have great like sciences.
Speaker: We have a great engineering department like at Cornell, where I did my Ph.D.
Speaker: Yale is known for having its liberal arts education be, you know, top tier.
Speaker: So when you applied to Yale, what made you choose a school like that?
Speaker: Like, did you have any intellectual interests as, you know, a teenager that you had kind of thought about before going to college?
Speaker: Because if you read economics, it'd be Freakonomics when you were, you know, maybe at the high school, beginning of college.
Speaker: It seems like at that time, maybe things were still kind of amorphous for you intellectually.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: And I think they were still a Murphys for a long time.
Speaker: Maybe they still are.
Speaker: For me, one of the appeals of a place like Yale where you didn't have to commit to a major when you first started was precisely that, that it gives you a lot of latitude to explore and take classes in a lot of different departments.
Speaker: And you're forced to take classes in the sciences, in the humanities, in the social sciences, in the arts.
Speaker: So it gives you a really good exploration of different fields before you commit to one in particular.
Speaker: Oh, like a core curriculum?
Speaker: There is no core curriculum as it is at Columbia with the humanities.
Speaker: Ah.
Speaker: but you do have to meet certain requirements.
Speaker: It does force you to like explore a little.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: Liberal arts at its finest and it's most literal.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, in the extreme, like the downside is that they, I think they don't appreciate so much like the professional careers.
Speaker: So you couldn't like have a major in journalism or pre-law because those are for professions actually.
Speaker: You're here to learn about knowledge.
Speaker: But I definitely started
Speaker: even from freshman year, like taking some econ classes, some political science classes, which I don't know, even though I did eventually my PhD in political science, the first political science class I took at Yale, I didn't like it.
Speaker: I was like, oh, this is so boring.
Speaker: This is not what I thought political science is.
Speaker: And then I just like focused more on economic psychology.
Speaker: And then there was like one semester when I was like really excited about art history and took like
Speaker: Art of the Roman Empire, Art of Mesoamerica, intern to architecture.
Speaker: And I thought, oh, maybe I should do this.
Speaker: But then economics and psychology ended up winning.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: So I was curious what political science class you took that kind of turned you off at first.
Speaker: So ironically, it was, I think it was Latin American politics and I ended up doing a PhD in Latin American politics.
Speaker: But I think the way that the PhD education is done is very different from the undergrad education in political science.
Speaker: You know, the PhD is more of like up to you of like, you know, exploring different fields and like finding, you know, the famous gaps in the literature.
Speaker: And you coming up with a lot of the puzzles, which is really exciting.
Speaker: And in undergrad, it's more just like, you know, reading all these things and like memorizing a lot of things.
Speaker: And at the time, I guess I just didn't appreciate what it meant to have all these theories out there.
Speaker: So it felt maybe like too abstract to me at the time.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Like you're learning the fundamentals.
Speaker: You're given like the ideological frameworks that you can't necessarily experiment with at the undergraduate level the same way that you can as a graduate.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: I also, I like, you kind of lit up when you were talking about this one period in your undergraduate career where you're taking a lot of art history.
Speaker: And one thing that I'm kind of observing through all the interviews is that people...
Speaker: who go on to do PhDs, it seems like we all have these very intellectually capricious interests where we're really into this and then, oh, we're also really into that and we're really into that too, which ends up kind of pushing us into fields where we have a lot of creative licensure intellectually or the ability to like synthesize things from multiple fields.
Speaker: So would you say when you were an undergrad, you were a double major, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I was.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I didn't write a thesis, so neither econ or psychology had a thesis requirement.
Speaker: I remember writing a paper my senior year on those trying to synthesize a lot of what I had learned in both majors.
Speaker: And it was a lot of applying how economics and psychology
Speaker: can come together to understand problems of poverty.
Speaker: So at the time it was a new literature.
Speaker: Now there's a lot of research in that field on understanding things like self-control for savings rates or different attitudes, how that affects different positions towards different types of outcomes.
Speaker: And yeah, I was just interested in like, what can these two fields tell us about how we can reduce poverty?
Speaker: Like, are there like, I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of nudges from behavioral economics of like, you know, these small changes that can have big effects.
Speaker: You change the default in a form, you can change the number of people who choose something.
Speaker: So like,
Speaker: whether organ donation is a default.
Speaker: And when you go to the DMV, that makes it a lot more likely that people choose to donate their organs and when it's not.
Speaker: So how can that be applied to things like retirement savings or savings rates or
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: That's actually very practical.
Speaker: Like these are very practical concerns within these fields of psychology and economics that you were stitching together, you know, like I actually hadn't heard the concept of nudges, at least if it was in Freakonomics.
Speaker: I read that book like almost 20 years ago at this point.
Speaker: So, you know, it's been it's fallen through the cracks of my memory.
Speaker: But but when did political science come back into play?
Speaker: After college, I started working more in the development economics field.
Speaker: I started working for this organization called the Jamil Parvati Action Lab, which they're based out of MIT, but they have offices all over the world.
Speaker: I was working in there.
Speaker: Latin America office.
Speaker: What they do is they run what are known as randomized control trials, so basically experiments to figure out if policies work or not for their intended outcome.
Speaker: So they'll test things like, you know, is it better to give out vet nets for free or to charge a price to people, like use them more or less if they're free for free or if they're priced at some level?
Speaker: Or how do you get people to invest more or to participate in microcredit or to pay more attention to politics or to vote more, right?
Speaker: So you will test by randomizing who gets what sort of intervention.
Speaker: you're able to say in a more rigorous way the effects of the policy.
Speaker: And for me, it was super interesting because we're learning so much about what works and what doesn't work about reducing poverty and about making government work better because they also have a big political economy component.
Speaker: So what are effective policies to reduce corruption or to increase accountability or political participation?
Speaker: And I was just struck at how, okay, like we're building this like huge evidence base of what works and what doesn't work.
