Postscript

Media, Culture, Technology

Category: Interview: The Working Life

The Band

Doug Moore

November 6, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Doug Moore is the talented singer/songwriter for the fast-rising “technical metal” band Pyrrhon. I spoke with him following the release of the band’s latest album ‘What Passes for Survival’ about the human experience of carving out a (sometimes) hospitable piece of the music industry to inhabit. Right now, he’s funding his music career with jobs writing for Clearer Thinking and Stereogum.

This interview took place on August 21st, 2017.

SAM: Besides making music, what do you do for a living?

DOUG: My main source of income is not death metal or deal-metal related (or even music related). Essentially, I am sort of a multi-role writer/researcher and factotum for Clearer Thinking. A succinct summation of what we do is that we advocate for rationality in an effort to encourage better decision-making in people’s daily lives. That’s sort of the elevator pitch for the site.

We create these little automated programs that you can take for free on the site, which mainly are designed to illuminate a concept that we think would be useful for people to apply in their daily lives. An example would be a program we made on the sunk-cost fallacy, which is the idea that basically once you’ve started investing in a project it’s not wise to continue to invest in it just because you have already invested in it, right? Often we get this feeling that we should stop investing, but a lot of people don’t stop, and they don’t for a variety of interesting cognitive reasons. So, in any case, there’s a little program that we made that is sort of like a 45-minute to hour-long explanation of what the sunk cost fallacy is, where you might see it in your daily life, and how you might try to prevent yourself from inadvertently falling prey to it.

Another thing we do is make little widgets that you might be able to use to help make better decisions on a daily basis. One of those that we made that became fairly popular was a little calculator that essentially helped you come up with a estimation for the dollar value of an hour of your free time. We also write blog posts and collaborate with other organizations that are working in the same space, trying to advance a greater interest in rationality and, essentially, sane decision making. *laughs*

SAM: How often do you work at Clearer Thinking? And can you walk me through a typical day of work?

DOUG: I essentially do work 35-40 hours for them most weeks, but I can change that at will by discussing my schedule with my boss.  Most days I sit at home, typing away at my computer in my apartment, then around the early afternoon — between 1:00 and 3:00 — I take a little break and go to gym, then I come back, do a few more hours of work, and then around 6:00 or 7:00 I usually knock off for the day and spend the rest of my free time working on the non-remunerative, creative things I like to do. Most of which are, at this point, making music: working on my vocals and working on my guitar work (I don’t play in my main band, but I do play guitar in one of my other bands and I might help compose for Pyrrhon, the main band).

I also have a side-gig. I do a little bit of…“music criticism” is my high-falutin’ term for it. I currently write a column for Stereogum, which is a mostly pop and indie rock publication, but I do some metal coverage for them. I had previously run a metal blog called “Invisible Oranges,” but I stopped writing there once I’d been doing the column for Stereogum for about a year. Essentially the majority of my day is taken up by Clearer Thinking, and then I will do some logistical stuff for the music writing stuff: corresponding with publicists and talking to my colleagues who will help me with the column and so forth. Most of my generative moments are at night so I use the daytime for the somewhat more quotidian stuff that I do for my main job.

SAM: Where did the name for your band come from?

DOUG: The band name is *laughs* something that I have had a love-hate relationship with over the years. It was essentially a compromise among the people who were in the band when it started — the band formed in 2008 and only two of us remain from those days. But essentially, we kind of backed into it. I didn’t know much about Pyrrhon, the historical philosopher. He’s this radical skeptic, right? He essentially was sort of the original apotheosis of that sort of skepticism. *laughs* I still honestly don’t know all that much about him.

We honestly arrived at the band name because of the way it sounded and looked, I guess — which is one of the reasons why I feel a little ambivalent about it now.  It’s impossible to pronounce or spell, so if we’re going by those metrics it’s not a great choice, but we’re three albums into a career at this point so I think we’re fairly stuck with it. But even though we sort of just backed into this name by bickering amongst ourselves as a bunch of 20-year-olds, the philosophy and lyrical approach of the band is… Well, generally speaking, we subject to criticism the base set of rules that most people seem to operate by, and, in the stuff that we create, a lot of the lyrics are about the more insidious features of daily life in contemporary society. Musically, our approach is, I would say, iconoclastic in a way in that we’re usually trying to upend the apple cart in one way or another.

Pyrrho

SAM: So it seems like there’s actually a fair bit of overlap between your day job and your music, considering that you’re focusing on social structures in both?

DOUG: It has kind of worked out that way. Though not really by design. It’s sort of interesting that you ask this because I don’t talk about my job publicly very often, especially in relation to the band, so I haven’t thought very much about how they’re connected. But I think that you’re probably right in the sense that in both cases I’m thinking about the way things are structured in daily life, looking at what’s going wrong, and asking how things could be made better. I think the specifics of how I’m doing that in my two roles are very different, however, and have almost nothing to do with each other—which may be why I haven’t thought about the connection too much before.

Generally speaking, the band comes from a very emotional, intuitive place. Most of the lyrics are generated automatically—strange phrases that bubble into my subconscious to the point where I become aware of them and isolate them and write them down. Whereas what I’m doing with my job is a much more left-brain sort of thing where I’m thinking analytically (for the most part). There’s a lot of writing involved, but I’m generally trying to write about technical subjects in a way that will allow people to understand them. The  Dionysian impulse that drives my work for the band is not really present in the Clearer Thinking work.

SAM: Your lyrics often seem very literary, for instance in “Mother of Virtues” from Pyrrhon’s second album. You  mentioned that they’re generated automatically, but it seems like you must put a good amount of thought into organizing them.

DOUG: You’re definitely right. I’m not just saying, “Moon, june, spoon— okay, I got the lyrics.” The stuff I write about for the band is very much driven by my own preoccupations personally. So in that sense, there is an element of analytical thought that goes into my attitude about these things, especially since the band is mostly pretty topical. There’s a lot of writing about various social issues involved, but it’s all viewed through the lens of my personal, emotional responses to those things. For example, the song you brought up, “Mother of Virtues,” is explicitly about overpopulation up to a point, right? But it’s not meant to be a polemic where I tell you what to think about overpopulation because I did all the research and here are my conclusions. I mean, it’s a poem essentially. There’s an element of  neurons firing intuitively in my head, and they produce these phrases, which reflect the anxiety and disgust and some other emotions that I have when I really think about overpopulation as a thing that’s actually happening. And I try to arrange these phrases into a song through an iterative process of trying out different stuff. So it’s really hard to draw the line between my left-brain attitudes about the subject and my right-brain process of generating lyrics about it that feel compelling.

 

Sam: So do the lyrics represent your own views? Do you try to account for your bandmates’ views as well?

Doug: As for whether all the lyrics should be taken as literal representations of my attitude, I would say definitely not. In part because there are some lyrics that aren’t written from my perspective — I sometimes do that storytelling-y thing when I write from someone else’s place because I’m ultimately not that interesting where I can carry the whole band with my own special feelings.

“If the question is whether the subject matter is chosen to evoke an aesthetic effect that matches the band, the answer is no. There’s a ton of me in the lyrics.”

If the question is whether the subject matter is chosen to evoke an aesthetic effect that matches the band, the answer is no. There’s a ton of me in the lyrics. That’s one of the things that I really try to strive for, actually, because so many metal lyrics are incredibly impersonal, either because they’re just poorly written or because the approach of the lyricist is to, you know, speak in the voice of an omniscient third-party narrator who’s describing this or that. A lot of times in metal lyrics you get the voice of God describing some evil and that’s not my approach at all, I really try to invest myself.

As to whether they reflect the views of the band, I would say that, broadly speaking, the answer is yeah. To the extent that Pyrrhon has a political perspective, we’re all pretty much on the same page. I would say that I’m probably marginally more engaged in that stuff than the rest of the band, but they’re all definitely paying attention. They’re all readers, you know, they’re an astute bunch of guys. But there’s not really a lot of give and take in that stuff. In some ways the attitudes of my bandmates affect what I write lyrically because I’m around them all the time — we talk about the issues as a band. *laughs* And I’m also thinking about my bandmates, thinking about their musicianship — I’m often writing to music they’ve written — so of course their attitudes will come through in the lyrics to a degree. At the same time, I don’t really consult anyone with what I write. Everyone’s usually like “that’s good!” and that’s the extent of the feedback that I get from them. If I said something that someone really didn’t agree with, they would say “I really don’t want to be associated with that sentiment,” but that’s never happened before.

 

Sam: Knowing Pyrrhon’s taste for compositional complexity, how do you go about putting your lyrics to music?

