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How do you align you career to your values, interests and skills?
Rob Pearson is here to help answer this question. As Assistant Dean of Professional Development and Career Planning at Emory University in the Laney Graduate School, Rob specializes in helping students answer the hard questions. He knows that career planning can be daunting, but that it doesn’t have to be!
Episode #5 of the Informational Interview 2.0 Podcast uncovers tips, tricks, and tools to help those who are asking what the next steps are for their future.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Innovation in higher education: how universities can prepare their students for success
- The process of evaluating career options starting with your values, skills, and goals
- Tips for graduate students on how to communicate, network, and market themselves
- The importance of harnessing and showcasing your strengths (We LOVE Clifton Strengths!)
- How and where you can develop a digital footprint
- Why networking is valuable and how to improve your skills
- How educators can inspire, mentor and support their students effectively
- Navigating the future of innovation and career planning.
About Rob Pearson
Rob Pearson currently serves as Assistant Dean of Professional Development and Career Planning in the Laney Graduate School at Emory University. He earned a PhD in musicology from Brandeis University in 2011, after which he worked as a faculty member in music history for four years. A committed champion of graduate education, Rob moved into the graduate and postdoctoral career development field, in which he has worked for the last four years helping graduate students and postdocs imagine the range of diverse career options available to them.
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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT
Heidi Scott Giusto
Hello and welcome to the informational interview 2.0 podcast where we discuss how communications can spark innovation in career growth. Today, I’m fortunate to have Rob Pearson as my guest. He is Assistant Dean of Professional Development and Career Planning at Emory University in the Laney Graduate School. Thank you so much for being here. And I would love for you to tell me a little bit more about what you do at Emory.
Rob Pearson
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me. As you said, I’m the assistant dean of professional development and career planning in the Laney Graduate School at Emory. I’ve been in my role for about nine months. And in that role, I oversee programs and workshops related to the professional development of our graduate students, whether they’re interested in pursuing careers in academia or beyond academia. This is part of my portfolio. In addition to that I oversee the training program for teaching assistants at Emory called TATTO. It stands for a teaching assistant training and teaching opportunity.
Heidi Scott Giusto
It’s memorable. I love it. It’s not what you know, think of tattoos in higher ed at all. So
Rob Pearson
Yeah, it’s the teaching assistant training and teaching Opportunity Program. And it encompasses training TAs to become excellent at working with their students and adaptable and great teachers and set them on a path to becoming excellent teachers in their careers. And I also oversee the Jones program in ethics with my team, which is a required training in ethics for all doctoral students at Emory.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Wow, that’s wonderful. I’m impressed that they’re that Emory is offering TA training like it. So it’s a formal program that TAs have to go through that’s innovative in and of itself to me. I remember my first grading as a grading assistant. That first experience was kind of terrifying to me. It turned out okay, but it was terrifying. I was thrown into it.
Rob Pearson
I think it can be scary for some TAs, but we want to make them feel that they are supported before their first TA experience and that they’re supported throughout their time serving as teaching assistants at Emory.
Heidi Scott Giusto
That’s wonderful. So that struck me is you know, so my co-host and I, Kevin Anselmo, we’re interested in innovation. And that just on its own sounds innovative to me. Can you tell me a little bit more about what innovative ways is Emory helping students prepare for their career? So the TA understands for grad school, but tell me a little bit more about for beyond that, beyond grad school?
Rob Pearson
Yeah, I mean, I think you know, we are engaged in several different kind of, I guess you would call them interventions, ways to prepare graduate students for the wide range of careers available to them. But I would just say that, you know, my belief is that graduate school, in many ways is already preparing graduate students for diverse career paths, even if it isn’t always evident how that is happening. So we like to–exactly, so, you know, we’re really focused on giving graduate students the tools that they need to be able to communicate their experience in a way that’s meaningful to diverse audiences, whether that is employers in the business world or in the nonprofit sector, or whether it’s talking about what it means to be a teaching assistant to diverse employers, we want graduate students to be able to communicate their value. And so we’ve set up a number of programs to help them gain facility with interacting with diverse employers and in various industries, as well as training set up to help them communicate their research and their experience as a graduate student in those kinds of forums.
