(Music)

VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with the 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.

(Music ends)

MISTY CROOKS, HOST: I’m Misty Crooks, a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Graduate Center and a fellow in the Office of Career Planning and Professional Development. In this episode of Alumni Aloud, I interview Rayya El Zein, who graduated from our program in Theatre and Performance and is now Senior Program Manager at Code for Science and Society. She explains how she transitioned from academic research to research in the tech non-profit world, and how GC students can position themselves for fulfilling careers in non-profits and the tech field.

CROOKS: Rayya, thanks for joining us today. To start with, can you give us an overview of your organization’s mission and what your role is there?

RAYYA EL ZEIN, GUEST: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m happy to. So I work for Code for Science and Society. We are a US based tech nonprofit whose mission is to build support for open source, open data, open science projects in the public interest. I work for them running the newest of three programs. It’s called the Digital Infrastructure Incubator and it is a cohort based capacity building program for open digital public infrastructure projects. All of the work that we do at CS&S, we do not build technology and we don’t host data ourselves. All the things that we do are about strategic support, are about human infrastructure, social infrastructure, cultural infrastructure for open technology. So the work that I do in the incubator is working with projects as they think about what their project governance looks like, what their community engagement strategy is, if they’re in places where it’s less familiar what it means to work in open. We are working with them to localize the tenets if you would of open, working in the open, and thinking about how to, how to translate, how to localize, how to build the cultural infrastructure in different places. My background is in the social sciences and the humanities. I have a PhD from the Grad Center in theatre and performance. I worked in media and communications departments and anthropology departments, and so I came to this position really thinking about human beings and human culture.

CROOKS: To think a little bit more about your current role, can you tell us what a typical day or a typical week look like for you?

EL ZEIN: So Code for Science and Society, CS&S, is a fully remote organization. We have two people in Portland, Oregon. We have somebody in Seattle. We have somebody in Madison, Wisconsin, somebody in the Bay area, and me, I’m in Philadelphia. So we’re all working remote all the time. My day to day is a mix of working with the six teams in the incubator, building programming that cuts across the three programs at CS&S, building public facing programming, and getting to know the sector and the industry. I’ve really set a goal for myself of understanding how it works, and so a good portion of my week to week work is meeting new people. And there’s a small portion that’s working for, a small and equal part that’s working with the same people. But I guess one of the things that’s exciting to me about this work and this virtual work is that I’m constantly meeting new people. And I think that that is unusual, perhaps in some tech work, people are usually on zoom all the time, with the same people with their team. And for me that’s only part of the work. A lot of my work is meeting new people.

CROOKS: You have started to touch on this, but what is it about this position that you find rewarding?

EL ZEIN: I find it really exciting meeting new people all over the world, very smart people who are thinking about how to create things that would make the world a better place. That is not something that I was regularly doing in academia and it’s life giving. The other thing that I find really rewarding is that there are more and more people from the social sciences working in tech, but we’re still rare. And the perspective that we bring is really different from what people are used to hearing. And you see light bulbs go off all the time, or you hear like really pregnant pauses, right. And you know I used to hear that in my classrooms working with students, but it’s something totally different when you’re working with peers. And you can bring in perspectives. You can, you can shift the way that people think about things. So that I think that’s the most rewarding thing is that I have a perspective that is valuable and that is valued. I feel it like structurally valued and I can see it interpersonally. I’m bringing something of use. When I took the job, people told me that that was something that I would encounter. And it’s taken me, I’ve been in the position oh 11 months or so and I didn’t really notice that that was happening until I was like seven, eight months into it. And then I started seeing that what I thought was like common knowledge or common sense even was new for people. And not in a condescending way not like oh you didn’t think about that, no just like really a productive engagement with people’s work.

CROOKS: That’s great. On a different but slightly resonant notes, what are some challenges that your organization is currently facing?

EL ZEIN: So we’re a nonprofit and all nonprofits kind of face the same kind of challenges around fundraising, around what does the future look like, and what’s our sustainability model. One of the things that we work with teams on is sustainability. What is this, what is the vision of sustainability of your project? And as we’re working with teams on that, we also have to think about it at CS&S. Like, do you fundraise indefinitely? Is there an off ramp for fundraising? How do we continually articulate our value in the ecosystem? How do we grow? What does growth look like? Will we know when we’re at scale? What will that feel like? These sorts of things. These are kind of the existential questions I think of nonprofit work. Those are some of the kind of like continual challenges. Other ones are thinking about you know how do we actually work towards the values that we articulate. How do we actually build a more diverse and inclusive tech ecosystem without paying lip service to those terms? How do we build structures to transfer power, not just to increase representation? These are things that I think we don’t have answers to that require constant attention. You can’t just have one meeting or even a regular meeting. You have to think about it and work at it all the time.