Doug: So in  the case of Pyrrhon, getting the music and lyrics together into one cohesive thing is especially challenging because the music, even by the standards of the genre, is really challenging and complex. So as a result, in the early stages of the band, there was a really steep learning curve for figuring out how to write lyrics in a way that made sense with the actual song structures. That was made even more difficult because I’m an asshole and wanted to do something ambitious with the lyrics and have some poetic “friscon” or whatever. It was also really important to me that they looked good on the page, too, because when I was growing up as a fan of music, I would often hear a song that I liked and then look at the lyrics on the page and just think that it looked like a child wrote them.” Lyrics for rock music often look really clunky and awkward when you just read them out of context from the music. I wanted to get around that problem and that was easier when you were able to write in a consistent, regular meter. Pyrrhon can’t often do that because the music is just not like that, essentially.

“I often ending up choosing to pick things because I’m worked up into an emotional tizzy about some thing or another and I’m like “gotta get it out!'”

So the way that it ends up working is that there are two parallel processes that go on when putting the whole package together. The music generally grows up independently of the lyrics, so when we’re working on material for a new release, I start taking little notes in my mind about lyrical ideas that I have — just phrases that strike me or topics that I think we could do a whole song about, etc. In the meantime, we start composing the actual instrumental material, and as the sketches of the lyrics grow up, and as we get to the point of needing vocals for a composition that we’re relatively close to being able to perform, I’ll select one of the candidates that I’ve built for that release and pair it with the composition we’re working on. I’ll try to pick either the one that the music seems best suited for or whatever one I really want to write about at that time. I often ending up choosing to pick things because I’m worked up into an emotional tizzy about some thing or another and I’m like “gotta get it out!” so sometimes a song will get that lyric because that’s what I had to do at that moment.

So then it becomes a process of elaborating on a lyric and structuring it in a way that makes sense with the composition. In order for me to do that, I need to have a strong sense of the way that the composition works and what all the parts are, so often when we’re in practice just working on the music, I won’t have anything to do yet, so I’ll just sit there and watch the band play the song over and over and over again until I understand all the rhythmic ins and outs. So then, when I understand where I want the vocals to go, I’ll just try doing some death metal scat vocals over the music *laughs* where I just try to block in some ideas for where the lyrics are going to go. At the same time I’m developing a clearer idea for the structure of the lyrics in my head.

It sounds pretty involved, I guess, when I describe it (and I guess it is pretty involved). Basically there’s just this long, mutative process of taking these two threads — the lyrical idea that I had at some point and the compositional idea of the song — and gradually integrating them through lots of repeated listenings to the song and thinking about… what the lyrics and shit-, I don’t know. *laughs* It’s not really that interesting in theory, it’s basically just a thing that grows into itself with some coaxing from us.

 

Sam: So, I’m sure you get asked this all the time but, how do you avoid absolutely destroying your voice?

Doug

Doug: The answer that I always give to this question is: “with difficulty.” Just because it is pretty fuckin’ hard for me to do. Some people just naturally have a voice that is well suited to projecting lots of volume all the time and you can just go on living your rock and roll lifestyle and smoking tons and drinking tons and is totally fine the next day for you to just sing again. I am not that person, honestly. If you had told me even probably just ten years ago that I was ever going to have any renown as a vocalist of any kind, I would have thought you were crazy, because I don’t really have a naturally powerful voice. So I had to go to some lengths to sustain my voice for every show. There’s a bunch of things that go into it — one thing I do is practice a lot to strengthen my voice. A lot of metal vocalists seemingly just don’t practice — they’re just naturally able to do it. Must be nice for them, but I’m not like that. I warm up a lot and try to use good technique. Even with screaming, there is a lot of technique to it, a lot of which overlaps with conventional singing. You know: you need to use proper diaphragm support, and not get out of breath, and all of these things that keep you in the right physical posture while you’re performing. Other than that I try to not yell and scream too much when I’m not on stage and keep the partying to a minimum. I like to drink beer, like many people in bands, but on tour I don’t drink very much — I’ll have a beer or two, but I don’t really get drunk — which is, in the world of metal (as you can imagine), a little out of the ordinary. Another things that’s really important is sleeping a lot. When you’re asleep, your voice is being rested and that’s the time that you get the most recovery. So I try to sleep as much as I can, which can be kind of difficult on the road when you’re crashing on floors and doing long drives, but it is doable. It’s been a long learning process which has featured me losing my voice at many inopportune moments, but at this point I’ve mostly figured it out and it’s relatively rare that I have vocal problems.

…

I would say that compared to the average singer in a metal band, the thing that makes my vocal approach stand out is that I tend to code switch a lot (I guess would be one way to put it). There is a pretty broad range of screaming and yelling that you hear in metal, but usually in a given band you usually only hear like one or two. You’ll get the low beefy-sounding roar or you’ll get a high goblin voice, or you’ll get a guy who sounds like he’s in a hardcore band who’s doing the screamo thing. My approach involves jumping between lots of these different registers. I’ve got five or six and I’ve got a multi-effects pedal that I use, so there’s a lot of textural changes in what I do. Really the process of learning how to do that was just a lot of trial and error.

 

Sam: Knowing how much work it would take, when did you really commit to metal?

Doug: When I was a teenager, I knew I was interested in being a musician, so I was playing guitar, but I could already tell at that time that I wasn’t going to be a virtuoso, it didn’t come too naturally to me, so I started messing around with vocals just to see if I could do it, essentially. Over the years, I would practice my vocals by trying to imitate different records that I heard. I listened to a pretty broad range of “heavy music,” as they called it, and in my listening, I noticed that a lot of different metal singers would have different ticks and little foibles to the way they delivered words and I found that I could get a pretty broad range of different voices just by imitating different ticks. So in a way, I learned by doing impressions of different people, and in doing that I learned what my voice was capable of — which different things I could do well, which different things I thought sounded distinctive when I did them, which things I felt like had character or emotional expressiveness to them (not all these styles are especially expressive) — and eventually I started performing in different bands and trying out different styles. Eventually, I just developed a vocabulary for doing it. I wasn’t ever really trained or anything like that, I just winged it and blew my voice out a ton of times and eventually figured out what I was doing.

 

Sam: You’ve been getting a lot of positive coverage lately, does seeing that sort of envigorate you?

Doug: This is what I think of whenever I see a positive review: “it’s really cool that you like it, but I don’t think it’s the best thing we’re ever going to do, hopefully it will be blown out of the water by future Pyrrhon records.” I mean, it’s been gratifying to see the reaction, it’s been hard for me to tell how well it’s doing in the grand scheme of things, because positive critical feedback isn’t necessarily indicative of any public interest, especially in a very niche culture like metal, where the people who are writing about it are really intense hobbyists who are doing it for free, who have these very abstruse, long-tailed tastes that are highly specific and so far out from the normal of what anyone even in metal really listens to. *laughs* It’s totally unclear to me whether the enthusiasm amongst music writers is reflected by broader enthusiasm, but certainly our shows recently have been better attended than they were on the last record cycle. I think a big part of it is just that we’ve been plugging away for a while and have a little name recognition, so when the new record came out, people were immediately more receptive to it, it’s like the mere familiarity effect — there’s something from my job.*laughs*

 

Sam: I saw a particularly nasty YouTube comment that equated listening to a song off of Mother of Virtues to forcible prison sodomy. 

Doug: *laughs* I think I saw that too.

Sam: How do you feel about that sort of ‘feedback’?

Doug: It’s true, YouTube is generally the place we get slammed the most, which I kind of relish, honestly. I have like a perverse love for really excessively negative feedback on Pyrrhon, mostly on the grounds that it’s a metal band that’s influenced by punk and harsh noise and all of these genres that are (in my mind) supposed to be antagonistic and offensive to people’s ears a lot of the time, right? So, rather than seeing a wall of, “it’s pretty good”s, I would rather have people hate my shit and think it’s repulsive and objectionable — that’s a lot closer to the reaction that I would have envisioned from people when I started doing this shit. It’s supposed to be antagonistic, it’s supposed to have an element of “fuck you” to it and I think that gets lost in a lot of metal bands in general. A lot of bands just seem like they want to be liked by everybody and that’s just not what we’re about.

“Yeah. Yeah we got called a ‘blight’ and I was like, ‘sick.'”

 

Sam: What are your thought’s about Pyrrhon’s place in music knowing that you’re getting a good amount of critical attention and acclaim while  you all still need to work two jobs.