Heidi Scott Giusto
And I think that’s wonderful because so much of this, I’m not sure if you use the word but I think of it as an act of translation because the communicating that to diverse audiences what I find with what I do because I work so much on resumes and I do help grad students go from CV to resume. Sometimes they’re not sure. They intuitively know they can do a particular job that interests them. But they’re not sure how to communicate that to the target audience. So the key example I think of is when you see a job, and it talks about coaching and training, and someone says, “Well, I’ve never done coaching and training. I feel like I can do it. But I’ve only done teaching.” And they’re, you know, they’re so interrelated. It’s helping people or a lot of what I do is I help people translate that and communicate, it’s like, we feel like you can do it because you can do it and you have been doing it through all this teaching you’ve been doing and having office hours and one on one sessions with students. So I really appreciate that. So tell me a little bit more about how you work with individuals and how do you if you’re sitting down and you’re meeting with a grad student, how do you help them gain clarity on their goals and what they want to do?
Rob Pearson
I think it’s important to create a space where graduate students feel that they can work through their ideas about their future careers in a supportive environment. And that could mean a lot of different things. You know, we have a number of tools that we refer our graduate students to, and we work with him on tools that are meant to help graduate students gain clarity on their goals. But I think one way to tackle this problem is to back up a little bit. And instead of starting from the point of like, what’s the end, right? Yeah. Like, what’s that concrete job that you want? A lot of graduate students may not know what those jobs are, or what’s even available to them. And so we have to kind of back up a little bit and maybe take stock of our skills, and interests and values and things that are maybe a little bit more abstract because it’s once we’ve got a handle on skills, interests, values, qualifications, then it’s maybe easier to think about how those things might translate in a variety of fields. That’s a little bit different from the way it might work in some contexts where you you want to start with “What is your ultimate goal?” And then work backwards from that. And I think that’s an important strategy as well. But you know, we’ve known for a long time in this field that people with advanced degrees can do so many different things. But as we’re going through the process of graduate education, it’s not always clear what those things are. So we want to make sure that our grad students first are thinking about their own experiences and what’s important to them, while also at the same time exploring the range of diverse career options available to them when they graduate.
Heidi Scott Giusto
I have to ask, are you familiar with Clifton Strengths?
Rob Pearson
I am.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Have you heard of that one? So do you do you like that assessment?
Rob Pearson
I love Strengths Finder.
Heidi Scott Giusto
I do too! I can geek out on Clifton strengths because it gave me that type of clarity. I’d love to hear your thoughts because I immediately thought of that when you’re saying skills, interests values, and I’m immediately thinking, “Strengths!” So what are your thoughts? I’d love to hear your insight.
Rob Pearson
I think the Strengths Finder assessment is really excellent. And the reason is because it’s so positive. I mean, it takes a good starting point that everyone has something wonderful about them, and that you can contribute in different ways. I really value that because I think it really is inclusive of the diversity of all of us. And it helps people acquire language to talk about themselves in a positive way.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Do you want to hear my experience with it? Sure. Yeah. Well, I tell my clients, it’s not required that people take this assessment before working with me, but anyone who I work with, I encourage them to, and I tell them, it’s inexpensive as well. You think I was representing them? I don’t, I just think it’s a really good assessment. But I call it the great equalizer, because there’s these 34 strengths and we all have one through five and we all have 29 through 34. And so any listener if you haven’t heard of this, I should have said this first. The Clifton strengths used to be called Strengths Finder recently rebranded is backed by over 50 years of research from Gallup. And the whole premise is that we’re happiest and most productive when we operate from our strengths. And to what Rob what you are saying is, I have found too, that a lot of times it gives people language, and it has this wonderful ability to increase self awareness of the person because they might not realize that one of the things for instance, is focus. And a person who is has a top strength and focus, they might be able to focus, not surprising, on a task for an immense period of time. And they just take that for granted. They don’t know that every everybody can’t do that. No, no, everybody can’t. So it’s this. It’s empowering, to your point. It’s very positive. I don’t think there’s anything in there that I’ve worked with somebody who said, “Oh, this doesn’t feel like a strength.” So I think we agree that it’s a great tool. And for me, my background is I have a PhD in history from Duke. And somehow I ended up deciding my plan A was to own a business, and I’m going to write resumes. That’s not the most common transition. But the Strengths Finder report gave me some clarity on that, of why why this made sense why it was logical. So I’m not surprised to hear that you also like it. And I suspect when the students when they take that assessment, they probably do find that they have those kind of moments of, Wow, this is awesome. Like, this is me. Do you find that as well?
