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VOICE OVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with a GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development.

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ANDERS WALLACE, HOST: I’m Anders Wallace, a PhD candidate in the Anthropology program at the Graduate Center. In this episode I sit down with Mike Pino who’s the global learning partner for Cognizant Digital Business, a fortune-200 IT services and business process outsourcing company based in New Jersey. He’s responsible setting the learning curriculum for 40,000 employees who work in data analytics, artificial intelligence, programming, and digital engineering that keeps them up-to-date with today’s digital trends.

Mike earned his PhD in English from the Graduate Center in 2004. In this episode, Mike tells us about and the importance of pursuing learning outside your PhD discipline, the breakthrough insights you can gain by applying your academic interests and training in business contexts, and the importance of conveying your value to companies in ways they can understand and appreciate.

Mike lives in Florida so we made this interview happen via video conference.

So, how are you?

MIKE PINO, GUEST: Doing okay—I’m glad to be back in North American time zones.

WALLACE: You were in India, is that right?

PINO: India, Singapore, was supposed to be also in Europe and Australia, but thankfully the trip was shortened just a little bit.

WALLACE: That would’ve been a proper world tour.

PINO: Yeah, a long tour.

WALLACE: But that’s a regular part of your work that sounds like?

PINO: You know, a lot more than I expected. And it sounds glamorous, but after you spend a bunch of time on airplanes—and really flights have changed over the last 15 years—it’s really not that much fun.

WALLACE: Yeah, I can imagine. For listeners who don’t know you, could you say your name and what you do for a living?

PINO: Sure. My name’s Mike Pino. What I do for a living is I am the global learning partner for Cognizant Digital Business. Cognizant is a fortune-200 IT services and business process outsourcing company based in New Jersey. And my responsibility in the academic sense is sort of like a dean of a university, where I’m responsible for setting the academic curriculum for approximately 40,000 students, which we happen to call employees, and I’m responsible for making sure that folks who do data analytics, artificial intelligence programming, digital engineering—a lot of cutting edge kind of skills—I’m responsible for making sure that I keep them up-to-date and driving toward the next thing. So that’s my responsibility—to really set that curriculum in programs and make sure they continue to be in a state of readiness for the organization.

WALLACE: So let me see if I got that right—you’re helping to train these IT consultants and data analysts on the cutting edge of what they should know and the best practices of their field?

PINO: That’s exactly right.

WALLACE: It seems like quite a leap from English.

PINO: You could say that. It’s probably a lot longer of a story and there’s probably a long detour that walks through a lot of my history, which got me from there to here. I have 25 years of software programming under my belt, so that’s also part of the reason why that’s happened.

WALLACE: That’s interesting. Can you give me an overview of that journey?

PINO: Well, I’ll start from undergraduate. Although I ended up getting a PhD in English, my undergraduate was in science. I was in Chemistry and had the choice between graduating early with an English undergraduate or graduating on time with a triple major in Spanish Literature, English Literature, and Chemistry. So I ended up with a major in English Literature, graduating in three years, and then a minor in Spanish and minor in Chemistry. But my real background was always in Chemistry and science, and I always found literature fascinating and fun. So I guess that’s one of those unusual wrinkles or quirks. But that’s how I ended up with someone that was actually doing UNIX programming, because I learned how to do UNIX while I was an undergraduate working in the lab because that’s how we would analyze our data at the time. So I was the guy in the lab who learned how to do that. And from there I decided to pursue a degree in Literature. And I’d never regret it, but it wasn’t something that made a lot of sense to people. It was more of a passion—something I always found interesting.

And now that I’ve reflected on it more and more, the thing is that I’ve always found languages interesting—both human and machine languages. I’ve programmed in more than 25 languages and learned to speak more than 9; although I’m really not comfortable anymore in more than 2 or 3 languages. But I’ve always found the thing between human and machine languages to be the interesting place. And to me I think that one of the interesting things that’s opened up my career of late is I’m able to do some interesting programming work connecting machines with human language, being able to start to predict and understand both emotional states, as well as likely predictable outcomes based on how someone is putting language together or how someone’s assembling things based on a lot of different data points.