Doug: Um, let me think about that for a second. I feel like I would be remiss in complaining about Pyrrhon’s place in anything ever. Given what we’re doing, I think it’s really a privilege to have any audience whatsoever — the band is substantially more popular than I ever thought it would be. I kind of thought it was just going to be this sort of garage project for eternity that might’ve had a few fans, but wouldn’t really ever go anywhere. So, the broadest part of the reaction is that I’m really grateful to be a part of the conversation and have people listening to our music, even (and sometimes especially) if they find it really revolting or, a “blight in the face of metal,” as I saw this one blog today put it. Yeah. Yeah we got called a “blight” and I was like, “sick.” I would say that relative to my attitudes about music, a lot of people in the metal world seem to be very conservative — really interested in hearing the same few ideas that were conceived in the ‘80s and ‘90s (and ‘70s even) repeated in like a catechism to the way things used to be. As someone who’s trying to do something more inventive and left-field, I would prefer there to be more people who were receptive to that sort of thing, but that’s simply not how it is and that’s not how I would expect it to be, either. So, given the antagonistic and deliberately difficult nature of the project, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many people have been willing to give it a shot and do what’s required and see past the initial shock of the chaotic nature of the music.

 

Sam: [Some bullshit, two minute long question about how both horror movies and metal are both intended to disturb, but horror is more accepted by the mainstream. I forget. It was one of those things where I thought I was on some next-level shit at the time, but it was really dumb in retrospect.]

Doug: I would disagree a little bit with your evaluation of the aims and means of both of those styles. If you consider horror movies that do well and also most metal records that do well, they’re both pretty populist in nature, as well. Successful horror movies have clear, conventional narrative arcs that are designed to draw in viewers and compel them to care about the participants and the plot, and there’s a lot of window dressing to make them look cool. The desire to disturb and upset is an element of what they’re trying to accomplish, but it’s also set within the framework of a relatively straightforward piece of cinematic entertainment. There’s a reason why horror movies often aren’t thought of as being as prestigious as drama — it’s schelacky, it’s low-brow fun for the masses. A lot of that stuff applies to most conventionally-styled classical metal as well — it’s mostly, essentially really a form of pop music, with verse, chorus song structures that are built around clear, direct melodies. If you think about Metallica, right? All the classic metal bands, they’re rock bands, they’re playing a form of rock music that is essentially designed to be catchy and entertaining, even though there is an element of horror or anger that is the emotional locus of the art, it’s still in a digestible package. I think that what Pyrrhon is doing is more like a pompous, obnoxious art flick that, if if it has a plot, it’s buried under multiple layers of weirdness and you can’t tell what’s going on, and it really makes you feel like bad to watch it a lot of the time — it doubles down on the evocation of disgust and fear and all these other things, as opposed to having a bright, catchy melody that has some more minor notes to it. Hopefully, if you’re going to listen a couple times and do the work you’ll be able to get stuff out of it, and I think that’s why people are responding to the new record, but for both the Erasorhead type of movie and the Pyrrhon type of band, there are going to be a lot of people who are just gonna go, “nope, fuck that, I hate it” and that’s fine — it’s partially designed to get that kind of response too. In the more conventional metal band, there’s a balance of the desire to appeal and the desire to repel, whereas in a band like Pyrrhon, we’re not necessarily saying “we’re going to make music that no one likes,” but we are doing something that’s really weird and designed to be confusing and painful to listen to sometimes, and some people (like us) are masochists musically who like that kind of thing, and a lot of people are not.

 

Sam: What are the aims of the band?

band

“Pyrrhon is a thing that pays only for itself… sometimes.”

Doug: From the very beginning of the band, we have all been under the understanding that Pyrrhon is not designed to remunerate. If it does make any money — which at this point it does — the money is just re-invested into further band stuff. Pyrrhon is a thing that pays only for itself… sometimes.*laughs* So as a result, we’ve all had to do different things with out lives that allow us to pursue the band. We all have day jobs, 3/4 of us live in very expensive urban areas, we all have to make sacrifices with our lifestyles for our jobs, which are all more flexible types of things which allow us to tour and what have you. We all have to eat some shit to make this thing work. We all have to be frugal and take jobs that will let us tour — and that’s usually not a very well-paying job — and we live in expensive places. So it’s not easy to make it work, but we have done it so far and the reward we have from doing that is being able to do literally whatever the fuck we want artistically, which is more than rewarding enough to justify all the decisions we made to make that possible.

 

Sam: So I saw that you took the Chinatown bus from UPenn to NYC just so you could practice with Pyrrhon. That stuck out to me as a super interesting experience and I was wondering if you would care to expound on it.

Doug: I guess “fortunately” would be the correct word, I never saw anything too crazy. There were a lot of people who were messed up on drugs, but there were no real Canadian decapitation incident type happenings. No busses ever caught on fire, which is actually a thing that happens with Chinatown busses pretty frequently. I don’t think I ever saw anyone even barf on one of those busses, which was kind of a miracle given — especially back in those days — who was taking them. That at this point is far enough ago that it seems like it’s quite far in the rearview for me, but when I think about that period it gives me a bit of a nostalgic kick. On the face of it, doing that in college as a committed student who worked pretty hard in school was kind of crazy upon reflection. It was really a huge investment of time and not always the most fun thing to be doing during my Saturday —  sometimes I would even do it during the week, take a day when I got out of classes early, practice for two and a half hours then run right back to the bus all sweaty. But at the time I remember thinking “okay, you’ve always wanted to be in a band, these guys are pretty talented, this might be your only opportunity to ever do this, even to the point where you could play live shows and maybe even go on a tour someday. There were times in the early days of the band where to commit to it like I did seemed like it might have been a mistake, but fortunately, I feel like we’ve gotten to a point where I get a warm fuzzy thinking about that one; I feel like I made the right choice.

…

I would say that the thing that I treasure the most about my experience with the band is tied directly to that kind of memory. We put so much of ourselves into doing it and we had to do so many stupid little tasks, like the DIY band things like hand-assembling record or thinking about the logistics of trying to get to this place or that. When I think about all the shit we did to finally have these little artifacts of our labor, these physical copies of the records — whenever I see the first copy of a new record and think about everything that went into it to create something that someone else can experience and hopefully take something productive away from, it’s really… there’s nothing else like it for me. It’s the best feeling, it means everything to me.      *puts down mug*

Album Cover for 'The Mother of Virtues'

 

photo for greg

Holly Kosiewicz

January 29, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Holly Kosiewicz is Director of Policy Development at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan and El Salvador and has worked on research teams in Colombia, Peru, and the United States. Her work has been included and published in several book projects as well as The Journal of Higher Education, The Journal of Economic Psychology, and Education Week. Holly earned her Master’s at Brandeis University (2007) and completed her PhD at the University of Southern California (2015).  

HARRIS: What were your immediate plans after finishing undergrad and did they work out the way you imagined they would?

HOLLY: I graduated from UT Austin in 2002, and my intent was to do international development work. I’m a first-generation American, and my Polish parents instilled in me the importance of understanding different cultures. So, after UT, I joined the Peace Corps and worked in Jordan. Unfortunately, we were evacuated after six months of service. That sent me back to the States for about half a year. After that I returned to the Peace Corps in El Salvador but I realized it wasn’t really a good fit; nevertheless I still wanted to do something related to international development work. So, afterwards, I decided to get a Master’s in International Development from Brandeis University. As a student there, I became a research assistant on a project that was examining the well-being of a Bolivian indigenous group: the Tsimane’. That experience is what sparked my interest in doing research.

After I graduated with my Master’s degree, I got a job working as a research assistant at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. There, I worked on a number of projects, but the project that most interested me was one that investigated the impacts of a financial aid program intended to help lower-income students attend and succeed in college. What I liked about that project was that I was able to work with economists and psychologists who were studying the behavioral dimensions of student aid. I worked at Los Andes for a year before returning to the States to start paying off my student loans. When I returned, I began my work in DC as a researcher for an education newspaper called Education Week. If you’re interested in education, or K-12, I would recommend looking into it and reading its articles.

After working there for two years, I enrolled in the education policy Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California. USC gave me the best opportunity to do my own research and gave me the best financial support. While there, I studied developmental education in community colleges. To give you some context, developmental education is largely used by community colleges to help underprepared students succeed at the college level. Some people call it “remedial coursework.” And there’s been a lot of debate about the effectiveness of developmental education. I did a wide range of research—I do mixed methods research, which means it involves both quantitative and qualitative approaches—trying to test the effectiveness of different assessment instruments to determine which ones can adequately assess if a student is prepared for college or not.

In my last year of school, I was laboring on whether I should go to academia or whether I should enter the government. It was a hard decision. Deep down, I really wanted to conduct research that could make a meaningful impact on the education that students receive, and I wanted to work directly with state and local policy makers.

So instead of taking a job in academia, I decided to take a job as Director of Policy Development at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Because the work I’m doing has a clear impact on state higher education policy, I think it is the right place to be, at least for now. But only time will tell if I transition to a research organization or try being an academic later.

HARRIS: You’re back in Texas, right? Did a longing to be home bring you back?