CROOKS: Can you tell us how you went from the Graduate Center to your current position?

EL ZEIN: I was a teaching fellow the middle three years of my PhD. I was a writing fellow in the fifth year. I was applying for funding to do field work in the Middle East from years two to five. It felt like I was applying for funding for a long time. I got some for what would have been the sixth year of my PhD. My dissertation was about rap and hip hop musicians and kind of like the ecosystem of cultural entrepreneurs around them in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. I got some funding to spend four or five months in the West Bank, to spend almost a year in Jordan, and a few other months here and there in Lebanon. I’m Lebanese so my family was there, so that was the easier part for me to do the research. So I spent a year and a half in fieldwork and then my partner was in the Republic of Georgia at that time. So when I was writing up, I didn’t have additional funding, so I moved to Tbilisi to Georgia and was there. I defended. I got a short internship at a social science research center in Georgia. Mostly they do quantitative research so that was very different from what I had been doing, ethnographic research, but it was my first introduction to R and different kinds of quantitative data.

I was on the job market. I had a few interviews. I did a fellowship in Germany that winter and then in the spring I got an offer to do a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, and so we moved back to the states. We moved to Philadelphia, where I am now. And that was a two year postdoc at the Annenberg School for Communication in one of their clusters called the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. I spent a year working on the prospectus for my manuscript and kind of feeling out other initiatives. Like I was really interested in and still am interested in building things, in collaborating. I found the structure of isolated research like exciting, but very difficult to pull like out of nothing, out of zero right. I really was thirsty for different collaborative structures, so I spent a lot of that first year of the postdoc feeling out like are there different collaborations I could build. And none of those panned out. The structure of the postdoc was very much focused on write your book and that’s the professionalization model that I think a lot of PhD graduates are kind of pushed into if they’re lucky to have that kind of support right. So I worked on the prospectus. I cranked out maybe three or four different drafts of the manuscript and then the second year I was almost exclusively on the market, I filed 91 applications I think. And I ended up as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the anthropology department at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. That position was initially just for a year. And then, it was extended for a second year. They got the funding to make it a tenure track line. There was an open call . And then they hired someone else. They hired an anthropologist, someone who was trained as an anthropologist. And at that point, I had just had a child. I had been on the market for five years maybe. It was the pandemic. And I thought you know what, I think I need to try something else. I felt myself in a very tiny place as a person right. I felt like there were so few things that I could do. I felt very backed into a corner and I did not want to be that kind of person for my kid. And so I started doing the things that a lot of us do. I was following different coaches or mentors. Beyond the Professoriate was one. I think there was maybe one other one, but the kinds of resources they put online to think about how do I translate my academic CV which is, I don’t know, 17 pages long into a two-page professional CV. How do I write a cover letter that isn’t academic cover letter that’s legible to other people? I think those were like the hardest things for me like getting those two documents to a place where they could be tailored to different jobs. And then I just started sending them off. Actually, the job for Code for Science and Society was one of the first half a dozen that I applied to. That’s the process of applying. I have so many other things to say about like advice. There’s so many things you can do when you’re a student right so that that transition doesn’t feel like an existential. It’s not scary it’s just like one of the things that you do.

CROOKS: If you could go back to your time at the Grad Center knowing you know sort of where you are now, what would you do maybe differently or what would you do at all to help out that process?

EL ZEIN: The first thing that I would have done was make sure that I was writing not only for academic publications, to make sure I had bylines in regular media, journals or whatever, anything that you’re interested in, literary journals, political op eds, whatever it is, but to have publications that were not only peer reviewed publications. And I remember, there were many turning points where it was like how should I think about doing spending my time and all the advice I got was that you need peer reviewed journal articles. That’s the only thing that you need. And I think that that is so wrong because even if you end up on the tenure track, the public legibility of your intellectual work is paramount. It’s so important and learning how to write for public audience is just as important as learning how to write for an academic one. It might be more important in the social sciences and in the hard sciences right. The scientists who can translate what they’re doing to a popular audience, they’re just so much more effective. It helps your teaching. It helps your writing, I mean all of it so that’s the first thing. And then the second thing I think would be like to pursue paid or not paid opportunities in industry. There are ways I could have augmented my income that would have set me up to do other things besides academia. I would have been happier because I would have met other people. I would have been building a network. I would have been happier because I’d been making money, like different exposures, different patterns of professionalization would have been really useful.

CROOKS: And when you were applying for jobs and ending up in your current role, what did the actual job search process look like?