Speaker: But then a lot of the times these things are then not adopted by governments or politicians don't listen and things are not implemented.
Speaker: So it made me start thinking a lot of things.
Speaker: What are the political incentives behind a lot of these things?
Speaker: That took me to kind of take a step back and start thinking more about, okay, what are the politics here?
Speaker: Who is winning out of keeping things in the status quo?
Speaker: Who's losing from this?
Speaker: And why are they not complaining?
Speaker: And it really forced me to think more of the politics.
Speaker: The institutions behind this, how those institutions shape our behavior, the behavior of politicians as well, their incentives.
Speaker: Their incentives to invest in poverty reduction or not, their incentives to invest in better government or not.
Speaker: And that's all politics.
Speaker: And I guess for me, the appeal of political science is that it gives a framework to understand individual behavior and how institutions shape different types of outcomes.
Speaker: If you're really interested in solving social problems, it's not enough to just know what the actual solution is, but you need to get the politics right.
Speaker: So, you know, I was always concerned about things like development and poverty elimination and reducing corruption.
Speaker: And for me, political science was a way to understand why those things like basically didn't improve, just even though we do have a lot of the solutions to those problems.
Speaker: It's very clear.
Speaker: So I have two questions that kind of keep popping up in my head.
Speaker: One, when you say poverty, what exactly do you mean by that?
Speaker: I was focused more on the experience of developing countries.
Speaker: So I was born and raised in El Salvador.
Speaker: So, you know, growing up, I was exposed to a lot of poverty and a lot of corruption as well.
Speaker: So it was more of a concern of how to improve welfare, like societal welfare.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: I mean, again, and to what I'm also kind of stitching together here from what you're saying is this this need for what you're studying to be practically oriented for it to actually to have some kind of effect, to affect some kind of change.
Speaker: So that leads, I guess, to my second question.
Speaker: What exactly turned you off initially from that Latin American politics class that you took as an undergrad at Yale?
Speaker: It's a good question.
Speaker: I would say maybe at the time I didn't see the connection between a lot of the theory and its applications to actual social problems.
Speaker: I had to take a more roundabout way of working a bit and figuring out, oh, there are a lot of political constraints to the social problems we face and to implementing solutions to these problems.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And then understanding the value of these theories.
Speaker: Speaking of this roundabout way that you kind of took toward eventually studying political science, you took how many years off between undergrad and grad school?
Speaker: I worked for two years.
Speaker: I find it interesting, too, that you didn't need to write a thesis and didn't go through that experience as an undergrad.
Speaker: And then sometime during your time working, you thought to yourself, political science might be the answer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's not enough to know about the economics and the psychology of it per se, but it would be most effective dealing with policies and how those are made.
Speaker: And as you said, understanding political science and working with political science as this highly interdisciplinary framework for
Speaker: various types of issues, either on a local scale or global scale.
Speaker: And so you were working and then you thought to yourself, OK, PhD in political science.
Speaker: Did you think to yourself at any point, maybe a master's?
Speaker: What made you what drew you to a PhD?
Speaker: So I actually started with with a master's degree.
Speaker: So I first started at Columbia in the public policy program.
Speaker: OK, it's a great school after my two years of working.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I would say the place where I was working, it was very research-oriented.
Speaker: It was based out of universities.
Speaker: It's a lot of involvement of researchers and faculty.
Speaker: So I think in my mind, it was always like, oh, this is a really cool way of doing research.
Speaker: It's a really cool way of tackling a lot of these problems.
Speaker: But after being there for a while, you soon realize there's a low ceiling to
Speaker: what you can do without a lot of the graduate training.
Speaker: I didn't have that much of training in statistics or kind of metrics from undergrad.
Speaker: So I really needed that in order to advance in the career and to be able to do better and more rigorous research as well.
Speaker: And at the time, I wasn't sure if that meant doing a PhD or a master's.
Speaker: I wasn't sure if I wanted to commit a long time to a PhD.
Speaker: So I thought a master's was a good in between.
Speaker: And I actually started doing research with a professor while I was at Columbia.
Speaker: And that just got me more into doing research.
Speaker: And I really enjoyed it.
Speaker: So I applied to PhD programs, got into Columbia.
Speaker: And so I just kept going in the same building and everything.
Speaker: Yeah, and then I was really excited about all these different subject matters within political science and just becoming more professionalized in those areas.
Speaker: So before we get into the fields that you were interested in as a burgeoning political scientist, when you transitioned into a PhD program at Columbia, did you have to start again from scratch and then go through and take qualifying exams and then go on?
Speaker: Or did you come in with some sort of transferable credits?
Speaker: Mostly, yeah.
Speaker: I had some classes that the credits did transfer, but for the most part,
Speaker: I did start from scratch.
Speaker: You know, the training is very different from when you're in a master's program from a PhD program.
Speaker: So you really have to dive into
Speaker: all these readings and literature and really understand all these different theories, how they talk to each other.
Speaker: I think in the second or third year is when I took the comprehensive exams comparative politics and quantitative methods.
Speaker: And then started working on dissertation stuff after that.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I didn't expect that your credits would transfer because I know, I think in the UK they sometimes can, but I think in the US typically,
Speaker: when you do a PhD program, even if you have a master's, it's like you're pretty much starting from zero because like you said, it's a different set of skills.
Speaker: It's a different set of training that you have to receive.
Speaker: And even though your qualifying exams do result in like the master's when you do a PhD program, it's not the same thing as doing a master's degree, which is a very, seems much more intensive in a way.
Speaker: Although Columbia, I know is known for having a very rigorous degree
Speaker: graduate curriculum.
Speaker: For example, at Cornell, it was amazing.
Speaker: We could design our own curriculum and we could go in any department we wanted.
Speaker: And I actually applied and got rejected from Columbia for my PhD in musicology, which was fine in the end.