HOLLY: Yeah, for sure. I wanted to be closer to my parents, especially as they get older. My husband and I have a family here and want to make sure our kids have a close relationship with our relatives.

HARRIS: Can you describe for me what you do during a typical day at work?

HOLLY: Well, my work really ebbs and flows. I don’t really have a typical day, but I can tell you what I do. My official title is Director of Policy Development at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, and I work in a relatively new division at the agency called Innovation and Policy Development. And the short of it is: we’re considered a think tank within the state agency, that supports and conducts research that has the potential to inform higher education policy and practice in the state. For the past year, I have been developing relationships with external researchers—these might be researchers in academic institutions, like Dickinson, or in think tanks—to work on studies that answer the big questions that state policy makers have around higher education.

For example, one of the things I’m currently working on is dual-credit education. Dual-credit education is a process by which a high school student can simultaneously earn high school and college credit from a single course. In Texas, participation in dual-credit education has been expanding rapidly for the last 15 years. But recently, due to new legislation, it’s also seen a significant increase in the percent of 14- and 15-year-olds participating in it. As a result of these shifts, state and local policymakers are raising questions about whether dual-credit education is being effectively scaled. Are students academically prepared to succeed in dual-credit courses, which are college-level courses? Are the academic standards used to teach dual-credit courses the same as those used to teach regular college courses? What are the costs of delivering dual-credit education? And very broadly, how are high school students benefitting from dual-credit education? These are some questions that the Coordinating Board, in collaboration with the RAND Corporation, is trying to answer, and we hope that these answers can help state legislators and policymakers decide what kinds of reform should take place.

HARRIS: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges to developing and implementing policies in higher education?

HOLLY: I think one big challenge is how to go about improving education policy and practice when working with very limited resources. In other words, where can you introduce reforms that generate the largest gains for the least amount of money? That question is always at the forefront of policymaking at all levels of government.

Another challenge is the political pressure that policymakers encounter continuously to get things done. Many times, the pressure to get things done quickly runs counter to the long time it takes research to inform what policy should look like. Research is typically very methodical and it’s slow to produce results. Policymakers, however, need to make decisions quickly, and so they are not going to wait for research that takes five years to complete. The challenge is thus designing research that can produce results relatively quickly while meaningfully informing the decisions that policymakers need to make.

Another challenge is that there are a lot of stakeholders involved, and each of them has its own interests and concerns. It’s sometimes difficult to understand what all of these interests and concerns are, not to mention determining how to balance them in such a way that everyone benefits. Not only students, for instance, but also teachers and faculty, advisors and administrators.

HARRIS: You’ve worked in different educational systems and in several capacities related to education: development projects, policy research abroad. How have these experiences informed the work you do now?

HOLLY: Well, I’ve always believed that education can make society more equal. And that belief has shaped the work that I have done since I’ve graduated from college. I’ve always wanted to ensure that my work could really improve education quality, particularly for the underserved. If I wasn’t doing that—if my work was helping maintain the status quo, for instance—that would make me feel very uncomfortable.

HARRIS: Some people might cast or imagine policy research as being a separate project from what could be called “on the ground” work, or work that interacts directly with the people affected by policy.

HOLLY: I don’t think policy research has to be detached at all from the people you are trying to affect. There are all different types of research. There is research that uses administrative records from state government agencies or federal government agencies. But there is also policy work or policy research where the researcher engages directly with students, with teachers, with community organizers to really get a better grasp of what is happening in the trenches and to give voice to those who have been silenced by more dominant groups. I think the experiences of people who deliver education or experience education is extremely valuable, especially when you’re trying to contextualize, for example, quantitative findings. And the only real way you can get at that is by actually talking to the people who are directly involved in overseeing and delivering education.

HARRIS: What advice do you have for someone trying to determine the best way to have an impact on the educational systems that surround them?

HOLLY: I took some time off after earning an undergraduate degree—I didn’t go straight into my PhD because I think it is really important to figure out where your passion lies. And I think one way of doing that is working in the trenches and really trying to figure out what are the challenges that students are facing and what are the challenges that teachers are facing. I think those experiences can really help you figure out what you are interested in and what you like to do. For example, I was a teacher in the Peace Corps and I discovered that I wasn’t particularly good at it. But that experience also helped me to better understand that there are so many external factors, like nutrition and outside demands, that can impact if a child learns and performs well. I saw that with my own eyes, and I don’t think I would have learned about that sitting behind a computer screen or reading a report, you know? Or at least, I wouldn’t have learned it so profoundly.

So I would recommend to anyone who is interested in making an impact on education policy to work side-by-side with educators, parents, students and educational organizations. Get to really know the challenges that they are facing before trying to make change. Once you get a good grasp of what those challenges are, the way you approach education policy research will be more thoughtful, and probably will gain more respect.

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Interview with Patricia Thomas

September 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Patricia Thomas is a Lead Educational Adviser for the Young Scholars Program at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Before joining Jack Kent Cooke, she taught college courses in education and trained K-12 teachers to serve students with a variety of needs, background, and interests. She has also worked as a foreign language instructor and assistant teacher in gifted and enrichment education at both public and private schools.

BROOKE: To start off, can you tell me a little bit about your educational background and what degrees you got in undergrad and how you got to where you are?

PATRICIA: Sure. I was a foreign language major as an undergraduate student. I’d had a passion for French and Spanish all through high school—and actually earlier than that for French. So I majored in French and Spanish and minored in Education and I got my teaching certificate at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Then I went to Teachers College, the graduate education school at Columbia University, and first I did a Master’s Degree in general Curriculum and Teaching and then I did a Masters of Education in Curriculum and Teaching but with a specialization in Urban and Multicultural Education. I taught for a while while I was there, and then I went to Emory University for my doctoral program, where I got a Ph.D. in Educational Studies with specializations in Second Language Acquisition and Urban and Multicultural Education.

Getting my Ph.D. was a really good experience. I learned a lot from it. And when I started here in my Educational Adviser role, I wanted to keep learning: specifically, about advising. So I did a graduate certificate program through Kansas State University in Academic Advising, then a graduate certificate program through George Washington University in Counseling. I did this program because I had been thinking about getting a graduate degree in counseling and I wanted to get a sense of whether I wanted to pursue it fully. George Washington has a certificate program in Counseling Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Persons, so I took a few classes there, got the certificate, really enjoyed it, and decided to stay and do a Master’s Degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling.

 BROOKE: What sparked your interest in urban education?

PATRICIA: I think that it was a little bit the circumstances of where I was. I’ve always been interested in education, but while I was getting my teaching certification at Wake Forest, my teaching advisor and mentor put me in touch with some instructors and professors at Teachers College and it just so happened that one of the people that I networked with was the professor for a sort of education and cultural diversity course. Once I got to Teachers College, it became my favorite class. I really enjoyed the course topics and the types of projects we did, and I wound up TA-ing for that professor for several semesters. And in doing that, I saw that there were some interesting issues that I could explore within the combination of urban and multicultural education. I was also teaching in New York at the time. I taught in a private school and also did after school work and teaching assistant work at two public schools. The differences among the three schools was enormous. And that just kind of got my thoughts percolating.

BROOKE: How did you get from New York and those positions to where you are now?

PATRICIA: I think originally my thought was that I was enjoying teaching but I wanted to participate more in teaching teachers. So I thought that the main way to be able to do that was to get a doctorate in education. I had a couple of friends at Emory that I had worked with years before and Emory had a small doctoral program, so it seemed like it’d be a really welcoming, cozy community. I applied there and got a chance to do a lot of work with the prospective teachers that they had in their Master of Arts in Teaching program. I think that I would have continued along that path, but I got to a point that many doctoral students get to which is that your funding is over but you are not finished. So I had many ups and downs with advisors leaving, retiring, going on sabbatical, and it wound up taking me five years to finish instead of the four that I was on track for. So I needed to find work for that fifth year.

I looked around Atlanta for jobs and wasn’t really finding something that I thought would be a good fit, so I decided to look around up here in the DC area instead because I grew up here and my family is still here in Maryland and DC. I decided not to look for teaching positions right away because some of the other veteran doctoral students had said, “If you start teaching while you’re still trying to finish your dissertation—if you actually leave your program, leave your campus and start teaching somewhere else—you’re going to be too distracted. You’re gonna love the teaching and you’re not gonna want to work on your research and your writing.” So I wound up taking a look at some jobs outside of teaching.

I was just looking at the Chronicle of Higher Ed website—they have a jobs board—and I started getting interested in the idea of advising, which would still be connected to education but would be different from designing a curriculum for a whole semester and grading papers and that kind of thing. So just on an off chance, I looked in the nonprofit section of the job boards and there was this position to be an Educational Adviser for a nonprofit organization and as I was looking through it, I thought, “The characteristics that they’re looking for are things that are interesting and important to me and things that I think that I can do.” The population was one that interested me a lot because the Foundation works with students who have financial need—so are from low to moderate income backgrounds—but kids who are really, really bright. I had worked with kids in a gifted education program in New York and in gifted summer programs for several years during college and the early part of grad school so it felt like a really good fit.