So it’s been a lot of fun. I would say English is something I always found fascinating—reading the great works and having conversations about them and pursuing really the larger kinds of threads of literature—but I wasn’t really sure that I’d be a professor. I enjoyed teaching in the university system, but I was never sure that I’d be a professor.

I guess you probably have more and more of my kind now, but I worked fulltime when I was at CUNY. I was the head of operations for a digital marketing company in Massachusetts while I was writing my dissertation at night. So it was one of those things where I don’t think that that’s a typical academic life. In fact, I was more in the nonacademic world than the academic world. Maybe at the beginning of my career it was that way, but by the time I was writing my dissertation I was fulltime employed.

In fact one of the funniest things that happened was that I did go to MLA, which for my discipline in English is where you go for jobs and interviews and such, and I got a tenure track position. And I went to talk to my mentor at the time and said, “Would I be crazy to take a 160% pay cut as an assistant professor?” And he said, “Yeah, you probably would be.”

WALLACE: So you had this underlying interest in languages and systems, which seems like a common thread between chemistry and programming and English literature.

PINO: That’s exactly the case. And when I was in the English literature program at CUNY, I had the chance to work with a Linguistics professor, and that really launched me into a little bit more of computational linguistics and some of the work in my dissertation actually leveraged that. So it was one of those moments where I really found that kind of intersection and that’s something I’ve been doing in the background.

WALLACE: So can you tell me a bit more about the career trajectory you took? You were a head of marketing while finishing your PhD. And what happened from there?

PINO: So I was working for one of the first online marketing companies—a company called E-Dialogue, which doesn’t exist anymore. eBay bought it and I think I was employee number twenty-something. And by the time I was writing my dissertation, I was the defacto head of technical operations and responsible for a lot of marketing type work, which was kind of unusual. You know, at night I would be thinking about Carlisle, and by day trying to make sure that the copy we were sending out to the NFL or Staples would lead to the outcomes we were trying to accomplish. So it was very unusual.

From there it was pretty easy. I got back into the university system. They brought me in at Brandeis University to help change the way they were using online learning systems. I came on there and worked in instructional technology. And basically graduated from there to a lot of online learning systems and web development. Was part of the team that helped launch the distance education program with an online component. I built a platform for doing that and built a lot of technologies that link things together.

Now it sounds pedestrian, but at the time in 2004 or 2005, one of the things I accomplished was that we livestreamed the graduation ceremony around the world, which at the time was not easy to do. And from there I ended up at Harvard Business School Publishing. They were really interested to try to take some of the work they were doing—taking a lot materials from Harvard Business Review and some of the books that were published—and they were making derivative products on CD-ROMs and such in 2005 or 2006, and they asked me to help them rethink the whole thing for an online experience. So I did that and ended up building another platform for them that helped deliver executive education at a fraction of the cost. I built a lot of those kinds of platforms over the years, but that’s how my career has sort of gone—at the intersection of learning and technology.

WALLACE: Super interesting. What’s a typical day in the office like for you if there is such thing?

PINO: There isn’t. (Laughter.) I haven’t worked in an office in ten years. I’ve worked out of my house. I do have office space wherever I want, but one of the things that’s been nice about my career is that I’ve been able to carve out a little space for myself. So although I work from home, sometimes my days will start at 3 or 4 in the morning—and that’s to get on the phone with sometimes Australia, Japan, or India, work through some issues, make sure I understand what the business needs are, what our customers and clients are looking for, and finding ways to develop learning so we can deliver our employees with the skills that are needed at that moment. My day will sometimes start that early, sometimes I don’t have a lot of things going on in the middle of the day. Sometimes I’ll have a lot of things going on in Europe or North America, so it just depends on what’s happening or where we are the calendar. Because just as academic calendars have their cycles and their semesters and times of year when you have midterms and such, same thing happens in corporations. And your promotion cycle is something—like tenure view and you could sit on a committee inside a university—here you actually do sit on a committee and you do a similar type of thing except you don’t call it tenure review, you call it a promotion cycle and you’re reviewing people’s performance and their potential for advancement.

WALLACE: Sounds as though there are a lot of parallels that way with academic life.