Speaker: Well, I only got into Columbia.
Speaker: I mean, you only need one, right?
Speaker: You only need one.
Speaker: Well, only one into Columbia.
Speaker: I mean, but still, I'm glad, like, in retrospect, I'm really glad that they rejected me because they have two years of required courses that you have to take.
Speaker: And I was like, no.
Speaker: You know, when you're an undergrad, I think it's a different kind of experience.
Speaker: So you must have been in school for a really long time.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: A long time.
Speaker: I guess total grad school, it was...
Speaker: Oh my gosh, I don't even want to count.
Speaker: I think it'd be nine years total.
Speaker: I was going to say, yeah, just you got in the nick of time, just under 10.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: No double digits.
Speaker: Yeah, two years of the master's and then seven of the PhD.
Speaker: That's wild.
Speaker: When you started your PhD program, it seems like you had professors, like you said, they kind of encouraged you.
Speaker: They said, oh, you're doing well, blah, blah.
Speaker: Have you thought about a PhD, right?
Speaker: Did people encourage you?
Speaker: And were you thinking, oh, maybe I could?
Speaker: Yeah, it was a mix of both of...
Speaker: thinking, you know, as I started doing research, being very excited about it, and then also getting good feedback from faculty and being like, oh, you can do this for a living.
Speaker: And
Speaker: You're kind of good at it right now.
Speaker: So doing it for a living.
Speaker: So thinking about career, right?
Speaker: When you were entering grad school at that point, again, entering your PhD program, what were you thinking career-wise?
Speaker: Like, oh, I really like the research aspect of it.
Speaker: Maybe I could stay and be a professor.
Speaker: Were you thinking about leaving the industry?
Speaker: What was the culture like at Columbia in terms of encouraging different career tracks in or even out of academia?
Speaker: I know that's a big question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: At the time, I was fully committed to being a professor.
Speaker: And, you know, I think a lot of people start that way.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: And then, you know, things can change in seven years.
Speaker: And yeah, no, I was, I think for me also like seeing like this model of like the
Speaker: the professor practitioner was really cool in my mind.
Speaker: It's like, because I was exposed to all these people who are doing really cool research, but then also taking it into action.
Speaker: So it's like, oh, cool.
Speaker: I can be like one of those too.
Speaker: And the thing is like, you know, they, those professors do really cool work, but they're, I mean, I don't have the numbers on this, but I don't think they're the majority of faculty.
Speaker: So I was exposed to like a very,
Speaker: selected sample of professors.
Speaker: And I think most faculty, for the most part, their work is more focused on the theoretical part, advancing literatures.
Speaker: So when I started, it was, oh, cool, I'll do the PhD, and then I'll be one of these professors who does all this type of
Speaker: both academic but also practical work.
Speaker: Isn't that like a... I feel like that's such a common theme too with us PhDs.
Speaker: So I did my PhD in musicology and I'm a performing musician.
Speaker: And I also really loved talking about music, writing about music, reading about it and interacting with it.
Speaker: And of course, as an ethnomusicologist, there's also this component of exploring other cultures and kind of being on the ground with your work.
Speaker: And all of that appealed to me like, oh, you can be both...
Speaker: a performer and like, again, this practitioner in a musical sense.
Speaker: And again, an ethnomusicological sense, like an, you know, like an anthropologist of music out in the world, collecting stuff, going to parties in my case, you know, like being a sense of being there.
Speaker: Well, at the same time, that sounds like more fun field work than what I was saying, going to parties.
Speaker: My field work was really fun.
Speaker: It was by design.
Speaker: The theoretical aspect of it, like translating it into theory ended up proving to be
Speaker: kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back.
Speaker: Like I just, how do I put this rave in the, you know, forest Fuji into theoretical terms?
Speaker: Like I, I found a way to do it.
Speaker: That was part of like the gig in my head of like, I'm going to do research on this kind of stuff.
Speaker: I have to find a way to spin it.
Speaker: And it was fun.
Speaker: I, it was, it was a fun intellectual exercise and some, well, not fun.
Speaker: It was a worthwhile one.
Speaker: It wasn't, it wasn't fun.
Speaker: But I think that's like, anyway, I think a lot of us that end up going into PhDs, um,
Speaker: do find these professors early-ish on in our budding careers.
Speaker: And we think, wow, I want a life like that.
Speaker: I want a life like that.
Speaker: Like, that could be me.
Speaker: Especially because with academia, there's this seduction of freedom, right?
Speaker: That you can kind of be relatively autonomous.
Speaker: You can have a foot in this world, have a foot in that world.
Speaker: You have this great schedule where, you know, oh, I'm on sabbatical this year.
Speaker: Oh, I have summers off.
Speaker: And, you know, did that, did that appeal to you?
Speaker: Especially, I mean, you grew up in El Salvador.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Did that freedom of schedule at all and being able to kind of travel, I'm totally projecting here, but was that something that factored into your journey as well?
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: And it was the flexibility of, I mean, not just of schedule, but of being able to work in different areas.
Speaker: capacities, right?
Speaker: So you could be a professor for a while, but then take a sabbatical and work in government for a year or something like that.
Speaker: And maybe I was overexposed to these types being at a public policy school where a lot of the faculty were professors who were also ministers of the economy of the government or something like that.
Speaker: So it's like, oh, cool.
Speaker: I want to be that.
Speaker: But I think part of the problem is that
Speaker: You only see the successful cases, right?
Speaker: Those successful cases are so much more salient than the ones that are not successful.
Speaker: Election bias.
Speaker: Yeah, so you don't see the entire photo.
Speaker: You don't see the adjuncts.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You're not exposed to that.
Speaker: You're not exposed to the people who are not there anymore, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Who are not in academia anymore for whatever reason.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like seeing like someone who won the lottery and has this fantastic life traveling everywhere in the world.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: On the other hand, depending on our timelines, I feel like we might be around the same age-ish.