Rob Pearson
I do. I think it helps. It helps give them language to talk about their experiences. That’s maybe different from how they’re used to talking about their work in graduate school. So I’m thinking about my own experience, for example. So I’m a musicologist. I studied late 18th and early 19th century music. I was really great at musical analysis. And there was a time when I graduated. And I felt that my primary skill that I acquired in graduate school was musical analysis, which in the context of the world outside of music scholarship, that doesn’t seem like a very, you know, transferable skill. But when you take a tool like Strengths Finder, or really any tool, and you start seeing how, you know, that I bring to this process of musical analysis, a strength of intellectual and the ability to see patterns and the ability to find meaning in patterns. Not surprising that I would be also interested in musical analysis. But that helps me to see that maybe I would also be good in other environments where I’d be doing similar activities, identifying patterns, thinking, logically and strategically through evidence I’m looking at.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Awesome. We both love — we’re are both fans of Strengths Finder here. I want to move on a little bit. I know that you and I are connected on LinkedIn, which is one way a person can have a digital footprint. Of course there are others. I know Twitter is a big player, so to speak among academics. A lot of academics are on Twitter. Can you tell me a little bit about the role a digital footprint plays in career development in nurturing new and innovative ideas?
Rob Pearson
Yeah, I think a lot of folks value the ability to have a presence online. And there are a lot of reasons for that. I’ve seen many scholars become very active on Twitter and really build wonderful and nurturing communities around people who care about the same research questions and professional questions that you do. One of the things I love about Twitter is, you know, it’s got a kind of language of its own and a way of operating that idiosyncratic to Twitter. Whereas on Facebook, you would not generally send a friend request to someone that you don’t know that you have maybe some professional interests with. On Twitter it’s very natural. And it’s actually, it’s common to send messages or to interact in conversations with other people who might even be way ahead of you in your career, but still be someone that shares an interest with you. So I found that it’s a really great way to build a network, even if it’s a network outside of the communities that you’re typically thinking about operating in. So in my field, musicology, we have a robust community of folks who use Twitter. And it tends to be a very supportive environment, inclusive environment that, you know, really, actually spills outside of the digital platform. So when we go to academic conferences, or we meet each other, you know, around in the musicology world, it’s not uncommon for those groups to have personal or in person meetups to kind of bring that conversation back in. to the real world, I think that’s a really valuable way in which it operates. You also see really robust conversations on Twitter happening alongside in person academic events, like conferences, or even just kind of academic, the academic world. And so, you know, even if you’re not able to attend a conference, for example, you’re often able to participate in an academic conversation about the scholarship taking place there by being there on Twitter and interacting with folks who are there.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Yeah, I love the point you made about how, like all these different social platforms, they have their own culture. And you know, on Facebook, yeah, if you get some requests to friend requests from someone you don’t know, some people are okay with that. But most of us are not. It’s like, oh, ignore or decline. At least. That’s how I am.
Rob Pearson
Is that why you declined my friend request?
