How a humanities PhD got hired at Amazon

Larry McGrath on his academic exit and why he loves researching sports for a living

Larry McGrath

I’m back with another success story from the humanities! Larry McGrath is a senior researcher for Amazon Prime Video. He completed his PhD in the History and Anthropology of Science at Johns Hopkins University in 2014 and taught at Wesleyan University as a Mellon postdoc for three years before transitioning to business in 2017. He first landed a consulting position at a boutique firm, Design Science, where his work caught the eye of recruiters at Meta.

I spoke with Larry about why sports is such a fertile subject for anthropological research, how he continues to translate his academic skills into industry language, and what he sees as the most useful questions for informational interviews. Near the end of our conversation, I turn Larry’s own questions back around to ask about the tools he uses in his current role and the goals and challenges of his most recent work project. You’ll want to read to the very end for his take on whether a traditional liberal arts education ought to be replaced by a jobs-based curriculum, or whether employability can be the byproduct of studying Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake.

Don’t forget that our first book club meeting will be this Thursday, August 10, from 7:30-9:00 p.m., EST. We’ll be reading Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, which is available at Amazon or Bookshop. Even if you have never been an academic, I hope you’ll join us! Please use this link to join the conversation. Passcode is DxB3u8.

A Conversation with Larry McGrath

Joshua Doležal: You and I connected after a LinkedIn post. I guess I was revealing some of my ignorance because I was inundated with examples of people transitioning from academe and finding industry roles, but doing so from the social sciences or STEM. Matteo Tardelli, for instance, going from bench lab work into industry lab work. There's a fairly direct correlation there. So I had posted this assertion that was flawed, that there were more folks in those other disciplines represented and that fewer folks in the humanities are out there. And so you were one of the 120 people who set me straight.

Larry McGrath: I do a lot of coaching and seminars for humanists and social scientists, and there are plenty of opportunities in industry for both of them. But for the sake of this interview, I'm happy to speak more specifically to the humanities.

Joshua Doležal: Yeah, it's a playbook that I think is less well known. I would like to narrow our focus there, but maybe we can start with your own exodus from academe. So before I clicked “record,” you were saying that your metaphor for former academics is “disaffected academic refugees.” Why do you choose that metaphor?

Larry McGrath: I choose that metaphor to describe people like myself seven years ago, who achieved what they wanted to in academia, yet realized that the picture they had of the institutions didn't live up to their experience of it. Hence the disaffection and the refuge we sought was in other institutions, namely businesses who would compensate us better as well as provide a higher quality of life for the skills and expertise that we had built in academia.

Joshua Doležal: You have a PhD in the history and anthropology of science from Johns Hopkins. When you began that program, what was your picture of academe? What did you hope to get out of those four years?

Larry McGrath: I wanted to be Noam Chomsky. I wanted to be my undergraduate advisor, Judith Butler. I wanted to be someone who wielded humanistic knowledge that is an appreciation of context, textual criticism, and interpretation. I hoped I could use my platform within academia to speak to broader social political trends. Edward Said was somebody else whom I wanted to be. These were all the All-Star humanists that motivated me to become an academic. They lent a picture that I painted for myself and my mind back in high school.

And when I finished my doctorate at Johns Hopkins and wrote a dissertation about the history of neurology and psychology in France, I went off and did a really fun postdoc teaching very clever liberal arts students at Wesleyan University from the Humanities Center, where they read all of their books, called me Professor, and I enjoyed perhaps the most coveted right of any academic, which is the right to be left alone and to close my office door. And I soon realized that the friends around me who were also humanists from undergraduate years, but went on to business law and other domains, were doing things that I couldn't do, such as going on nice skiing trips and eating at nice restaurants because I didn't make enough money as an academic and I didn't live in a place where I wanted to live. And so it was because of those things that I ended up leaving behind the picture of academia that I had once painted for myself.

Joshua Doležal: Did you feel like your research was fine, it just was the institutional context that that didn't really fit with your picture?