PINO: In many ways there are analogies between the two experiences. I don’t think they’re so remotely distant from each other. I think the stakes are different. The speed is sometimes different. I think sometimes the autonomy and the ability to do things in an academic space that you might not have the access to do in a corporation may be one significant difference. But I think there are a lot of analogies between the two experiences.

WALLACE: So what have you enjoyed the most about your work?

PINO: One of the things I actually have really enjoyed is how quickly I’m able to help people to feel relevant in their role. And not only relevant to where they are and how they’re performing in their current role, but seeing an opportunity for career development longer term. I think there’s a satisfaction that comes with developing people. If you ever have the teaching bug, you never really lose that fascination or excitement of seeing someone get something for the first time, and then of seeing them apply it in different ways and learn to do something with it in new ways. I think you get the same kind of experience in a corporation except what you’re helping people to do is meaningfully contribute in an organization and feel as though they’re building a career future for their family and their betterment. That’s what I’d say is the most satisfying thing.

WALLACE: That’s interesting. Because, on the one hand, you’re working on these digital systems, and on the other you’re really saying that it’s a lot about mentorship and developing people in the context of learning.

PINO: Yeah, one of the things a lot of people tend to misunderstand about digital is that digital is about being more human. And I think this is something that a lot of people have kind of missed about it. When you really get down to it, a lot of what’s been changing in the larger ecosystem, I mean this stuff has been around for a while, is for instance, five or six years ago we used to talk about digital technologies and means of distribution in terms like social mobile analytics and cloud or SMAT. And really what digital is is a radical reconfiguration of all forms of interactions or commerce between humans, business, and institutions. And I think that in some ways what we’re watching here is that the technology is basically reducing the friction and accelerating the exchange between the people that produce and the people that consume. So what you’re doing is you’re disintermediating all the people that go between. In a certain way, you’re helping humans be more human.

At the same time, it’s surprisingly dehumanizing. And the real scary part of all this is that we may have the expertise, the know-how, the knowledge to produce some of these technologies—to produce robots that can teach themselves what would take 100 years if done serially, but they can actually do it in parallel—teach themselves how to rotate a cube. So you now have AI that have taught robots to manipulate things as well as a human hand can do, not taught by a human. AI that was programmed to try to track down the zodiac killer and now writes creepy poetry. So there’s a lot of weird stuff that’s happening, and if you look at it, you see that a lot of our innovations are really questioning wisdom or self-consistent ethics or morality. A lot of the stuff we’re producing are far surpassing what we as humans have been able to do in terms of self-consistent ethics of morality and law.

WALLACE: You’ve mentioned things you enjoy about your work, what about some challenges or things you find frustrating in your work?

PINO: (Laughter.) I think any time you work in a collective sort of sense, one of the challenges that always exists is that you have to give up your sense of what the right way forward is. And sometimes you actually have to step back and check your own intellectual arrogance at the door. Because the best ways forward are often with intellectual humility, and sometimes that’s not so easy. Maybe that’s just for me. I’ve been very fortunate in many ways. I’ve been ahead of my class in lot of things. But one of the things you don’t learn when you’re ahead of your class is that you don’t learn how to step back and really respect and understand what’s happening around you. So I guess in some ways what’s been hard is actually learning how to develop that sort of emotional awareness—how to develop a stronger sense of intellectual humility. That may be a personal quirk for me, but that’s been one of my challenges. And what I’ve discovered is that an awful lot of interesting things happen when you stop telling people what to do or how to do it and explain to people what you wish to accomplish and what the outcomes are and let them actually come up with the answers. And sometimes you find better answers than you even anticipated. So it’s a lot of that kind of stepping back and actually learning how to do things differently.

WALLACE: So that’s a benefit of losing some of that academic autonomy—gaining the intellectual humility.

PINO: Exactly. And I think in some ways that team context is where a lot of this is really moving toward. Collectively, humans can produce innovation much faster than in individual systems, no matter how fast a processing speed and such exists.

WALLACE: Do you ever feel disappointed about not being in academia?

