Joshua Doležal: I’m Joshua Doležal and this is The Recovering Academic. My guest today is Dr. Kate Rogers.
Kate is a psychologist by training. Her B.A. is from Wake Forest, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, and she was Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga for four years. Her story is a little different from others in this series, because she didn’t leave her faculty job because of the corporatized university, dissatisfaction with her pay, concerns about being denied tenure, or any of the other symptoms of burnout that have defined the Great Resignation. If her partner had not found his dream job in Seattle, Kate would still be teaching in Tennessee.
Unlike other academics who spend months translating their research and experience into industry language, Kate transitioned smoothly into a role as Behavioral Scientist with Zillow, a real-estate marketplace company headquartered in Seattle. Since joining Zillow in 2019, she has been promoted four times, holding some positions for as little as three months before moving into a new leadership role. Kate is now Senior Manager of Behavioral Science and Experience Measurement at Zillow.
Today we talk about how industry allows Kate to continue her research into human behavior, how the “why” that drove her as a professor — helping people get to where they want to go — remains at the heart of her role as a senior manager. We talk about current trends toward jobs-based curriculum in higher ed and whether a traditional liberal arts degree still meets the needs of our time. And we reflect on how our professional lives often uproot us from the communities that shaped us.
A Conversation with Kate Rogers
Joshua Doležal: So I have to ask where you're from originally, because you have quite a winding path on a map.
Kate Rogers: Yeah, I did tend to move diagonally cross country, but I grew up in western North Carolina outside of Asheville before going to the middle of the state-ish for undergrad. And then to Canada, Vancouver, for grad school, then Tennessee as a professor, then Seattle for my job now.
Joshua Doležal: I was going to ask if you picked the geography of any of those places or if they were degree related. So Wake Forest is the only one you chose for that reason?
Kate Rogers: Vancouver was a wonderful place to live for a lot of reasons. It's beautiful. And it's where I ended up meeting my husband. So that seems like a great thing. It was difficult moving that far away from my family and moving to a different country. Even if it's still Canada, you have to get the bank accounts, the different phone and all that kind of stuff.
Then, admittedly, moving back to the area I grew up, I actually had family in Chattanooga. So that was really amazing. And I got very lucky with that and it was kind of nice being in that type of place again, around those types of mountains and knowing what that's like.
When I was in Canada, people would give me a hard time for my southern accent. When I moved back to the South, people gave me a hard time for sounding Canadian. But it was nice to be there. Nice to have some of the Southern food around again, not gonna lie.
Moving to Seattle also felt like kind of coming home because it's so close to Vancouver. I love having the mountains and the ocean here. So I think it's been okay. My parents loved having me just a couple hours away from them, and I enjoyed being closer to family. But at the same time, this is where the job opportunities were. And that's kind of how it goes.
Joshua Doležal: Well, I'm still kind of lingering in your academic chapter because it seemed like you were a very high-performing student at Wake Forest. You graduated with honors and you were a double major, if I'm reading that correctly, in Psychology and Religion. And I'm curious if you chose Psychology because you loved it more or because it was the more practical professional route.
Kate Rogers: It's mostly because I loved it more. I think the parts of religion that were particularly fascinating to me were people who changed religious beliefs, like you hear a lot about like new religious movements which we commonly will call cults and people talk about you know that process of people joining those is this wacky thing, which is probably not fair, but I think it's really fascinating to think about people who make a choice between denominations, because I think you could have similar things going on there and as well as thinking about trying to step back and look at religious beliefs. Growing up in the South, I was raised in a very Christian kind of environment, and so that feels very normal to me, but if you try to step outside of that experience, thinking through is that any more normal or reasonable than other groups that we maybe think of as being not reasonable? And so that was fascinating to me, but Psychology was always my first love.
Joshua Doležal: As a humanities person, I'm curious if you're still using anything from your religious coursework or your religion training in your professional life now?
Kate Rogers: So, one, I had a specific ethnography class that I think has served me well at times. Not that I am much of a qualitative researcher, to be completely honest, but I think that's been helpful. I think some of it is otherwise hard for me to separate from what I did in psychology, because I think between both of them, it's that thinking through, oh, people are different. People think about the world differently. People have different views and different beliefs. They're all equally valid. That I think comes from both. I just will happen to think about it from a religious context.