Larry McGrath: I really enjoyed my research and I ultimately left academia at a time where I was satisfied with what I had said. I had published my book, I completed my articles. I thought I made the intervention in the field of the history and anthropology of science that I wanted to make. It's a lovely thing when an academic gets to close a file on his or her computer and open up a completely new one. I was at that juncture and I said I'd rather have that file be in a different institution.

And what I've come to realize after having left academia is that scholarship needn't be produced only from academic institutions. There are plenty of scholars out there who enjoy much more comfortable work outside of academia who can nonetheless participate in the conversations that thrill us and motivate us to become academics.

Joshua Doležal: Good. So it wasn't the job search or the job market so much, it was just that you reached the end of that chapter and wanted to begin a new one? And so you transitioned then to a consulting position. It seems like a smaller consulting firm where you landed your first role. So I'm curious how you went about that. Was that something you did concurrent with your postdoc at Wesleyan, were you ramping up applications, translating things into a resume? How did you land that first role?

Larry McGrath: My first role as a consultant was at Design Science, a human factors and medical anthropology firm that caters to medical device makers. Those are household names such as Johnson&Johnson or Medtronic. And as a consultant, I would travel around the world, situate myself, say, in hospitals, ambulance bays, waiting for patients to show up. And shadow them through stroke treatments so that I can understand how neurology is practiced in Japan differently than in Germany. And then I’d go back to those companies who are our clients and make advice about how to adapt their devices to the different cultures in which medicine is practiced. So I was able to do something in my transition from academia to business that not a lot of academic refugees are able to do, namely, use my content knowledge. Instead, most academics in their transition use their formal knowledge. That is the skill sets of critical research, data analysis, synthesis, and so forth. I was able to say something about what I wrote in my dissertation, namely the cultural context of neurology in that new job, and I went to that job because I could still maintain a content foothold in the history and anthropology of science. That interested me. It was also because the big management consultancies, the Bains, BCGs, McKinseys of the world, wanted nothing to do with me. Especially as a postdoc. Those large firms don't know how to fit us within their success metrics when it comes to applications. So for the sake of readers, I would suggest working with smaller boutique firms as I did, where you can form more intimate relationships with hiring managers and they can take a risk on you as opposed to going through the formal neutral application portals of larger firms.

Joshua Doležal: Was that the first application you sent out? Were you really strategic about that or did you go through a learning process?

Larry McGrath: Oh, I went through a learning process and I applied what I advise a lot of people with whom I work to do, namely the “pigeon method”: shit on as much as possible with your applications and see what sticks. That was alongside coming to terms with my ignorance about the opportunities that are out there in industry. I spent the summer of 2017 buying about 50 people coffees, just trying to learn about what they did, where were PhDs valuable, and what the nature of our projects were. And that was the key focal point of those informational interviews was understanding projects.

Because the project is the basic unit of work life and it's also consonant between academic and business work. Project is where I consume most of my time. It is that around which I collaborate with teammates. It's broken down into phases. I use different tools that the company offers and ultimately generate deliverables from that project for different audiences.

And so understanding other people's projects opened a window into how work was done in other domains. And I came to realize, thanks to those informational interviews, that some of that work sounded really awful and others like in consulting sounded pretty cool.

Joshua Doležal: You’ve made me remember something from way back. So I almost didn't go to college. I almost became a stenographer. I grew up in a little town in Montana and my father was a county commissioner and he saw the court reporter making a decent wage and talked to him a lot about freelancing opportunities. So this was pitched to me as a way to have an easy living. I typed fast and it seemed like a good skill fit. But I went and talked to the guy one day, met with this court reporter in his office, and he read to me from a deposition he'd taken earlier that day. And he kept saying “Um” and “Uh” and laughing. Then he’d say, “I have to type every word, you know, every word they say.” And I just thought, kill me now, if this is my future. It didn't seem like it was creative. There was no room for critical thinking. It left me with this sick feeling. So it sounds like you felt the same way with some folks you talked to.

