How academia helped me in UX
When I made the decision to leave academia for the private sector, I struggled. Firstly, I was unsure what job-options were available. Secondly, I struggled with how to translate my existing knowledge, skill set, and experience to fit the job position. Without going into detail, let’s just say I approached the transition very much like a research project, which is essentially how I approach many aspects of my life, and decided to pursue user experience research.
Since beginning my UX career, I discovered that academia imparted me with super powers that I previously was unaware of. If you are reading this because you too are considering leaving academia, and more specifically academia of a social science persuasion, then you too might have similar abilities: I have an encyclopedic memory of social interactions that I have participated in or observed, including what others say and do. I can also hold and unravel complex webs of associations in my head. I can isolate parts — maybe a person, event, or a thing — and retain an understanding of how it relates to the whole.
I may not be allowed to call these super powers when I underwent the better part of a decade engaging in intense training to develop them. This training involved reading canonical works of philosophy and social theory. Reading these texts, you start from the basics — for example, how are they defining “human-ness”; what are the active elements, and; what, if anything, are markers of temporality — and build up from there to understand the thesis. This means internalizing very specific and complex concepts and then understanding how they contribute to or relate back to the bigger theory the author is proposing. My training as an anthropologist also involved learning how to observe, imitate, and even manipulate people to make visible the invisible of social and cultural concepts and practices.
You can probably see where I am going with this. In UX, you are working to transform a product or process to fit into, work with, and enhance the life of your target audience or user. It is a very useful skill to be able to hold in one’s mind a complex web of associations between parts and whole. Applying this understanding of how a product or process interacts with the whole that is the life-world of your user, to improve the product or process: This is an amazing super power because you also empower your users by providing them with a product or process that enhances their life and their world.
To those of you considering “pracademia”, take pride in your hard-earned powers. Embrace and promote them. Not everyone can do what you can, and it is something that you can mobilize to your advantage as you transition from academia to private sector.