Speaker: I'm 34, so 1989.
Speaker: I'm 35, so great.
Speaker: And you finished your doctorate in 2020?
Speaker: Last year.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: May of 2022.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So we'll definitely get into what pandemic PhD life was like for you.
Speaker: Although since you were ABD at that time, it probably wasn't that different.
Speaker: I remember feeling in the beginning of grad school, like, wow, those weird latter stage PhD students that like never come around.
Speaker: And if they show up to colloquium, they look like they hate everybody.
Speaker: Like, is that going to be me someday?
Speaker: And then like, I was that weird person showing up and it's like, well, I graduated right before.
Speaker: Or just in general.
Speaker: Just in general, because like you become so isolated, you know, like, yes, you just kind of hold yourself away, you know, living this, you know, this aesthetic lifestyle, like dedicating yourself to your ideas, you know, just I got to make progress in my dissertation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So because our timelines are kind of similar ish, like we were in the academy around the same time.
Speaker: Things really took a nosedive, I would say in the 2010s for the academic job market for various reasons.
Speaker: Maybe when we were undergrads,
Speaker: I did encounter a postdoc here and there.
Speaker: There were some classes that were taught by graduate students, but for the most part, I was interacting with professors.
Speaker: And I imagine at Yale, it was probably a similar environment to Chicago in that aspect, right?
Speaker: Yeah, very similar.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: And I think that that has changed since certainly the time we were kind of coming up with these highly-
Speaker: selectively biased, impressionable ideas of what it meant to be a professor, because I think that back in those days, and I was certainly sold this bill of goods to a certain degree when I arrived at Cornell in 2011, which was, yes, even though it is a pretty competitive market,
Speaker: You're getting your PhD at an Ivy League.
Speaker: You'll be fine, right?
Speaker: You'll get a job.
Speaker: And then by the time I was done my PhD, it was like, oh God, I'll get a job.
Speaker: And then there's like an asterisk.
Speaker: And then you look at the footnote and it's like, but you have to adjunct for at least three years to show your dedication and to cut your teeth and build a new teaching portfolio.
Speaker: Like, wait a minute.
Speaker: And do a postdoc and move around.
Speaker: If you're lucky.
Speaker: You know, postdocs are the new tenured professorships.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And now what they do is they have these one-year postdocs, actually our mutual acquaintance.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I told him that if he...
Speaker: throws in the towel.
Speaker: He's always welcome to come on the show.
Speaker: But he well, he's doing well, but he's he's entering his second postdoc at Princeton starting in the fall.
Speaker: But he's finishing up a one year postdoc at Penn.
Speaker: And we were kind of he was like kind of lamenting to me.
Speaker: Went for a walk a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker: And he was like, you know, the thing is,
Speaker: a one-year postdoc and I'm going to another one-year postdoc that'll probably turn into two but these are kind of indefinite like I'm hoping that you know I have I have faith in him it looks like he's got a really good resume he's doing well he's making connections I think he'll be fine in in achieving what he wants but you know he was saying how when you have like a one-year postdoc you don't even get to really do any research because you're just on the job market looking for your next gig
Speaker: Yeah, it's tough.
Speaker: It's tough.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah, to your point, I do think it's the academic job market has gotten a lot more precarious since the financial crisis of like 08, 09.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: When we were in college at the time, we graduated into a world that the job openings are starting to go down and have kept going down ever since.
Speaker: Yeah, I think there is this false sense that there will be a job available, but maybe they don't tell you what it would take to get that job and all the different sacrifices that you have to do to get that job.
Speaker: But then it's also a numbers game.
Speaker: There are not enough open positions for faculty members these days.
Speaker: I don't know outside of the social sciences, but I know in political science, I think it's like
Speaker: In the last year, only 20% of graduating PhDs were getting tenure track positions.
Speaker: That's actually quite high.
Speaker: There's a book that I brought up in another episode of this podcast that shares a very shocking statistic that for across the board in humanities and social sciences, so including political science, and we'll get back into your content of what you did because I'm very interested in that when you were a PhD student.
Speaker: 93% of PhDs as of 2020 do not go onto the job market.
Speaker: Oof.
Speaker: They do not go on to tenure track positions.
Speaker: They don't go on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So what happens to the rest of us?
Speaker: And I think, again, that's like across the board.
Speaker: So and including fields like mine where, you know, musicology, especially with like these university budget cuts, especially since
Speaker: even before coronavirus, what are the first departments to get slash humanities?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because universities don't want to fund them because they're kind of fluffy.
Speaker: They're not as lucrative for the university.
Speaker: Noam Chomsky talks a lot about the corporatization, the neoliberalization of the university in his writings.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They're becoming a, they are like a business now.
Speaker: They are a business.
Speaker: And that's why, you know, tenure track positions are far more expensive for a university than an adjunct gig, which I adjuncted for one semester and I was like, screw this.
Speaker: I like like teaching students.
Speaker: That was always the joy for me.
Speaker: One of the joys of being an academic.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They're like they're especially undergrads are just the lifeblood of the institution, like grad students.
Speaker: We're all just like, I don't know, I found a lot of them like they used to complain at Cornell, like, oh, the undergrads, blah.
Speaker: And I'm like, do you realize how lucky we are to get to work with Cornell undergrads?
Speaker: Like, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And teaching teaching for me was one of the highlights of the Ph.D. It was super enjoyable.
Speaker: So rewarding.
Speaker: Also.
Speaker: Very rewarding, very energizing, like you get back from the students.
Speaker: So energizing.
Speaker: And you learn a lot because I think you really develop a different understanding of the subject matter when you have to explain it over and over again to different people and you get questions that you never thought about.
Speaker: So yeah, for me, the teaching component was one of the most enjoyable parts of the PhD.