PINO: That’s a great question. The thing I miss about academia is the time to really sit back and think about what you want to say and what you really mean. Oftentimes when you’re working, you really have only a small bit of time to produce and your timetable to produce is ridiculously short. Maybe I’m romanticizing it, because my experience of the academic world is not necessarily what a lot of assistant professors actually experience. I’ve never actually lived as an assistant professor. So I can imagine carrying a 4-4 load and trying to find time to publish and research and also try to raise a family and do all of those things, which might be just as hard as navigating a fulltime job. But you asked me what my regret would be, so I guess in that way I’ll just keep it in my own narrow context and I’ll keep the romantic sense of the academic life and being able to step back and really think about what you mean and take a lot more time to think through it.

WALLACE: How has finishing your PhD benefitted you in your career?

PINO: You know, in a couple ways what a PhD has done for me is it immediately establishes that I have the capability of working through problems or being able to think through things at a different level. It immediately establishes a certain sort of credibility. The last time I checked, I think nine people have looked at my dissertation—excluding my committee, family, and friends that I made look at it. So it really doesn’t matter necessarily in the corporate world what you worked on, but rather that you have this kind of experience of being able to work through problems at that level of intensity. That’s what finishing the PhD has opened up for me. I’m not sure that would be the same for everyone, but for me that’s what it’s done.

WALLACE: That actually resonates a lot. It’s a skill in analytic thinking you can apply in many ways and makes you better and faster at learning new things.

PINO: Yeah. And one of the things you learn very quickly is that there’s never enough time to get all the information you want to get, so you have to learn how to quickly understand what roughly is out there and which areas are most right to pursue. And as a consequence, I think that’s a directly analogous situation to the kind of speed that you operate at in the corporate space.

WALLACE: You mentioned you had a multidisciplinary academic training—a computational linguistics course. And my question is: Was there anything else you wish you’d learned while getting your PhD?

PINO: You know, it’s kind of funny, computational linguistics really didn’t exist as a discipline at the Grad Center when I went there. When I was there, we were still at the Grace Building on 42^nd Street and 6^th. When I defended my dissertation is when we moved to 34^th St. at the Altman Building. So in many ways, I’m an old timer when it comes to CUNY. And the professor I studied with in the English department actually encouraged me to do some of the things I was doing. One of the things I started to do was take apart search engines, and I built my own search engine. And what I was trying to do was to understand semantic drift in a more meaningful way. To understand how words change over time.

I was able to accelerate my dissertation through this work. By taking apart a search engine. I had to rewrite some code and do some stuff with OCR scanners, because a lot of my texts I was working on weren’t digital when I was doing my dissertation. Everything was still in microfilm or in hard form. So you literally had to figure out where you wanted to pursue and how you wanted to pursue and then you would apply this.

But I wish at the time—some of the ways that computational linguistics and semantic technologies have advanced since then—I wish I had the opportunity to do some more of that work while I was in my graduate studies. I don’t think it would’ve changed anything; it would’ve just been something I would’ve appreciated more. And I’d probably be a lot more hands-on in programming now if I were doing that. I’d probably be doing a lot more programming in R, a lot more stuff with linguistics than I currently am. I don’t think I’d change anything. It was a great experience.

I had a lot of great professors at CUNY, a lot of really encouraging professors. I had one in the English department who was pretty impressive and really one of those genuine types of people who encouraged people to pursue their passions whatever they were. He had this course on medievalism, and he really encouraged us to try to do something and make it digital, which at the time in the late 90s was to put it on a CD-ROM. You were writing in C++ and doing all sorts of goofy stuff, but that didn’t stop this professor. He would basically say, “Figure out a way. If you need me to help you or connect you with someone in the computer science department, let me know.” He was just one of those people who really encouraged it, and some people did some amazing things at the time. It’s experiences like that that are unique to CUNY from what I’ve been able to gather from other people’s experiences in higher education and graduate school.

WALLACE: So let’s imagine that a GC student who’s listening is interested in going into your field in either consulting or technology development. What would you say to them? What skills should they focus on learning, looking back at your own experience?

PINO: What’s funny right now is that the next disintermediation that’s happening is programming known as low-code or no-code, which, as it sounds, requires absolutely no programming capability. These are platforms that make it easy for humans and machines to actually build systems faster. So in a certain way a lot of my past is a path I wouldn’t recommend to other people because it’s not going to be there much longer.