Heidi Scott Giusto
Hahaha oops. I feel like when I think of the some of the major platforms, and I know there are so many, but the ones that I’m most familiar with and work with are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And it’s kind of like LinkedIn. If you’re connecting with somebody you don’t actually know. Part of your point is maybe like further in their career or something. You want to be customizing a request. Otherwise, someone’s gonna think well, why is this person connecting with me? Facebook, at least for me, and I knew people use it differently, but is much more of people I actually know. And for the record readers, I don’t think you actually try to friend me. So I will accept we know each other. Twitter though is more of, you can follow, you can connect, you can direct message, somebody and it’s totally acceptable even if you don’t know them. If you’ve been following the same thread, same conversations. That has been my understanding. It sounds like you, you see that as well. And yeah, I know too going to conferences, Twitter, it’s like, what’s the hashtag? You know? Now, I remember back in grad school when I went to the conferences, there was no hashtag for the conference. Now, the first day you’re there even in advance. It’s like, oh, what’s the hashtag? What are we all tweeting? So I think it’s an interesting platform. And it’s neat to me that you that you’ve actually then met up with some of the people that you have first connected with through Twitter and you have met them in person, then it sounds like that’s been the case.
Rob Pearson
That has been my experience. I mean, I think part of it is that it’s a it’s just a great environment to be able to continue academic conversations and really blend between, you know, the fixed time when you’re at a conference and versus the sort of extended life of that conference outside of those boundaries. So it’s been very helpful for graduate students I work with and for me, frankly, to be able to build a network of people who’ve been care about the same things that I do and who might offer unique perspectives on challenges I’m facing in my research in my work and my career, that can be really useful. So I know on Twitter, a lot of conversations actually happened around, you know, professional developments. So academics talking about their research, but also talking about the diverse range of career options available, how to prepare for diverse career options, sharing resources related to career preparation, like online webinars and other workshops. You know, that’s been really interesting. And I found it to be really a good thing to see these conversations about career and professional development raised in their visibility.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Yeah, and my Twitter presence, which is, is I give myself like a B, maybe on my Twitter. I can be more active, but it’s almost exclusively around professional development in that academic sense and setting and I know one of the organizations dedicated to helping grad students as well. They have a huge Twitter presence is Beyond Prof is what I call it it Beyond the Professoriate. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them or follow. Talk about a presence there. And I know the one co-founder, I remember years back, I was just so amazed at the 10s of thousands of followers she had, and it’s all around and it was exclusively around the idea because her handle is “From PhD to life.” And just all these conversations around —
Rob Pearson
Is that Jen?
Heidi Scott Giusto
Jen Polk Yeah. Yeah,
Rob Pearson
Yeah Jen. I know. I totally agree. They have done great work. When I was first entering this field. I took my advice now that I’m giving to graduate students, which is to sort of be active and to write little blurbs and articles. And I remember when I was first entering the field of graduate and post career development, I wrote an article about the I think it was like seven careers you can consider outside of academia or something, instead of becoming a professor, and I remember I wrote this thing on LinkedIn thinking, “Why? Why not? I’ll just write something.” And Jen found it and tweeted it. And it, you know, LinkedIn at that time, I don’t know if it still tracks the number of views you have on your articles. And I remember thinking, “Wow, people actually cared about this.” And it was because of her sharing, sharing that, that resource with her followers.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Oh, that’s such a nice story. Did you ever tell her that?
Rob Pearson
I actually did. Yeah, years later, I told her, because that was that was what I needed at that time. That was, you know, I had just graduated and I wasn’t really sure where I think I had, I had just sort of left my what was going to be my last faculty position at that time. You know, I really wasn’t 100% sure what to do. So I had been doing all this research on careers. Research, which I later found out was going to be valuable to other people as well. So I was glad to be able to share it and glad for that community that they had.