Speaker: And one of the things I miss most of not being in academia anymore
Speaker: this is a great segue to get back into your content as a PhD student.
Speaker: So you started your PhD and you mentioned comparative politics.
Speaker: So what exactly was your course of study?
Speaker: What was your dissertation research on as a political scientist at Columbia?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, comparative politics is like the catch all term for politics that's not in the US.
Speaker: And that just happens to be how,
Speaker: academic departments or political science departments are organized in the US these days where you have American politics as one subfield, political theory as another, international relations as another.
Speaker: And then comparative politics is like
Speaker: politics outside of the US.
Speaker: The West and the rest.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And my research, well, it took me a while to eventually land on my dissertation topic.
Speaker: When I first started, I was really interested in questions of corruption and accountability, and then got more interested in the question of crime, particularly in Latin America, criminal violence in Latin America.
Speaker: even though it's such a big problem in the region, there wasn't that much research in political science to understand the politics of crime and particularly of crime, but also criminal violence at a more organized scale.
Speaker: And I started exploring that literature a bit more, just understanding the connections between political science and crime.
Speaker: How can we understand crime?
Speaker: questions of criminal violence through a political science framework, then eventually, I even forget what my actual dissertation proposal was about, but eventually I landed on this topic that was about understanding the disconnect between actual levels of crime and
Speaker: what politicians campaign on during elections.
Speaker: The idea was that, or the inspiration for this was seeing a lot of electoral campaigns on Latin America in a lot of places that have very high levels of crime where politicians wouldn't even mention crime at all.
Speaker: So it was this question of, wait, what's going on here?
Speaker: Isn't politics supposed to be a place where social problems get solved?
Speaker: You know, citizens express their demands.
Speaker: and say like, look, we're really concerned about all these problems and the politicians are supposed to offer, supply some solutions to these problems.
Speaker: So it seemed to me that there is this disconnect between what voters wanted and what you saw in like public opinion surveys of what the main problem was.
Speaker: and what politicians were offering in campaigns.
Speaker: And that eventually became my dissertation of trying to figure out the reasons for this disconnect.
Speaker: What are the barriers for something, for electoral politics to take us to solutions to crime right now?
Speaker: That's, yeah.
Speaker: In an ideal world, electoral politics is supposed to provide a way to solve these big social problems.
Speaker: So I can't help but think, I'm sure you weren't studying this in the context of, say, New York City, but I know that that was actually a really big issue in the past mayoral election.
Speaker: And I remember feeling very disappointed with the options that were available to us.
Speaker: So last year, I'm sure you remember.
Speaker: Do you remember the big subway shooting at 36th Street?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That is my subway stop.
Speaker: And that really spooked me.
Speaker: And then like about a month later, and I ride a bicycle a lot, less so now that like the delivery people are out and about.
Speaker: Like, I get it.
Speaker: You're trying to, you're doing your job, but it's like kind of scary now to ride a bike on like 4th Avenue in the protected area.
Speaker: Yeah, they can go really fast.
Speaker: Oh my God, they go so fast.
Speaker: And I'm just, sometimes they go the wrong way.
Speaker: It's like, it's chaos.
Speaker: And I'm like, okay, I'm just like riding my little grandma bike.
Speaker: But anyway, I was riding my bike a lot in those days because I just was like,
Speaker: in my subway that's like five blocks from my house like and I know that was like a freak incident etc etc etc but you know I was just like I don't really know if I want to be on the train right now so and I ran a red light on my bicycle and it was on a one-way street where no one was coming and I got pulled over by a cop actually in front of the subway station and I was like I was like is this for me or something going on at the train station he's like it's for you and I was like what did I do he's like do you know what you just did and I was like I actually don't
Speaker: he said you just ran a red light and i was like i actually kind of went off on him i was like there are people getting shot and this is what you do yeah great use of resource i'm appealing my ticket my hearing is in a month two months because it is it was like a year for the next available hearing and uh anyway i'm kind of going off here but the point is like good luck
Speaker: Anyway, like crime in like New York, I feel like it's become so politicized now where we are that it's sort of like this interesting thing where it doesn't need to be politicized.
Speaker: Why does it need to be politicized in this very toxic American context where it's like either you agree with one side or you're a literal Nazi or on the other side, you're like a ghoul from the Stone Age.
Speaker: I'm like, these are the options like across the board politically.
Speaker: So I'm assuming that since you did comparative politics that you weren't talking about these particular issues in an American context, right?
Speaker: I wasn't, no, but that was a question that came up a lot was trying to understand, because I was doing it more in the context of Mexico, you know, very different context because it's more organized violence from drug cartels.
Speaker: So it's a problem that has been in Mexico for a long time and has only been increasing.
Speaker: And the problem has been just getting worse and worse and just metastasizing.
Speaker: I think that's like one key difference between the situation in Mexico and the situation in the U.S. where it's more variable.
Speaker: In the U.S., crime goes up, crime also goes down.
Speaker: There's more variability in that sense.
Speaker: The other thing that's very different for the US that doesn't play a big role in the Mexican context is race, where a lot of times when we talk about crime in the US, there are a lot of dog whistles around that issue.
Speaker: So it ends up being politicized a lot because of the race component.
Speaker: The particularities of the American social fabric.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Your research sounds really fascinating and really timely and highly applicable.
Speaker: And I was also kind of wondering, and I guess you've kind of answered it, like when he's talking about crime, is he talking about like civilian crime or more like organized crime or even like corruption?
Speaker: And it seems like you're kind of working with all three of those on some level when you talk about crime, no?
Speaker: in my dissertation, it was more on organized crime.
Speaker: So violence coming from drug trafficking organizations, drug cartels, less so like street crime, like someone stealing your wallet or something like that.
Speaker: But it's more like the issues in the Mexican context, it's more like things like homicides, femicides,
Speaker: kidnap hangs.