Joshua Doležal: So you, I assume, were mentored by professors you loved and wanted to be like them, and that's part of what pulled you into that academic path. And you beat the odds – you got a tenure track position. You weren't part of this purgatory of postdocs and perpetually contingent lecturers or adjuncts. You taught for four years at UT Chattanooga and you were getting close to tenure, the Holy Grail really for academics. So I'm curious why you pivoted to industry in 2019, partly because this was before COVID and the Great Resignation that I was part of and that is still going on.
So what changed your attitude toward the profession that your whole path had led you toward – and that you were winning at, right?
Kate Rogers: In my particular case, to be very honest, my partner found his dream job in Seattle, so he came out here, I stayed in Chattanooga and then I taught and ran my lab remote for a semester. And then I took a leave of absence for a semester, which they were kind enough to grant me. So during that time I applied for some jobs and happened to land the Zillow one and it ended up being a great fit, because…I was not unhappy in my job.
I think if this hadn't happened, I would probably still be at UTC, because I had really great colleagues. I enjoyed the research I did. I enjoyed the good parts of teaching. I think if you've taught, you know, there's not necessarily all good there, but this opportunity, once I was there, there were things that just kind of clicked in a way that I hadn't experienced in academia that made it worth that switch.
Joshua Doležal: A common story for a lot of folks who've gone through this transition even when they've made it voluntarily has been a kind of grieving process. You seem like a very upbeat positive person, so maybe that wasn't as hard for you. But you probably didn't expect to ever get tenure again when you gave it up, so was there anything emotionally hard in that for you?
Kate Rogers: Yeah. I mean, I think it was really hard to shift from that identity, because my partner, when we got together, he knew I was an academic, he knew we would move where I had a job, and then this kind of happened. And so, I will admit, there were some tense months there. I don't know if grieving is the right word, but certainly reconciling identities and the extent to which I am still an academic – there are things in me that I think will always be that piece of it. But also pivoting to be like, hey, your identity is more than your job, I think is a big piece of that.
But I talked to quite a few other folks who had made that jump beforehand and I think that was really helpful and talking with them about what this looks like, what this could be, in preparing me for at least some of those things that were going to come up.
Joshua Doležal: So when you think of Kate Rogers as more than a senior manager for Zillow, what do you fill in there for your identity now?
Kate Rogers: Wow. Yeah, those are hard questions. It is just thinking about it as a whole, a whole person. I am a person outside of my job. So that means I have the energy to have hobbies outside of my job instead of feeling like you have to work all the time or when you go on vacation, not having to take work with you is amazing.
Probably a lot of people would say dog mom for me, because I do post a lot of pictures of my dogs, I'll admit that. But there are other facets to my life where I can spend more time and more energy, and I don't have to be tied to this single thing that defines me anymore.
Joshua Doležal: Let's talk about that transition, then, because it seems, for anybody moving from academe to industry, the first leap is the hardest. So my colleague Aditya Mahara compares a professional path to swimming between islands, and the island of academe and the island of your first industry role are the farthest apart, often. So how was that switch for you? Because I'm looking at your title and it seemed like Behavioral Scientist was pretty similar to what you were doing in academe. So was that not much of a leap for you?
Kate Rogers: Yeah, I can't honestly imagine an easier transition. That's not to say that it was super smooth and perfect. But as far as it goes, I transitioned to a role, but did pretty much everything I was doing before. Like, we did end to end research. So I just didn't have to teach and I didn't have the service aspect required of me.
I didn't use personality psychology as much. I was using more broad theories for that. But otherwise it was very, very similar to what I was previously doing and I was also really fortunate.
When I joined, I was the 1st person on my specific team. So, it's really just me and my manager for several months, which was intense, but also great because I got a lot of feedback that way. But the broader team had a lot of academics on it, including my manager. There's also some culture shock that goes on there, the language that you use, how you communicate, all of those little things.
And so they also got it and gave me maybe a little bit more grace than other people would when I'm sure I did things that industry in general would be like, what are you doing? One of the things that my manager said was you can't take a week or two weeks to respond to an email.
We know in academia, it could take months to get a response, and pointing out some of those very specific differences, I think also is really helpful in setting you up for success. Because I think if you don't have a manager who gets some of those cultural differences, it just takes you that much longer.
Joshua Doležal: You mentioned some of the shifts in discourse. So learning a new vocabulary, some of these are acronyms like KPI, or…what were some of those that were foreign words to you initially?