BROOKE: So if you could describe your current position, what is your job title and what does your job involve?

PATRICIA: It’s a little bit of a lot of things. The position I have now is Lead Educational Adviser. I started off as a regular Educational Adviser and I had a caseload of students that I worked with. I still have a caseload now, just a smaller one, and I also supervise other Educational Advisers. But the nuts and bolts of the Adviser position are to work with these students from 8th grade through 12th grade and help them and their families navigate the educational system, and get access to rigorous, challenging, interesting educational opportunities. Things like getting into a high school that is going to offer all the advanced coursework that they would benefit from, getting connected to lessons in art and music and sometimes sports or dance, things like that.

We help challenge them to set high goals for themselves and become leaders in their schools and their communities and help them pursue experiences that will help them learn how to do that. We also get them connected to each other and we also fund them via a tailored scholarship budget for enrichment opportunities like summer programs; almost all of our advisees do a summer program each year. There may be other programs that they’re involved in during the course of the year like an internship or a conference related to some of their interests, so we kind of lead them through getting connected to all of those kinds of good opportunities and then also get them prepared for college. So talking to them about what their options are and what the landscape of college looks like, taking them on visits, helping to make sure they’re prepared for SATs and ACTs by getting them appropriate preparation if they need that, helping them through the decision making process. Just basically taking every student from where they are in 8th grade and making sure they have a really strong educational experience all the way through high school and that they get placed well for college.

BROOKE: So do you fund all of that then, through the foundation?

 PATRICIA: We fund a lot of it. Every student has a scholarship budget that kind of fits them and we try to put several priorities on there and then also try to accommodate students’ own wishlist items. So the first priority is going to be to make sure that the students are in a really strong high school or have access to some really good high school courses. Sometimes a student isn’t really in a position to go to a high school that is particularly well-suited to them, so we might have them go to the high school that is closest but also supplement courses at the local community college or through distance education or something like that.

We’ll make an effort to see that the priorities for a strong high school education are paid for. We generally negotiate. A lot of our students are going to a private high school, for example, but we’re not really a high school scholarship, so we’re not going to pay a $40,000 tuition to a boarding school; but we will help negotiate at that school, so that our students get really good financial aid. And then we fill in the things like a laptop or flights to and from home, books and uniforms, maybe the family contribution if it’s a couple of thousand dollars, fees for activities, things like that. We do pay for a summer experience each year, and then many other little things.

It’s a program that’s focused on filling in the gaps, so the our students have the things that families with greater financial means would usually be able to provide for their children. We’re trying to provide some of those things and we’re trying to provide the resources and the experiences that are going to allow the students to really live up to their potential. There are so many kids who come into the program in 8th grade and when we start talking about the scholarships and the resources that we’re going to be able to provide during the course of their time, their parents will say, “Oh yeah, we always wanted to do this summer program” or “We always wanted to have her in piano lessons, but we just couldn’t afford it. She was excited about it, really wanted to do it, and the only thing standing in the way was money.” So I think we’re trying to remove some of those little barriers.

BROOKE: You work for them for a long time, so I’m assuming you gain pretty strong relationships with them as well?

PATRICIA: Yeah, definitely. It differs from student to student, but I’ve been here now almost eight years, so I’ve had a chance to see a few of my cohorts of students all the way through from 8th grade through 12th grade and there are some really nice bonds that get formed. Some of those students I am already keeping in touch with as they go off to college and I know that we will stay connected for the long term. With others, maybe we don’t see or talk to each other that much once they finish high school, but there are events within the foundation that they sometimes come back for. We sponsor a few summer events and we just started an alumni event that’s held in the spring, so I think they stay connected to the community at large even if they don’t stay connected to me personally for a long time. Which is fine, I like that they know they have a nice network of peers.

BROOKE: I am assuming your job sort of changes on a day-to-day basis, but if you could describe your typical day, what would that look like?

PATRICIA: It does change a lot. My attention goes in a lot of different directions in this job. But on a given day, I’ll probably spend a portion of my time talking to students. I check in with the kids in my caseload about once every two weeks, so I will probably have a couple of half-hour phone calls scheduled in the afternoon. I might also be calling a vendor to see if I can set up lessons for a student. Today, for example, I have to follow up on someone who is going to give one of my students clarinet lessons and I need to call a stable for a student who wants to take riding lessons. So I’ll do a little bit of self-education around that.

I will be reviewing and revising goals today. The students are getting ready for—well, we’re getting reading for—planning for next year, and all of them will have individualized learning plans that include their goals, as well as the resources and programming we’re going to provide for them, their scholarships and budget. Lots of students have been completing their goals for next year and I’ll be reading a lot of those.

I’ll be checking-in with the advisors that I supervise. We also do that about once every two weeks formally, but pretty much every day somebody’s stopping by with a question about a students or a budget, or some sort of programming that we’re doing within our department. So I’ll do some chatting around that and do some documentation—we always have to take good notes about things, so I’ll be checking up on my notes. I’ll probably also correspond with a couple of parents. We talk primarily with the Scholar, as that’s where we’re trying to build our strongest rapport and because it’s the student’s education that we are trying to nurture, but the parents are the ones who are there 365 days a year and they know a lot of things about their children that we wouldn’t be able to be aware of. Most of our students are pretty far away from our office here. We have a couple of local students, but most of them are scattered far and wide across the country. Parents are a really helpful resource with checking in with them; it gives us a lot of good information, and they have questions too, and things that they’re wondering about. So we will chat with them maybe about the college process, or some questions about the interests that the student has, or there might be a financial change in the family that we need to follow up on, things like that. So I’ll probably have a couple of interactions with parents as well today.

BROOKE: What do you think is the most rewarding part of your job?

PATRICIA: I think there are a couple of things. Seeing students get a chance to do things that they’re really capable of but might not have had a chance to do otherwise is fantastic. So seeing them stretch and travel to places during the summer that would’ve been hard for them to imagine going to, seeing them become really good leaders, seeing them get access to a strong education—that’s really wonderful. And forming bonds like we were just talking about—that is very, very rewarding. I have a handful of students right now who I’ve worked with previously and they’re off at college; maintaining connections with them really makes me feel good. I feel like we’ve grown together and have all developed in really positive ways because of that connection.

I also think that having really kind, interesting, and talented colleagues is pretty amazing. Our Young Scholars program has a fairly big staff—at least, for a small organization. About 55 people work at the foundation, and the Young Scholars team has 18 people. So we are pretty big, but we are a really nice team and I think we complement each other well and we learn a lot from each other and depend on each other. So it feels really good to have the support of all of these other people and to be able to give that support back.

Those are probably the main things: the connections, personal connections. I’ve said several times that I put my counseling degree to use a lot within this job, even though it’s not a counseling position, per se. But just the interpersonal part of counseling, helping people figure things out, figure out difficult situations, or set goals for themselves, or work through something difficult. All of those things come up on a daily basis here and I think being able to apply lessons and concepts and practices from the different parts of my education to this job—that is really rewarding too.

BROOKE: So going off of that, what is the most challenging part of your job?

PATRICIA: Well, as I mentioned earlier, my energy has to go in a lot of directions, and that takes a lot of organization and the ability to multitask at a really high level and at sometimes a frenetic pace. That’s hard for me. I am a pretty calm person, so looking at my desk at the end of the day and seeing 8 or 10 different things that need to be followed up on is challenging.

I think, too, that even though we’re able to do a lot with the Scholars and their families, we still can’t do everything that we would like to. Our scope is primarily educational; that’s pretty much going to be the priority. That is fantastic and I think that does a lot for the students, but then there will always be other situations going on in their lives that we can’t fix. I’ve had students who have had incarcerated parents, or parents who have some sort of significant physical or mental illness, students who have other kinds of family difficulties or have had periods of homelessness, and a lot of times, that is something that their families have to figure out on their own, or with other resources in their communities. It can be hard to get on the phone and say, “Okay, let’s talk about the classes that you’re gonna take next year,” when you know that there is some other really difficult situation that’s going on in the background. So that’s hard. In the last couple of years, I’ve had a few students too who’ve had their own emotional and mental health difficulties, and I’m attached to them, and I care about them, and it’s difficult to see them go through that and know that they have to carry some of the burden on their own. I can’t fix it all.

BROOKE: You have students all over the United States, then?

PATRICIA: Yep, we all do. I think we have Scholars in 46 or 48 states, something like that.