Larry McGrath: Yeah. In fact, there were some instances far more insidious than your averted stenography career. I remember looking at consultancies who offered change management roles, and especially coming from academia, I was accustomed to all of us having our own jargon for each of our own domains. And so I talked to people in change management, naive as I was, thinking, wow, that's organizational psychology. I had studied history, which is the dynamics of continuity and rupture over time. Change management sounds fascinating. And I talked to actual change managers about their projects and they all involved taking a headcount of people at organizations. That's the first step. And I asked, Why would you need to count the number of people? And I soon realized, oh, because that means you need to fire some of those people. And essentially this job change management is a euphemism for the roles that we saw in Office Space, and we all hate those people. So that was an instance of a job that sounded great superficially, and I soon realized it was awful.

Joshua Doležal: I’m always happy for any Office Space metaphors, and I'm finding that Office Space as a narrative fits academe, the more corporatized it becomes. But I want to circle back to the informational interview.

So you're buying all these people coffees… I guess now we would be Zooming with some of the folks if we can't meet them in person. And one of the questions you're asking is about the kinds of projects they do. What are some other questions that would be really effective? Because I know that someone in my position – I'm still in the discovery stage of this transition, so it's easy for me to say, I'm just here to learn or tell me about your job. And that's not really a good question. So “Tell me about your projects” would be a better one. What are some other examples like that?

Larry McGrath: Let's take a step back and break down the job search into three phases, and I think this dictates the questions worth asking in the first phase. It's purely exploratory, just understanding the lay of the land, what industries are out there and which roles would suit you.

The second phase, after you've identified a couple industries and roles is to strategize your candidacy. And then the third phase, it's to actually get a job. So in the first phase of discovery, I suggest you ask about people from similar backgrounds to yourself who have an advanced degree in the humanities, whether they work in the role to target those kinds of people, by seeking them out on LinkedIn, understanding their transition, reading wonderful Substacks about people who have also made the transition talking about their projects.

And asking very pointed questions: What tools do you use at work? Do you use Microsoft Word? Do you use Google Docs? Do you use words? Do you use numbers? Do you use formulas? I really think, and perhaps it's my bias as an anthropologist, that these quotidian aspects of work are key to understanding what's really going on.

And I think too often academics come at these questions and informational interviews flying at far too high a level. What administrative processes are there at work? Tell me all of the people who are on your team, what are their different roles? Could you break down your most recent project into its phases from beginning to last – not your favorite project or your least favorite project, but your most recent?

It's always better to ask about people's memory than it is about their imagination. During these informational interviews and after you have a sense of what's out there, you move on to the second phase, which is to strategize your candidacy. And at that point, I think it's worth asking people to read your resume. Are there better words with which to present yourself? Are there open sesames? Are there red flags? A recruiter will spend at most 20 to 30 seconds reading a resume. It's really important that the key words are included to make it obvious that you are already doing the job. And you don't want to talk like an outsider. You want to talk like an insider. Now the third phase is getting that job and it takes a bit of confidence to say to people during informational interviews, your job sounds really cool. This company sounds like it would be a great fit. Could you please get me a job here?

Joshua Doležal: And you think that works?

Larry McGrath: As my mother would say, the worst they can say is no.

Joshua Doležal: Yeah, yeah. That's where I want to, I guess, gently push back against the pigeon method because a recent guest, Elissa Gurman, was saying she wasted a lot of time with that method before she honed her strategy to exactly what you're describing, which is meeting as many people as she could, and as a PhD recognizing that no amount of polish on the resume was going to get her past the screening with some employers. Like you were saying, they wanted nothing to do with you or with her as PhDs, and so it really was the more targeted approach of identifying gatekeepers within organizations and saying, you know, I have an in here. Could you open the door for me or point me to someone who can? And that's, I guess, the playbook that I've gravitated toward. I'm curious if that was part of your strategy either at Design Science or at Meta or at Amazon. Or did you basically make the case for yourself without any “in,” at either of those organizations?