Heidi Scott Giusto
That’s wonderful. So do you want to talk a little bit about your career path? And how you because it is sound sounded like you’ve been whether the words innovative or creative or however with your own career where you you’ve made a pivot. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Rob Pearson
Yeah, I’m happy to talk about my own experience. I graduated with my PhD in musicology from Brandeis in 2011, fully expecting to pursue a career as a scholar as a musicologist. And I actually pursued that career path for about four years after I graduated. And I had a handful of positions, all of which were fixed term, before I finally had one final offer after four years of doing this for yet another fixed term position. And I just decided I didn’t really want to do that. And by then I had kind of set down roots where I was living, and I had a partner and I had dogs and I had, I didn’t want to move across the country and move my family at that time. And so I made a decision to pursue other career paths. And so I spent a lot of time exploring what I could do networking. meeting other people who had kind of like, gone before me people with musicology degrees, but also people with other humanities degrees. And really I was just curious, “what are people with PhDs doing?” You know, there are not large numbers of us. I mean, there are a lot of people getting PhDs, but in terms of folks pursuing diverse career paths, you know, we’re, we’re talking about each person kind of having to forge their own path and identify or really innovate for themselves, what career paths might intersect well with their own interests and values. And so that’s kind of what I did. I went through this career exploration process. And I learned from that, that I just loved that process of identifying my skills and my values and imagining different possibilities for myself. And that’s what I wanted to be able to do with graduate students. And so actually, while I was a faculty member, I was already thinking about this because I would put on what now I would identify as CV workshops, and resume workshops for my doctoral students. And they weren’t I realized they weren’t really good. Getting that anywhere else. And I really enjoyed doing it a lot. And so when I saw that there was this field of folks dedicated to the professional development of graduate students and postdocs, I just dove in fully. And this is the path I’ve been on for like the last four years.
Heidi Scott Giusto
And it sounds to me just the way you’re talking about it, it sounds like it’s been a good fit.
Rob Pearson
I think it has been a good fit. I also think it’s an important time to be doing it, because we know that graduate students are entering the world with with wonderful contributions and having made just major contributions to the world. Intellectual, scholarly contributions, but also they’ve just given up themselves throughout the process of graduate education. And, you know, I really care a lot that those folks they feel supported and they can imagine, they really can take on board that there really are a range of things they can do after they leave graduate school.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Yeah, it’s so rewarding to be able to feel like you’re in charge. Have your career path. And ideally, everybody gets to feel that way. But in practice it, you know, across society overall, I think a lot of people don’t feel that way. Otherwise you wouldn’t have all these polls and stuff that show just what percentage of Americans are unhappy or burned out or this or that and being willing to take that, I don’t know if we want to call it risk or what but that next step that feels a little bit like “oh, well, this isn’t exactly what I did study for a dozen years.” And that’s okay. Or at least for me, it was about a dozen years when you get your bachelor’s through PhD. And I know for me, at least, when I made my switch, and I went through a similar process of and I use Dukes Career Resources, and that’s partly why I’m so interested in learning about what universities are doing now too, because I’m sure it’s changed. It’s been eight years since I defended because it really just gave me such such good and I went into forming my business feeling confident about it. But I greatly undervalued how satisfying it would be, like deeply like personally satisfying to be helping people on their journey, helping them navigate career change. I just love it. Love it. I’m thrilled that more, it seems like more and more attention is being paid to graduate students in their professional development.
So moving on to a slightly different topic. You talked a little bit about networking through Twitter. But can you tell me a little bit more about networking and any advice you would give for networking strategies for somebody who’s trying to take their career to the next level? Or maybe they’re a grad student trying to come up with their idea for whatever it is, business ownership or whatever it is for them next. What do you see the role of networking being?
Rob Pearson
I think It’s really, really important. We all know that it’s important. And we know that jobs go to folks who have done networking all the time. And so I mean, networking is challenging, though, because it comes with a kind of stigma. So a lot of people bring this impression that networking involves kind of being smarmy, and passing out business cards at conferences, you know, I think there’s a place for networking in person. But especially today, and especially during this time, when we’re all working remotely, networking online has become a real norm. I advise graduate students to engage in very targeted networking as early on as they can. And that’s for a couple of reasons. So I mean, it really, it’s true, whatever kind of career you’re pursuing. So I mean, I know that a lot of postdoc opportunities, for example, go to people because of connections they’ve made with their, you know, the connections that RPI has and recommendations API’s given to them. And that’s an important part about it. But that’s important because you know, you need to be able to have that conversation with your mentors. about what kind of career you’re looking for, and whether that person can help kind of help you find your next step. But it’s also important if you’re just looking to learn about career opportunities. And that’s why, you know, in our program, we work really hard to get our Laney graduate school PhD alumni in front of our graduate students at every opportunity. Our alumni are some of the most amazing people out there. And many of them are just working and doing incredible things in all areas of the of the world and there’s—
Heidi Scott Giusto
Can you give me a few examples?