BROOKE: If you could leave the reader with one final comment about your job or your passion for education, or really anything, what would you want it to be?

PATRICIA: I would recommend to other people to become really good listeners—really dedicating yourself to the art and practice of listening is important. I say that because I think there are points in life where you have to listen to yourself and to where you’re being called to do your work and live out your life, and you need to be thoughtful about that and responsive. Sometimes people ask me, sort of like you were just doing in the interview, “How did you get from this place to that place to the other place? How did you decide to do this educational program or that one?” It was just sort of a continuous process of discernment, listening to myself and thinking about what I needed to do to get to this next step in life, or recognizing when something really felt appealing to me. I had thought about doing counseling a long time ago, and that little voice in my head that said “you should try this out” never really disappeared and finally I got to a point where I listened to it and actually tried it out and I felt very grateful afterwards. So there’s a listening to yourself and the voices that guide you.

But also listening to other people. I think that is probably the most important thing that I can do and have done in any of my jobs or any of the roles within a particular job: just sit there and listen very actively and as compassionately as I can. It’s amazing how much better people feel, even if there’s nothing else that I’m able to do. If the person I am sitting with feels heard and feels cared about, then they may feel a little bit better. I think for me, working at that, working at being a good listener has been extraordinarily helpful and I think that is something that all of us could try to do a little bit more of, especially in those situations where your desire to help can only take you so far. As you know, when you go into education, it’s complex. There are going to be a lot of issues that you’ll come up against, and some of them you’ll be able to address and some of them you won’t. But if you’re able to help other people feel heard and empowered—or at least feel at ease—I think that will be a positive step and something that will be appreciated.

 

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Interview with Leigh Arsenault

May 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Leigh Arsenault is the Program Manager for Federal and State Policy at the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, where she oversees the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. Before joining Aspen, Leigh served as a Senior Policy Advisor for higher education at the U.S. Department of Education. She also worked as National Youth Vote Director and National Policy Coordinator for Obama for America for the 2008 and 2012 elections, respectively.

THEO: Okay! So I’m going to pull up you’re LinkedIn profile.

LEIGH: Oh jeez, so you’ve been doing research!

THEO: Yes, I came prepared. . . .Okay, so you worked on the Obama campaign. How was that?

LEIGH: It was an incredible experience! It was my first job right out of college so I actually moved to New Hampshire when President Obama announced in 2007 that he was going to run. I worked the primaries as a campus organizer, so I moved to colleges across the state to organize student chapters of what was then called Students for Barack Obama. It was an amazing opportunity for me to be a part of something where you could really feel the day-to-day tangible impact you were having. I had to measure the number of people I was talking to, learn what they cared about, and figure out how I could then turn that into real organizing on the ground. It also taught me a lot of skills that I continue to bring to my day-to-day work.

THEO: So your interests fall on the political side of things, but also lie in education? Would you say that you’re more interested in one or the other, or are they equal for you?

LEIGH: I would say that I am now on a track that puts my career squarely in the field of education, particularly education policy—and, in my current work, also research on institutional practice. What I think connects those two things—my political experience with my work in education—is my own personal drive to dedicate my time to issues that will help make positive change, however that may be. With education, I think that if we can further improve outcomes for students and ensure greater equity within our system as a whole, that can have larger benefits for our society. As for my organizing work, I would call it more organizing work than political work really in terms of how I view it, but I was also compelled to work on things that would have an impact on social issues and help produce change that would really be meaningful to people.

THEO: So when would you say your interest in education began?

LEIGH: My mother was a teacher, my sister’s a teacher…I come from a background where the importance of education was told to me early and very often, so I always understood the importance of that. I’ll be honest though: When I was in college I didn’t know that I would work in the field of education. I didn’t plan for that at all. When I completed my work on the Obama campaign, I moved to Washington D.C. and I was hired to work at the Department of Education to support the Under Secretary of Education—her name is Martha Kanter, and she was the former Chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. My job was to support her in her work and through that I was exposed to a number of different issues on a very global scale, in particular those related to higher education. Martha was the first person to take me under her wing (she does this with many people), and she quickly became a mentor to me. I was very lucky in that regard. Once I was exposed to higher ed issues, I began working on them and moving further down that path so, though I wish I could say I planned my career path all out from the beginning, it really evolved organically on its own for me.

THEO: Was there ever a point where you wanted to teach at a college or a high school or did you want to do something different with education from the start?

LEIGH: Working at the Department of Education, I was exposed to policy issues and I now work for a nonprofit organization that researches community colleges specifically in terms of the practices that result in successful outcomes for students. So I’ve continued to be exposed to that work, but I’m continually drawn down to the institutional level of education. In fact, I’m actually considering whether to continue my own education by pursuing a doctoral degree in higher education. And I hope to have the opportunity to teach—that’s something I’d really like to do. So the short answer is yes, I hope that I will teach in my career.

THEO: So you mentioned briefly the program you are working with now. You are the Program Manager for Federal and State Policy in the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute. Can you tell me a bit about that?

LEIGH: Our program is to support institutional practice and policy and leadership that results in high and improving outcomes for students. That’s a quick summary of the work. In terms of how we do that, we offer what’s called the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. It’s a million-dollar prize for which community colleges across the nation compete. To identify colleges doing ground-breaking work, first we look at data in terms of how students are varying in persistence and completion at a different colleges. We reach out to the top ten percent of community colleges from a pool of over a thousand and invite them to apply for the Prize. From the information they provide, we then learn more not only about how many of their students complete certificates and degree but what strategies the schools use to measure student learning. That is, what are students learning in their courses, and what value will those courses have for their jobs in the future? We learn how well colleges help students complete and also how well they help them land jobs, whether or not they earn livable wages, whether or not the outcomes achieved are equitable, and whether the students who would like to receive an education are able to obtain it. So that’s the work we do. It’s really fun, because we get to go to the colleges, spend time with professors, students, and college presidents and learn who they are, why they do the work they do, and how their personal dedication translates into the outcomes they’re achieving. At the end of the process, we acknowledge the top ten colleges and present the prize to the winner.

We also look at leadership for higher education more generally, so we try to study the qualities that make exceptional leaders–exceptional meaning they’re able to ensure that their institutions achieve great outcomes for students. The other thing we’ve been engaged in recently is looking at ways in which we can encourage the top colleges in the country to increase their diversity in terms of socio-economic status, how they can enroll greater numbers of students who may come from low-income families and who may not otherwise have been able to afford college without some sort of scholarship and assistance.

 THEO: So you work with colleges to make this happen or are you working with students?

LEIGH: We’re working with college presidents and with policy makers really, to ask the questions and look at the data to find out what the current level of socioeconomic diversity is for colleges in America and then ask the question: How can we improve upon that? How can we ensure that more low-income students are able to access and enroll in colleges where we know they can and should succeed?

THEO: How long has this program been going?

LEIGH: We’re pretty new. Our program was founded in 2010 and it was founded specifically for the purpose of delivering the Aspen Prize for Community Colleges that I mentioned.

THEO: Alright, I’m really curious: Can you describe your average work day?

LEIGH: Oh, that’s tough! Every day’s a little different…I’m trying to think what my day was like today and see how that maps out…So, for today, I basically edited a report—I’m giving a full laundry list, here—I edited the report, also edited the design component of that report. I staffed a meeting where my boss was producing video clips talking about who this year’s prize winners would be. I worked with our Communications team to develop press releases to talk about that. I had a staff meeting talking about program management and how to improve our budgeting practices in our program. And I worked with researchers to define outcome measurements for colleges that we’re working with that are setting improvement plans at their institutions. So as you can see, there is a whole host of things that occupy my day everyday.

THEO: Seems very busy! So you’ve been with this program since it started in 2010? 

LEIGH: I joined the program a year and a half ago.

THEO: And are you thinking about staying with them afterward? What do you see yourself doing in the future?

LEIGH: As I mentioned, I recently applied to graduate school, and I’m considering now whether to enroll in a PhD program for higher education. That would be a five-year program, so that would entail research and teaching experience and also developing the course skills and cognitive skills that I need to hopefully one day lead research efforts and work at an educational institution perhaps. So that’s really exciting.

In terms of the College Excellence Program, one of the really great things about working at a non-profit is that you get exposed to a lot of people and ideas, and the programming you do always has to quickly change—there’s a lot of change in terms of the projects that come your way. So, as I described, we have the Prize, and in our leadership work we’re developing a new curriculum to help prepare the next generation of community college leaders, and that adds a whole host of aspects to the work that are really exciting and involving. We have policy projects like the one I mentioned to you about increasing socio-economic diversity at colleges. That would be a year-long project and evolve into many other things, so it keeps me creative and on my toes at all times. For that reason, each work day is always different, but also very engaging and exciting. So, if I don’t continue my education, there’s a lot of opportunity along the road at Aspen. And the work I’d be doing here would have a lot of impact on the world, which is, you know, what you really want out of a career.