EL ZEIN: I started following different job lists. Like Words of Mouth is one that Rachel Meade Smith puts together that, I mean the first thing that I really started doing is like reading those listings in earnest right. Like what are the ways that jobs are being framed and it was because I didn’t know that I wanted to be in this sector right. It was a way for me to imagine, is that a thing I would want to do right. And then that was like the first chapter if you want. The second chapter was really translating my job materials and then I applied for the position at CS&S. There was an initial interview with a committee, three or four people. There was a second interview with a different three or four people. Then they checked my references. Then there was a call where they offered me the job. They sent me an email saying we’re going to offer you the job, and then there was a call to talk about terms.

CROOKS: And you talked about transforming your academic CV to a resume. How did you make your background as a social science researcher legible to people in industry and/or the nonprofit world?

EL ZEIN: So I think that I got very lucky in that the person who hired me, the Executive Director of Code for Science and Society, Danielle Robinson, is also a PhD who left academia. So she understood the transition that I was going through, and it was attractive to her. She was like oh like that’s somebody I could work with. Not to say that she wasn’t considering people who weren’t leaving academia or don’t have a PhD. But I felt like there was some implicit understanding that she and I share, even though her PhD is in the hard sciences, not the social sciences.

How did I make sure that my materials were legible? So I found the resources that Maren Wood puts together at Beyond the Professoriate. The website is beyondprof.com. I was in this way of thinking, where was like oh teaching is only teaching and research is only research and none of these are legible outside of academia. But teaching is really communicating to different stakeholders right, communicating information clearly to different stakeholders. And research is grant writing, and it is budget allocation and it is completing projects. It’s project management, basically, and so is teaching. Teaching is also project management right because you’re getting you know 16 to 500 students through the course so it’s also directing research, if you want, especially those upper level courses or one on one classes, not doing the research, but directing research. So I think a bunch of positions I was looking at were those kinds of things. Like, how do I be a professional researcher outside of academia or direct research? So I had two things in mind, or three. I need a stable income with insurance for my child. I want project management experience because maybe one day, I want to run my own institution or my own think tank or my own nonprofit. And this will be a way to build that experience. And I need to not hate what I’m doing. Like I want to have like some political alignment with the goals of where I am. Those were the kinds of things that guided me as I was deciding what to apply to. And it was still 2021, so I needed to be remote as well. And there were a lot of things that were remote at the time.

CROOKS: And for people looking for positions in your area, I’m thinking of this as the intersection of tech and, what skills or qualities would you say are particularly helpful?

EL ZEIN: Across the board, general competence right is important, showing up having done what you said you were going to do, follow through. Those things right which all academics have to do right. I think, also like thoughtful articulate engagement that is not about ego is important. I think being able to listen to and actually hear and then speak back to different communities, different stakeholders is equally important. These are things that like we can all do, but we’ve been kind of trained into thinking that that’s not enough or that’s not a skill or that’s not like a professional quality. And it’s just not true. All the things that you need to succeed in a graduate program are things you need to succeed in the business world right. The things that we don’t train academics to do is to recognize their own value and their own worth and to have confidence in the things that they’re saying. And you do need that in industry. And it took me months to kind of relax and to notice how much of in a corner I’d been putting myself in academia and to let my instincts guide how I was engaging in the workplace. But I guess like what I do well at my job is listening and communicating. And so it’s the parts of work that were valued as a teacher. The other thing that I do, I mean I’m like training myself to write differently in this position because nobody like, no funder wants to read like a theoretically inflected grant application right. And it just doesn’t work right, so I have to retrain myself how to write. The skills I have about conducting research, you know I’m an ethnographer so that’s also listening and communicating right, so I don’t see them as so separate, the teaching and research skills. It’s the writing that I’m shifting how I’m, how I have to do it. And I feel like a little dissatisfied with that answer because I couldn’t articulate it more as like professional skills, but what I hope that you can hear, those listening, is that it’s not some other thing you have to train to do. It’s what you’re doing already.

CROOKS: Yeah, yeah, that’s super helpful. Great. And as a final question, we like to see if you can give any advice, or leave us with a moment of advice for current students.

EL ZEIN: You have value, you have so much value, like the PhD was not a mistake. It is a good thing that you’re doing. And there are a lot of options after you graduate. As much as you can resist like the Kool aid or like the guilt or like the thing that you just have to like be more competitive to get these tiny positions that so few people can get, resist it and go like flourish, be happy. Like there’s so, there’s so much money that’s out there. It’s really mind boggling and there doesn’t, you don’t have to like move around the country or like feel like you’re underperforming for your family or. You can make money and thrive and still feel intellectually stimulated and you’re not letting anyone down. And your friends that you’ve made in academia will celebrate you for it. They’re not going to be like you know she left you know, like those were all fears I had in there that did not pan out.

CROOKS: Great. Thank you so much for joining us today.

EL ZEIN: Thank you so much for having me, Misty and for hosting these conversations.

(Music)

(Music ends)

Back to Top