Speaker: extortions, that type of crime.
Speaker: Higher scale sorts of things.
Speaker: So thank you for explaining and getting back into your experience researching these issues.
Speaker: So you took your qualifying exam second, third year, and then your ABD.
Speaker: And you, this must have been, so if you finished in 2022 and you did, so around like 2018, you were probably.
Speaker: That must have been
Speaker: I think 2018 was when I defended my dissertation.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, so you were still thinking to yourself probably through the qualifying exams, right?
Speaker: Like, oh, I want to be a professor.
Speaker: This is great.
Speaker: This is great.
Speaker: But clearly there's been a shift because what do you do now?
Speaker: Now I'm a data analyst for a think tank called New America.
Speaker: That's yes.
Speaker: I cannot wait to hear more about that.
Speaker: Obviously you did not become a professor.
Speaker: What changed?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: A lot of things.
Speaker: So in terms of the research, well, the way I was doing the research definitely changed a lot because of the pandemic where, you know, you couldn't travel or do a lot of the field work that I wanted to do.
Speaker: So I had to switch to figure out ways to answer the questions I had, but using existing data that I could
Speaker: access from my lockdown apartment in New York.
Speaker: So I ended up doing a lot more text analysis of
Speaker: electoral campaigns or the campaign ads in Mexico.
Speaker: They listened to a lot of campaign spots to understand where politicians were talking about crime and what other issues they were talking about, if not crime.
Speaker: And so that was a big pivot.
Speaker: And then what changed in terms of wanting to be a professor?
Speaker: I think, you know, when you're in
Speaker: the phd a long time you start realizing more of the the nitty-gritty of academia and how it actually works and it's you know you start seeing the more complete photo that you didn't see before when you only saw the successful uh professors and you know you heard more of people who were
Speaker: going to other places or in academia and starting to hear or listen about the experiences of other people in the job market and just realizing that there are not that many political science jobs available either.
Speaker: And I think definitely a lot of
Speaker: This introspection came from being in lockdown New York and just having a lot of time to think of what I wanted out of life, especially in a time when when life felt so precarious here.
Speaker: And I was still super.
Speaker: I'm still I mean, I still deal with a lot of research.
Speaker: I'm still very excited about research.
Speaker: I think I became more disillusioned with.
Speaker: with the industry of publishing papers in academia.
Speaker: And I realized, well, publishing papers is how you get ahead in academia.
Speaker: That's how you get hired, that's how you get promoted, how you get tenured.
Speaker: And it's not an enjoyable process.
Speaker: A lot of times I ended up even like resenting my own work just because the peer review process made me change things in the paper in so many ways that you couldn't even recognize the paper anymore.
Speaker: Or the paper gets rejected everywhere.
Speaker: So I realized, well, if I don't enjoy the one thing that gets you ahead in academia, maybe academia is not
Speaker: the place for me.
Speaker: And realizing also that you can still do research in other contexts.
Speaker: It doesn't have to be in a university, but you can still do a lot of similar research in other places, whether it's in government or in the private sector or in NGOs or in think tanks.
Speaker: So once I realized that, it's like, oh, look, all these people are doing research, just not in a tenure track capacity.
Speaker: I think it really made me realize that there are other things to do out there and that there is this exit ramp from academia.
Speaker: I didn't want to...
Speaker: move around a lot.
Speaker: I really like New York and I don't want to leave.
Speaker: And in the academic job market, you really don't have any choice of where you end up.
Speaker: There's a lot of really good schools that are really far away from cities.
Speaker: I love cities, so I don't want to be far away from a city.
Speaker: yeah, I just said I want to like uproot, you know, so many years in New York and then start over again somewhere else.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: For maybe even just a year or two years or whatever it is.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's such a big thing about academia that you don't even really think about at the time, but yeah, you know, just like you don't get to choose where you live.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And those are some of the things that,
Speaker: I didn't know going into a PhD program just a lot of these sacrifices that you have to do for a faculty position.
Speaker: Well, even if you took a really good job at a city that you really like, you might have to move six years later or 10 years later if you don't get tenure.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: In a sense, yeah, maybe not so much disillusionment, but I guess like relief that I didn't have to do that.
Speaker: That shows a lot of self-containment.
Speaker: I really appreciate that, that like you didn't see that as, you know, wasted years per se, but you were just like, you know, okay, then it's not for me.
Speaker: It's like dating, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think the big shift that we'll hopefully go through is you're not trying to prove like, oh, I'm good enough for someone else.
Speaker: You're trying to prove like,
Speaker: try to find out if it's a good fit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, it's not about like worth or anything like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah, because it's not, I don't regret doing a PhD.
Speaker: Like I think, I mean, I really enjoyed it while I was there.
Speaker: It's such a unique time.
Speaker: Your job is to,
Speaker: read and write and do research and teach.
Speaker: So for me it was- And think.
Speaker: And think.
Speaker: And like despite the existential crises, it was still very enjoyable.
Speaker: And I learned a lot and made really good friends in the PhD as well.
Speaker: Yeah, for me, it was more of like a, I think I started seeing a PhD more of like a one of many ways of gaining expertise in a particular topic.
Speaker: So that was... That seems very on brand.
Speaker: Yeah, it just happened to be my path to, you know.
Speaker: Yes, in that sense, it was, you know, it's not something that, you know, I wasn't like,
Speaker: regretting the decision or mad.
Speaker: They're like, oh, they spent all this time.
Speaker: But I think, you know, I learned a lot about myself about what I wanted out of life as well.
Speaker: So it was a very valuable experience for me.
Speaker: That's beautiful.
Speaker: I really love that.
Speaker: You know, and I'll just say, like, for me, it was a very, I understand, like, this relief aspect of what you were saying very much.
Speaker: Like, when I reached a point where I just, producing my dissertation, I had a technical glitch, right?