THEO: Going back a little to your time in the Education Department, I was wondering: How did you get involved in all this? Did they come to you, or did you seek out them? Again, I’m a college student, so I’m interested in how I can get involved in this as well as other career paths.

LEIGH: My work on the campaign was actually a natural pathway to that job because I was what is called a “political appointee.” Those who had worked for the President on his campaign were given priority for positions classified as political appointments, and because I would be starting out in an entry-level position in terms of providing administrative support, those kind of job opportunities were available to me. It took two long years on the campaign (and super long days!) to get there in DC, but that was my pathway. I know it’s not the natural pathway for everyone.

In fact, there are two additional pathways for government jobs in DC. Instead of being a political appointee, who’s only employed for the life of the administration, you could be a “career employee,” who’s in their job for their entire career, across multiple administrations, and really keep the government functioning at a high level. So for you, when you finish your degree, you could apply right away for a position in any of those offices as a career employee. There are also opportunities called Presidential Management Fellows, where you would apply to be a Fellow and spend time in multiple agencies. That’s a great opportunity to get a bird’s eye view of government/public service work and expose yourself to subjects you might want to grasp onto, such as education. Does that help?

THEO: Definitely, thank you. I’m a junior, so I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life after I graduate.

LEIGH: So you’re a junior, and you’re making decisions now. You’re an education minor.

THEO: Yes, I’m an English major with an education minor. My original plan was to become a high school teacher or teach at the college level, but I keep hearing, especially from Professor Steirer, that I should keep pushing myself and try to look at all the different avenues of the education sector. It’s a lot of exploring right now, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do. It’s pretty interesting.

LEIGH: That’s great! And when you think about it, what sort of careers pop out at you?

THEO: I don’t know yet. That’s a lot of the reason why I’m looking around. I had always thought the idea of being a teacher would be nice. I volunteer a lot at schools, and I like working with kids. I guess I just don’t know yet everything that’s out there, career-wise.

LEIGH: Teaching obviously is a great profession, but I agree there are a lot of other options and knowing that you like to work with people is good. Starting there with what you enjoy is a good place to start. I guess my message to you for right now would be: You don’t need to figure out what you’re going to do for your whole life. You need to figure out how you want to spend your time, what you think is rewarding for you, and what you think you’re good at—like working with people. Then spend your time in that way, and I think opportunities will always follow. So if education is the path for you, know that and follow that, but a lot of different things can emerge and you don’t know where they will lead you.

THEO: So plan for the next year or so rather than the next five or ten?

LEIGH: Someone once gave me the advice that you always need to have an answer for where you will be in five years, but it doesn’t mean you have to stick to that path. You just have to do the hard work to know you’re moving forward. You need to focus and know you’re doing good work and you need to have a plan, but being flexible is okay. Be adaptable. Things may change, and that may be for the good. As long as you know how you’re oriented, what you care about, and where you hope to go, you’re on your way.

THEO: Alright, well thank you. it’s been very informative!

LEIGH: Thank you! And good luck!

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Interview with Sara Shahriari

February 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Sara Shahriari is a freelance journalist living in La Paz, Bolivia, and working in the Andean region. She reports on a broad range of topics with an emphasis on social justice, the environment, and politics. Her print work has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera America, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indian Country Today, and her radio work on Deutsche Welle.

BRITTANY: Tell me a little bit about how you got to where you are now.

SARA: Well, it was a circuitous path. I studied writing in college and was always really interested in it, but wasn’t sure how that would play out into a career. I considered going to law school. I considered going back to school for a bunch of different things, and I eventually decided that journalism would be the best way to sort of merge together the things I loved. I always knew that I wanted to work abroad and I decided on Latin America because I had already studied some Spanish, and I felt that I could learn enough Spanish in a not really extended period of time to be able to work well there. I went abroad after college and spent a year teaching English at a university in Ecuador, which is also in the Andes. The Andes start in Columbia and run down through Ecuador, Peru, into Bolivia, and a little bit into Chile. So I loved the mountains and the culture and it’s such a dynamic area in terms of how a lot of forces are interacting, like governments, corporate entities, indigenous identities. It is, to me, an incredibly interesting area.

When I finished teaching in Ecuador, I applied to go to grad school for journalism. I went to the Missouri School of Journalism and got a master’s degree. While I was there, I produced a Spanish language radio show. I studied magazine journalism. I just studied radio a bit, and then I got a grant from the school to go to Bolivia to work on a project for a while.

I came to Bolivia with that support and started working, and it was at a time when a lot of international journalists were actually moving on from Bolivia, so there was just fortuitously an opening for me to pick up some work here. I ended up staying and getting more work, and staying and getting still more work, and just sort of having a chance to really learn while writing, learn through working and writing all the time.

BRITTANY: I’m also interested in journalism and I know I’ve heard mixed things about going to grad school for journalism or even majoring in journalism given the state of the industry today. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that going to grad school was necessary?

SARA: It was good for me because I hadn’t focused on journalism as an undergraduate. If I had focused on journalism in any way as an undergrad, however, I don’t think a master’s degree in journalism would have been the right move. But for me, it was good to be able to do it. As an undergrad, if you’re already focusing on journalism, I don’t think you need a graduate degree too unless your aim is to acquire very specific new skills, like perfect video reporting, that will place you better in the job market.

BRITTANY: What was your major in undergrad?

SARA: Creative writing and English literature. So I was very writing-oriented but more in the essayist line of things. I was not very good at planning for the future, but at the time it seemed likely that I would end up going to law school. So an undergraduate English degree seemed like a good precursor to that if that’s what I decided to do. Then after working with a law firm for a couple of years as a paralegal, I just decided that law wasn’t right for me. So I reoriented my career direction.

I think you can go to grad school or you can just get a job at a paper and do it. I was fortunate in that I didn’t have to go into much debt for grad school because I TA’d while I was there, and  ran this Spanish-language radio program, so actually most of my tuition was waived. I personally would never have gone into a lot of debt to get a master’s degree in journalism because I knew I wasn’t going to make that money back. It’s not like you go to a medical school and you get a zillion dollars into debt and then it’s pretty established that you get a high salary afterwards. In journalism, most of us are not going to make a very high salary. So I thought going into a lot of debt was not a great idea.

BRITTANY: When did you know that you wanted to report on the specific issues you focus on, like the social justice, environmental and political side of things?

SARA: I think that’s just what personally speaks to me and interests me as a reporter. I don’t really like being in a scrum of reporters jockeying to get near the political figure who’s going to comment on the issue of the day. I like to be talking a lot of times with people who have never spoken with the press before, or have very limited contact with the press. I like finding voices that are hard to find and hearing the voices of people who are not often approached to share their experience. That, to me, is important and compelling and gives journalism that intensely human connection that I think is one of the best things about it.

BRITTANY: What do you think is the most rewarding piece that you’ve written?

SARA: A couple of years ago, I did a series of stories on the pollution of Lake Titicaca—that’s on the border between Peru and Bolivia—and those stories together formed what I think is a pretty diverse journalistic look at the issues affecting that area, which is really important environmentally and also home to so many people. So in that situation, I liked that I was able to spend a long time looking at that issue and examining it from different angles.

Also—and maybe there’s not one story on this topic that I think is the best thing that I ever did, but in terms of understanding the topic: the issue of child labor in Bolivia and how children have in some cases organized to defend their right to work as children. Getting to know the issues driving child labor was particularly rewarding because child labor is one of those topics that if you grow up in the States, you’ll hear it like, “That is bad, that is bad. It must be stopped. That factory must be closed. That person must be prevented from working.” And it’s not great, that’s for sure, but if you get to know young people who are working and see the reality of their daily lives, you understand why that work is necessary for their survival, and how diverse the reality of child laborers really is. So my knowledge on that topic and the time that I’ve spent reporting it is probably one of the things I’m most proud of because I think I may have helped people understand the issues behind what’s really a very controversial topic.

BRITTANY: Describe your typical day at work.

SARA: I have a home office. So my typical day is to get up maybe around 7:30, take my dog out, come back and get ready for work. Working from home or working freelance is always a challenge because nobody keeps you on a schedule. So you can sleep until noon if you want—although doing that would not be very good for your work overall. So I try to get up, get dressed, have breakfast and go to the office—even though the office is still in my house. In the morning, I skim all of the headlines from the big national newspapers in Bolivia to keep up-to-date on what’s happening across the country.