But one of the things I’d encourage people to do is spend a lot more time understanding people in contexts, because the huge change that’s happening I think is that a lot of the stuff that’s happening right now in digital—the hype that people are talking about—has been around forever. For instance, Blockchain. Everyone talks about it, but very few people actually know what it is. But what it really was is a professor in Accounting in 1989 came up with a practice known as triple-entry bookkeeping, and it took 30 years for the technology to catch up to where he was and what he could conceive.

And I think the thing you actually have as a grad student is you have access to think about things on a highly theoretical construct, and if you think about what people are going to need, where things are heading, you have the opportunity to set yourself up on a new path—whether that’s triple entry accounting to create Blockchain some three decades later when the technology finally gets there or whether you’re an anthropologist. We employ a lot of anthropologists in the research we do in digital marketing to help understand the way to get the most out of the interaction design, the experience design… and a lot of the tools and techniques taught in Sociology and Anthropology actually have correspondents in the corporate world.

The challenge you have as a graduate student is that you can’t assume that the corporation understands what value you bring to them. I think the most important thing you could do is try to imagine what they need and translate your skills into something you could do for them that’s unique to them. I think that’s probably the most important thing you could do. It’s a matter of branding yourself in a way that’s unique, and positioning yourself and experience not only in going through the higher education experience and finishing a PhD, but translating that experience to immediate application. And it’s a little bit tricky because it’s not something they teach you in any of the classes at CUNY I imagine. But I think if you were to spend the time thinking about what’s analogous and what you’ve learned and how it could be applied in a corporation, you can find some really interesting opportunities.

And there are a lot of corporations that are going down that path. Microsoft, for instance, has been experimenting the last two years—they don’t ask for a resume or a CV. They’re more interested in how you learn to learn, how quickly you learn, what things you’re capable of doing, and what kind of background and experience you have. So for instance, maybe you’re an educational psychologist, well, there’s a huge gap and opportunities in understanding psychometrics, and being able to help a corporation take advantage of that could be a huge game-changer for the corporation, even though it may be something that seems pedestrian and mundane to you with your background and training in psychometrics.

WALLACE: That’s such a fascinating synopsis you just gave, and really a broad one, too, in the ways students can think about how their skills apply in contexts they haven’t even thought of. So I think that’s a wonderful insight.

PINO: The real challenge is that digital has changed everything. It’s here. It has been here for some time. It’s not a question of whether or not to do digital, but how to produce consistent, desirable human results through digital intervention. How to make things better for individuals through the collective efforts of machines and humans. But I think the thing that’s gonna be the huge game-changer maybe 10 years from now are really understanding the ethics of wisdom and being able to be ahead of some of these things. I think our brethren in Philosophy—people who have what seems to be the least applicable training on any job—may actually be the people who have answers for some of the things that are going to start coming up very soon.

There is a place for people that come through with PhDs, but it’s not for the corporation to help you understand what you bring to the table. You have to take that amazing experience and that degree and apply it—to think about how to position it and brand it as something that’s directly applicable to something the corporation needs. Don’t be afraid of actually branding yourself differently. The other thing you should also do as soon as possible is start writing and sharing. Start looking at things and what you’re discovering—brand yourself and market it by publishing it. It’s not gonna be about what you learned. It’s how you apply that learning, what you distill or how you distill and apply it. And the more you’re seen as a person who can help people understand that context, the faster you’re going to have job offers that you didn’t even know would happen. In all honesty, the last few jobs I’ve had, people have come to me. I haven’t actually been seeking them. And that happens by making a little bit of time—getting out there, speaking a lot more, offering things, mentoring people. You’d be surprised how these things actually play out in the corporate world. By doing that, your next job is usually one or two connections away.

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WALLACE: That’s a wrap for this episode of Alumni Aloud. A big thank you to Mike for coming on to share his experiences as an English PhD in the world of digital strategy and consulting with our listeners. Remember to stay tuned for more episodes of Alumni Aloud, published every other week during the Fall and Spring semesters. Subscribe on iTunes and you’ll automatically be notified when new episodes are released. Also, check out our Facebook, Twitter, and career planning website at cuny.is/careerplan for more updates from our office or to make appointments with our career counselors. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

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