Rob Pearson
Well, yeah, so, so what we do is we bring alumni back for these alumni panels, and we’ve done them in person. We’ve done some online we did a panel recently on on medical science liaison positions, which is an area where really any of our scientists are curious about and we brought back some folks who were involved in in senior levels of the hiring process for MSL, and we’re able to talk to our grad students about career paths in that field. We’ve brought back folks who work at the CDC in bench science positions and mathematics. And I’ve been in my position for nine months. And I’m so amazed by the folks out there, and their generosity with coming back. And we found also that they’re so generous in that they really believe in what their graduate education at Emory has done for them and their careers. And they really welcome those opportunities to come back and share their experiences through the form of like networking events with current graduate students. So we’ve just found it to be a really exciting way to get graduate students started thinking about networking, and those are in person opportunities. But what I really want them to do is to take those in person networking opportunities, and kind of like, extend them to after a panel or whatever. And what we find quite often is that, you know, our alumni will come to campus, and they will feel so energized talking with our awesome graduate students, and then, you know, we’ll reach back out to them a few weeks later, and they’ll say, “nobody contacted me. I told them, I would love to hear from them and no one emailed me.” I think this speaks to the idea that people want to be of service and they want that To help people who might follow in their footsteps someday in their careers, and that’s the kind of information that might empower a graduate student to use networking opportunities to explore various career options.
Heidi Scott Giusto
I think people are very generous in what the way you what you just shared, I think can be helpful for people who do have that initial reaction and like, “Ugh, networking.” For whatever reason, you know, they don’t like the idea of it. But, and sometimes I found people who feel like they’re like, they’re going to bother people. But if somebody, to your point, is coming to campus, and they’re taking time out of their schedule, to share their story or you know, strategies that they use, they are being generous. They want to help. I’ve found a lot of people are very much wanting to help others, you know, move along in their careers because they were in that situation too. Before and so, so whereas some students might be timid with following up thinking, “I don’t want to bother them,” or whatever, to make the point that well, you know, people might feel bad. “Oh man, I went, I gave a talk or I sat on a panel or whatever I just never, you know, sat around and chit chatted a little bit in an open networking session. And no one followed up. I wonder if what I said wasn’t very valuable.” There could be a letdown after it because you want to feel like you have been helping. And so I think maybe that takeaway point is when students or any job seeker really trying to network to not be afraid about following up and that doesn’t mean email call and text someone seven times a day. I’m not endorsing that method, but the nice email and into me it’s a no brainer after that. Then go online and find them on LinkedIn, send a connection request, add a note that says, I met you at this, it was very helpful. I’d like to connect on LinkedIn. And that’s a way to be helping continue that relationship building. And that’s really what networking is. And then that other point you made of you can really explore different areas. Maybe you think, and I’ve worked with some clients who they want to try to get into being a medical science liaison, for example, and they think they know what it’s about. But I might encourage them like, “Well, have you talked to anybody in this role?” “No.” Well, do some informational interviews. And then they do, and it’s like, “Oh, it’s not quite what I thought.” And that’s just one example. But yeah, the point too, I think some people I don’t know, maybe can speak to this. Some people think networking means asking for a job. They see it as like a linear thing or you know, like, “If I’m networking that means what is next is I asked for a job.” But that’s not necessarily what we’re trying to tell people to do as best practice, I’m guessing you’d agree. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
Rob Pearson
I totally agree. And, you know, when I talk about networking with graduate students at Emory, I talk about a couple of things like joining a community that’s existing already. And so I’ll sometimes use an example of you know, you are doing your PhD in sociology at Emory, the intellectual orientation of the program here and the kind of work that’s being done here. No one would ever confuse that for the work that’s being done in a department over there. And once you’re in that community, you understand that level of nuance that like a PhD from this school in this field means this. Another one from this school in this field means this but looking at that community from the outside as someone who’s not really involved, you could just say a piece. PhD in sociology kind of means the same thing. And if you’re trying to learn about diverse career options, I want you to try to get into that conversation and understand that level of nuance so that you can say, “Okay, well, I’m applying to be an MSL at this firm and at this firm, but I would never mistake that that experience is going to be the same in those two different firms.” And actually, if you go into a job application process with a resume that speaks specifically to the not just the job, but like the community and the culture, and the job as it kind of lives and breathes inside one firm, I think that connection that’s really powerful. And it demonstrates to an employer that you really get what you’re walking into, and you’re going to be able to contribute and I think that’s a very positive thing.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Agreed. I couldn’t agree more on that. So you have been a graduate student. You have been a professor, and now you are in career services. What advice would you give to educators on how to help students find their purpose, develop their curiosity and improve their communication skills?