I might make phone calls to setup interviews. It sort of depends because freelance writing and writing in general is pretty cyclical, like sometimes you’re in an interview phase, sometimes you’re in a research phase, sometimes you’re in a writing phase, and each of those means different things. In the research phase, I’ll just go to a coffee shop with 300 pages of PDF documents and read and highlight and take notes.

If I’m in the reporting phase, I’m going to be calling people, setting up interviews, maybe traveling to other cities out in the field, getting to know people, talking, listening, recording, and just trying to get all the information that I need. And then of course I take all that information to my office and I just lock myself in the office and try to listen to all my interviews, transcribe sometimes and put together the text. So the day varies depending on which of those phases I’m in.

BRITTANY:With freelancing, do you have connections to certain papers like The Guardian or something, where you have to do a number of pieces for them, like two a month or something like that, or do you just pitch your own ideas?

SARA: I pitch my own ideas usually. It’s extremely fluid and that’s the interesting thing about freelance. It all depends on you to generate and then execute the idea, which can be an exhausting cycle to always be stuck in. But at the same time, it’s amazing because 99% of the time you’re doing what you want to do, not what somebody’s told you to do.

BRITTANY: What’s your tactic? Do you have any strategies for finding new stories and creating new ideas and coming up with new content?

SARA: I think the best thing that you could do if you’re a foreign correspondent is talk with people. I mean, I have a really interesting group of friends and contacts in Bolivia that work on a variety of issues. So we just talk. Talk about my work and listen to other people talk about their work, bounce ideas off people who aren’t necessarily journalists. I mean, it’s all about having your ear to the ground in that way, and staying on top of the national press. Those are the people who are out there following stories every single day. Of course they have to write a different kind of story than you have to write.

You’ve got to stay on top of what’s happening not just in the city that you are in but across the country. So you might be able to identify some national trends. So I think, yeah, just listening and reading are good ways to get your story ideas together.

BRITTANY: My mom is a freelance writer too and she talks about the challenges of working at home and the sleep-until-noon thing, how you can actually do that. I don’t know if I could be disciplined enough to do that.

SARA: It really requires . . . it’s like the best of jobs, the worst of jobs. It offers you such freedom but occasionally it’s like, “If only somebody would just tell me what to do!”

BRITTANY: Right, exactly. So I guess that may be one of the difficulties, but other than that, what do you think are the difficulties for being a freelance writer as opposed to working for a single company?

SARA: I think that when you freelance you often don’t have benefits like health insurance, like paid vacation. I mean, that’s certainly a challenge and I think that those are issues that drive a lot of people out of the freelance business because it’s so unstable in that way. Some people are married people or people who have a partner and they use their health insurance and that person has a more stable income and it’s good for the other person to be more flexible. But if you’re relying on yourself, a lack of paid vacation, lack of benefits, lack of retirement contribution funds… These are all things you might not think about when you’re 18 or 19, but then in your 30’s you’re definitely like, “What am I doing?”

So I think it takes a lot to stick with it once you realize those difficulties, and then of course things as boring as taxes. Taxes for freelancers can be hard to deal with, especially if you’re working abroad. The law is not very simple. It’s hard to find a simple tax program that’s going to help you do things the right way. So there’s a lot of nitty-gritty to it—the unglamorous, unexciting side of it. I mean, it’s wonderful to do the work that you want to do every single day but there’s a whole side of it that is a bit of a drag.

BRITTANY: So on the flip side, what would you say are the benefits?

SARA: The benefits are doing the work that you really want to do and doing it on your own schedule. It’s really amazing to think that every day you’re going to wake up and think of what’s most interesting to you, or something that’s exciting, or a compelling person that you want to talk with and then make all that happen and get to know that issue and really engage with it on an intense level. And of course there’re all different sorts of freelancing. I mean, people freelance on every possible issue, but I am talking about my life as a freelance foreign correspondent. It gives you a lot of freedom. I think freedom is probably the thing that a lot of us appreciate about the job.

BRITTANY: Tell me a little bit about the prep. Do you come up with an idea and then you have a certain newspaper or magazine in mind of like who you’re going to pitch it to, and if they don’t like the idea, do you go to another magazine? Tell me a little bit about how the pitching process works.

SARA: Well, pitching is really crucial to any freelancer. I’d say before I start talking about this that if anybody is considering freelancing internationally, I highly recommend sort of doing an internship or building contacts with editors at the places you want to publish before you start traveling.

In my case, I started working while I was still finishing my master’s degree and I did not really have contacts with editors back in the States at the places I wanted to publish and so it took me a lot of time to really get off the ground and establish those contacts; whereas if I had worked on establishing them before I came down to start working, I might have been in a better situation to start publishing sooner.

I feel that your relationships with your editors are so important because you’re trying to create something together, and as a freelancer your job can be really solo and isolating. I mean, you work on your own. You’re not in a newsroom. You see your peers or other journalists at events and social functions, but you’re not working with people every day. So that editor is your way to the larger world, and there has to be a lot of trust between you because you may be writing about a place that the editor doesn’t really know, or that they don’t have a really deep knowledge of, and that editor is going to be preparing your work for publication in an international outlet. So there’s got to be a really strong working relationship there.

When I first started pitching to people, a lot of times I would meet somebody who knew an editor at a publication and they’d gotten familiar with my work and they would put us in touch, because cold pitching a publication with no contact can be difficult. Editors receive so many pitches that they might not really have time to look specifically at yours. So networking and contact building are absolutely crucial, and I had never thought of myself as much of a networker when I started this job.

But when you like your job, networking is natural because you want to talk with people who are interested in and doing similar things. So you start to build up these contacts with people who are in the same field. And then once you get an editor to accept your pitch, you do the story, you send it over to them. I find that the first three or four times you work with an editor, you’re still really feeling out the situation, but if you get through that phase, then you can really start to build this relationship of trust where you put ideas back and forth and they’re responsive to you.

In my case, there were editors that I had worked with multiple times and when I think of a story or an issue, first I start to think, “Okay, this is happening. This is an interesting topic. This could be something that would work well for a story. And then I’ll think, well, how would I present it to make it interesting to outlet A, or how might it work for outlet B,” and normally I’ll just think of the editors that I know and think, “Okay, this story, the way that I want to do it, will probably work best for A.”

And they say yes or no. I think they say yes more than no because you get to understand what people are going to be interested in. Then once they say yes, I do the story, I send it, we go through the edit and then it’s published.

People ask me a lot of times, “Do you just write a story and then send it to an editor and ask them if they want it?” No, I don’t write my stories and then send them to an editor because writing a story the way that I do it is a really big investment of time. I can’t survive by investing my time in things that I then subsequently can’t sell.

BRITTANY: Right. Okay, so I guess I alluded to this before with the usefulness of the journalism degree but what about journalism as an industry, print journalism, specifically? I took a journalism class at Dickinson and my teacher would tell us all the time how print journalism is a dying industry. So what would your advice be to college students who are interested in pursuing a career in what a lot of people think is a dying industry?

SARA: I would say, think about how much you really love journalism. If you really love it, you’re going to get into it anyway. I mean, I always used to think it was so strange when people would talk about being in love with a job. But now I understand it. I mean, I love it. Will I be able to do it for my whole life? I don’t know. Would I like to? Yes, but I really just feel that this is the job that clicks for me and I know there are lots of other people out there who feel that way.

So whether or not the industry is dying, people are still going to go into journalism because they are going to feel a connection to it. But you need to really think realistically about the situation. I mean, your teacher was not kidding We have gone in recent years through massive layoffs at newspapers. Other organizations may not be growing or hiring as they once were. It’s a really difficult job market. At the same time, lots of people who went to graduate school with me are happily working as newspaper photographers and newspaper writers or magazine editors – while others went down different job paths. I mean, jobs do exist. You just have to accept that it’s an industry that is not flourishing at the moment.

But I don’t think that newspapers are going to end. I think maybe it’s not a death as much as a moment of profound change that is very traumatic to the industry. But the industry will continue onward. I think that people who are coming out of college, who really understand the consumption of news online and what it means to consume news through technology are a big part of defining how we’re going to consume news in the future.

BRITTANY: Right. Well, that’s the end of my questions. Do you think that there’s anything else that’s extremely interesting about you that you would want published?

SARA: I would just comment that if people are interested in international reporting and freelance, it’s not for everyone but I think it’s a great opportunity and really a privilege to get to know another country and another culture. I think it profoundly changes the way that you perceive the whole world when you’re just constantly immersed in a place that sees the world differently from the way that you once saw it. As a reporter, you become so involved with it that you start to see these details and intricacies and nuances that you would probably not see as a traveler or even as somebody working short-term in another country.

Of course you need to be realistic about whether you can financially survive in a place, in some cases people need to seriously consider their personal safety, and then whether living abroad long-term fits in with your greater life plans. If people are able to do it, I think that it can be a wonderful experience.

 

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