Speaker: that I couldn't find the Word document, only the PDF after I'd submitted to my committee and I had to integrate a couple of edits.
Speaker: And you can't with a 350 page document, you can't just like put it into like ilovepdf.com convert into Word document.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: Especially it was like I had significant portions in Japanese and like trying to figure, like I had to end up retyping a bit of my dissertation.
Speaker: Like just like I found an older copy, not the latest, but a later copy in the cloud.
Speaker: And I was like, I just have to edit this.
Speaker: That experience brought me to like a brink.
Speaker: And I realized if this is going to be my life of like stress and all of this, like I don't want to go up for tenure.
Speaker: And I did feel a lot of relief.
Speaker: But on the other hand, I was, you know, as an ethnomusicologist, figuring out what my transferable job skills are has been like its own journey.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Finishing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think I had a lot of relief from the decision to not continue in academia.
Speaker: And that's not to say that the world outside of academia is not complicated.
Speaker: I think there's also a lot of uncertainty.
Speaker: For me, it was just not having that uncertainty in the career that is so dependent on so many random forces, but also on all these politics within departments or within universities.
Speaker: that can determine whether you get a job or whether you get tenured.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It is a lottery.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And I think in non-academic settings, you have a bit more agency over that because in academia, you might put a lot of work into something, but maybe that year they're not hiring in your field or there are no openings in your field.
Speaker: Too bad.
Speaker: Too bad, right?
Speaker: Whereas I feel like in non-academic settings, because there's so many different models of success outside of academia, whereas in academia, success is so well-defined as... Tenure track.
Speaker: You get your tenure track job, then you get tenure.
Speaker: So that is success.
Speaker: You publish and you get tenure.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: I might be extrapolating here, but it seems like a theme that I'm picking up from hearing your story is that you're comfortable in these environments where you have to stitch together various elements.
Speaker: You're comfortable being adaptable.
Speaker: It's okay with you to kind of...
Speaker: This seems to be like a theme, like back to your undergrad, right?
Speaker: You had two majors because you could find that space in between, you know, that that was something that you could generate meaning from and then Oh, public policy, and then Oh, political science, like there seems to be, you keep your options open in a way.
Speaker: And it seems like that's been kind of liberating for you again, relief, and you work for New America.
Speaker: So in addition to hearing if you think my assessment of your adaptability is correct, I'd love to hear more about what you do now, what you find gratifying about it, and how you use your degree in the course of your day-to-day life, your day-to-day activities.
Speaker: I don't know if I'm that good with change or that adaptable.
Speaker: I think I can be a creature of habit a lot of times.
Speaker: But yeah, maybe I just like to keep different options open, but I'm finally with different scenarios.
Speaker: And so now I work for New America, which is a think tank.
Speaker: They're based out of D.C.
Speaker: They work remotely here from New York.
Speaker: And I'm in the political reform team there.
Speaker: And I think half, it's a small team, this political reform team.
Speaker: And I think half of us have PhDs in political science.
Speaker: And I think half of us have PhDs in political science.
Speaker: Yeah, I got really lucky with this position because it combined a lot of what I wanted in a non-economic job, a lot of doing research, but also research in social science, political science, subject matter.
Speaker: Because when I was looking for jobs, the skills from political science, I think they're
Speaker: They're very transferable to a lot of different areas, particularly the research skills, because a lot of the statistics and the survey research skills can be applied to a lot of different sectors.
Speaker: And I wanted something that combined the research skills, but still with research.
Speaker: policy or political science.
Speaker: So this ended up being a good combination of both because it's a lot of data work, like the day-to-day is a lot of collecting data, analyzing data, and writing results and briefs based on the data.
Speaker: And the subject matter, even though it's quite different from what I did on my PhD, it's still super fascinating to me because it's on intellectual reform in the US.
Speaker: So
Speaker: The overarching goal of New America is finding ways to move the United States to a multi-party democracy.
Speaker: So doing research on what would it take to get there?
Speaker: What are the electoral reforms that need to happen for more parties to emerge so that we can move beyond this two-party doom loop, as my colleague calls it?
Speaker: That is so amazing.
Speaker: So yeah, you answered my question by multi-party.
Speaker: You mean like, for example, a viable third party or something like that instead of having these two sides of the same coin that we have now.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And ideally we'd have something like five or six parties, something like that.
Speaker: That seems to be a healthy number of parties based on the experience of other countries.
Speaker: And it's been really fun because, you know, a lot of the research that you read in comparative politics as a PhD student, the big component is electoral systems and voting systems and how all these different systems work in different countries and the consequences that they have for voter behavior, for politician behavior.
Speaker: So it's been really cool to have that background and then
Speaker: contextualize it to the United States as well.
Speaker: So getting like lessons from all over the world to then apply them to, to the United States context.
Speaker: That's fascinating.
Speaker: And that's, it's, it's been, yeah, it's been a really interesting way to combine both like the, like the research research,
Speaker: skills and like the quantitative methodologies that I'm interested in, but also get to learn a lot about American politics through the framework, through the lens of comparative politics as well.
Speaker: Would you say that you're happy in your position now?
Speaker: You wouldn't like say someone said, Oscar, here's a tenure track PhD or tenure track professor job.
Speaker: Would you stay where you are now?
Speaker: I would probably stay right now.
Speaker: Wow, that's great.
Speaker: Okay, great.
Speaker: I love this.
Speaker: It's like a happy story with a happy, well, I don't want to call it an ending, but a happy-ish conclusion.
Speaker: A happy start.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: A new start.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: A new start.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: To close up, if there was any advice or guidance or resource that you wish that you had had when you started to question, like, huh, maybe this academia thing isn't necessarily compatible with what I want out of life, what would that look like?
Speaker: I would say, one, talk to a lot of people, especially talk to people outside of academia just to get a sense of
Speaker: different trajectories, different experiences, different job sectors out there.