Rob Pearson
Wow, I think educators are really, really important to this. And that’s because, you know, graduate students and postdocs, they don’t come to our institutions to do career development with Rob Pearson, they come to study. I don’t think so. But they come to our institutions because they want to study and work with and be mentored by excellent faculty at all of our institutions. That is a really, really important part of the equation. There are many cases where I’ve seen that graduate students might come and say, “I’m not sure if I’d feel comfortable talking with my mentor about the idea that I might not follow in their footsteps.” And I could have a conversation with that same mentor. And that person will say, “I would support my graduate student no matter what.” That’s a really important disconnect there that we really want to break that down. And I would say what we could do is really be explicit with our values, even a moment to say something like, I will support you, no matter what kind of career you want to do, want to pursue. That can be really empowering and meaningful for a graduate student, no matter what kind of career they’re trying to pursue, but they’re not values that we always make explicit.
Heidi Scott Giusto
What wonderful advice. And I couldn’t agree more. You have an expert background on it in a way I don’t but just my lived experience. Again, it was a little while back now, but I remember going into Duke’s Career Services and seeing real big sign on the wall and in each counselor’s office, it says “This is a safe space.” Meaning you can tell us anything you need to. And it’s it felt, in some ways, and I think some of it to grad students, maybe we, we put all these assumptions into our brains or whatever. But, it felt almost taboo to me to say, I don’t think I want to go the tenure track route. And I didn’t tell my advisor, I didn’t know how she would react and only after I defended did I say anything that “Oh, I’m starting a new business.” And she was so supportive of me. She immediately He made a connection for me wrote this beautiful email to this person of this is what she’s doing is she was so supportive. And the point she made when we talked about it, she was like, “Well, I’m happy to support you. I can’t really mentor in this because I don’t know it.” You know, she’s been a professor her whole career. But the fact is, I got it wrong, because I just didn’t know what will happen if she knows I don’t want to do this. What would have happened is she would have been supportive. Not that what I like or dislike matters, but I’d like that that closing that thought that you have there and that advice. I think it’s wonderful advice that a lot of graduate students even though some time has passed since, you know, when I finished, it sounds like it’s still a prevalent concern in letting and communicating that to the students.
Rob Pearson
It’s interesting because, you know, in many fields and in many labs or departments or programs, there could be, you know, a culture that has a long standing culture that values one career over other careers. And we want to push back against that.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Yeah. So last question for you. If there’s one piece of advice that you would have to give to a listener who is thinking about the next stages of their career, and this listener could be a graduate student, it could be someone like yourself, a working professional in higher ed, what would that be?
Rob Pearson
I think it’s really important to keep an open mind toward the possibilities of the future and what kinds of things you can do. You know, we have to recognize this is a time when people’s careers are evolving and what it means to even work is changing. And I think there’s so much uncertainty right now. And it’s a little bit of a mystery what the working world will look like when we come out of all of this. I think we need to keep an open mind toward those possibilities and do the best we can to remain supportive of people around us and just to affirm their experiences, whatever they look like, because there are going to be careers that we haven’t yet even imagined.
Heidi Scott Giusto
Thank you so much. Thank you. This has been wonderful. I hope you’ve enjoyed our conversation as much as I have. And just as a wrap up to the listeners, I just want to say thank you for listening to the Informational Interview 2.0 podcast. I’m your co host, Heidi Giusto, and I hope you keep listening to future episodes. Thank you.