Speaker: That for me was super helpful.
Speaker: Just reaching out to people.
Speaker: One thing I did was reaching out to a lot of political science PhD students who were not working in non-academic settings and just interviewing them and learning from their experience.
Speaker: And that was super helpful for me.
Speaker: And then
Speaker: The other is that there's just realizing that you can, you know, anyone who's in a PhD program is there because they enjoy doing research and we enjoy going deep into a subject and finding something new and, you know, the thrill of like, oh, I discovered something or like I figured a new way to look at something.
Speaker: You can do that in academia.
Speaker: You can also do that in other contexts as well.
Speaker: So research is not synonymous with academia.
Speaker: So I think that for me was a big eye-opening realization.
Speaker: It's like, oh, I can do research elsewhere as well.
Speaker: Yeah, and the other, I would say like, you know, just...
Speaker: Yeah, not being afraid.
Speaker: Well, I mean, just like there shouldn't be a stigma of exploring non-academic options or being interested in non-academic options, particularly because a non-academic option will be the outcome for most people in academia.
Speaker: And I mean, that could be a whole other podcast of ways that
Speaker: PhD programs need to change and academia needs to change to adapt to this new reality.
Speaker: So if you go with that realization, I think it makes it a lot easier to decide not to continue with the academic job market.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: And I honestly...
Speaker: I wish that I had known about people leaving too and just hearing their stories and hearing like, it'll be okay.
Speaker: You will be okay.
Speaker: Especially since I have a good friend who's hanging on for dear life.
Speaker: And she had a lectureship that got demoted to an adjunctship.
Speaker: And now she's getting paid a third to do what she had already been doing for a couple of years.
Speaker: And she's like, I don't know what to do.
Speaker: I don't know what to do.
Speaker: I think that there is this taboo that hopefully we can, you know, smash here by just sharing people's stories.
Speaker: There need not be, especially since, like you said, the majority of us, we don't go on to academic jobs.
Speaker: How can we figure out how to use our skills?
Speaker: How can we rewire our way of thinking about our careers, you know?
Speaker: And maybe I think especially for humanities people, we're kind of, how do you make a living out of music?
Speaker: You know, there's like very, very few options for that.
Speaker: Being a professor was one of the,
Speaker: seductive ways for that.
Speaker: But there are there are solutions.
Speaker: We just have to be creative about it.
Speaker: Like you have kind of shown with your story, you know, be willing to occupy multiple spaces at once and be comfortable with that.
Speaker: I think that that's very inspiring.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I would also say that be willing to learn from outside of academia as well, because I think
Speaker: A lot of the frustration comes because for a lot of PhD students comes from you only see stories of success within academia.
Speaker: So, you know, you see the tenure faculty, you see your colleagues who go on and get really good jobs.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: universities and you get socialized into thinking that success is getting one of these jobs success is getting tenure at an academic institution absolutely and because of that you don't really pay attention to to stories of success outside of academia so just learning about you know what does it look like to have a non-academic trajectory with a phd and like what is success
Speaker: the different shapes that success can take outside of an academic career.
Speaker: And you're a testament to that.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: It's amazing.
Speaker: It seems like too, you're actually really, you're doing what you had set out to do in the first place.
Speaker: Like you are actually using what you've learned and the research that you've done to actually implement a kind of tangible change.
Speaker: That's beautiful.
Speaker: Like, look at you, you're doing it.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that, that is like something really exciting of, uh,
Speaker: a lot of non-academic jobs that you can take is that you can still do a lot of the research, but in a lot of these other positions, like the research has to be useful.
Speaker: Like at the end of the day, that research has to move some needle somewhere.
Speaker: It has to change someone's way of thinking about something.
Speaker: It has to influence someone.
Speaker: So there's more action associated with it.
Speaker: You can still do it in academia, but unfortunately,
Speaker: for most academics, the way you get ahead in the field is by publishing.
Speaker: And universities often don't value applying that work to policy problems or to social problems.
Speaker: That only happens usually after tenure.
Speaker: And whereas you can take your skills and have
Speaker: an impact in the world.
Speaker: And that for me is super exciting.
Speaker: And I mean, hopefully, like, hopefully we're helping define a path towards a multi-party democracy in the U.S. and help democracy in the U.S. And that for me is super exciting, super meaningful, and very rewarding.
Speaker: It definitely makes the research far more exciting than if I were just writing for
Speaker: The journals.
Speaker: To satisfy a reviewer for the journal.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: And hey, when a viable third party, I don't want to say a viable third party candidate.
Speaker: We've had a couple.
Speaker: I voted for them.
Speaker: There have been a couple, yeah.
Speaker: But one of the things you learn in political science is that the electoral institutions matter a lot in terms of defining the number of parties.
Speaker: So hopefully when the parties expand, I'll have you to thank.
Speaker: So, well, this has been a pleasure.
Speaker: It's been fascinating talking with you.
Speaker: You're so intelligent and so articulate.
Speaker: And I've learned so much.
Speaker: So thank you.
Speaker: Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker: And thanks for having me.
Speaker: It's been so much fun.
Speaker: Oh, great.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Excited to hear more of these stories come out and hopefully...
Speaker: we can inspire someone out there to do what makes them happy.
Speaker: Just as a way to close, I remember I was really lucky at Columbia that I had really amazing advisors.
Speaker: And I remember telling one of my main advisors that I didn't want to do the academic job market.
Speaker: And she said, well, you know, in life you have to do what makes you happy.
Speaker: So, you know, whether that's academia or non-academic jobs, you have to do what makes you happy.
Speaker: True and Wise Words via Oscar Pocasangre, PhD in Political Science.
Speaker: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Academic Defectors.
Speaker: I am your host, Dr. Jillian Marshall.
Speaker: Catch you next time.