Kate Rogers: Part of it was just the communication style. So the specific work I was doing was very heavily methods, quantitative. So like, if I did a presentation, it was a 15 minute presentation, probably 10 minutes of it was on methods and diving in really deep to the stats. Don't do that in industry. They do not care. And so that was a huge shift and figuring out how to communicate to them the same way – you figure out how to communicate to students when you're teaching. That kind of thing, or keeping emails really short and concise.
The thing that's still kind of is mind blowing to me is the fact you can just look at people's calendars and put meetings on there and it's just done. Because I was used to sending Google polls or Calendly things, so having that calendar visible and just being able to put it on there. I don't know, it's just very strange.
Joshua Doležal: You're bringing back memories of long, drawn-out faculty meetings where we're talking about the academic calendar, right? And trying to carve out an hour for something new, and then it butts up against everyone's labs and there's this howling chorus of complaint. So, yeah, we're not very efficient. I say “we,”…I'm not in academe anymore either.
So tell me a little bit more about the roles that you've held at Zillow. This is one of the big differences, I think, between industry and academe, is that you were an assistant professor for about four years, and then in just one more year you've held five different positions at Zillow, right?
So you would have only had three titles, basically, if you'd stayed on the tenure track. You would have become an associate, eventually a full professor, maybe you would have been an endowed chair or something, but that's about it. So tell me a little bit about those roles that you've held. What was the difference between Behavioral Scientist and Senior Behavioral Scientist, and on up to your managerial roles?
Kate Rogers: So Behavioral Scientist, Senior Behavioral Scientist, and then Principal, were all those individual contributor, like, IC roles. You're not managing other people. And so moving up through those was basically just doing more complex projects, working in more abstract kind of ambiguous spaces, getting more visibility and who your stakeholders are. So who the people are that are really using the research that you're doing and who you're talking to as well as the type of research. So sometimes you're going to be doing very tactical, so very focused on this one particular problem or one particular change.
And as you go up, you're more likely to do projects that are going to influence instead of one part of a product or an experience, a whole product or a whole experience. So that broadens as you go, but at the same time, the work you're doing is similar. It's just kind of growing in complexity and breadth of impact. Once you get to that principal world, there is more expectation in terms of at least informal kind of leadership. So you're not in charge of folks or managing them, but a lot of times you're kind of a leader in your space or in your discipline.
And so you have kind of that role model expectation, mentoring types of expectations, that come with that. Part of this happened because we had some re-orgs. So re-orgs don't really happen in academia very often, which is good. But in industry they can be very common.
And so for me, the behavioral science team was on the econ research team. And then we switched to be part of Zillow research and insights, which has basically all of the research disciplines joined together, which is really cool. We have UX research, basically, a market research team and population science, all pulled together.And part of that experience opened up new opportunities for me in doing those changes. But yeah, that's pretty much it.
So now I do very little to no research. I do occasionally do some internal surveys. We're in the design org, so I'll run some for them primarily because I really like making pretty graphs, so I get to play with art and make those graphs when I do that.
So that's fun. But otherwise my day is spent more thinking about what do I need to be doing for the behavioral science team? I also have a second team now of experience measurement. So what do I need to be doing for that team? The infrastructure and how that team operates, that type of aspect, as well as helping the folks that report to me figure out the work that they should be doing, unblocking things for them, thinking about their career development in that aspect.
So it's a lot more, honestly, thinking type of roles in much less hands-on being able to check stuff off a list, which can be really nice when you're doing research. You can feel very accomplished and complete because, hey, that project's out. A lot of this stuff is much more kind of ambiguous and squishy now.
Joshua Doležal: I was going to ask you to describe your most recent project, but it sounds like in your current role as a senior manager, the projects are kind of ongoing if they're people related.
Kate Rogers: We have what we call Z Retreats, because we are fully remote, so they'll pull, like, orgs and teams together in person, so, it's basically an onsite type thing and I run surveys for the design org on that. That's the main type of project that I have done in the last year or so, just their surveys about how effective was this.
Joshua Doležal: I'm fascinated by the fact that you work at Zillow because I don't think of Zillow as a multifaceted company, you know, it's just a website that I've gone to to look at real estate. There's apparently a lot below the surface there. So I would never have pegged Zillow as a place where a behavioral scientist would work. Or I would think of it more as a kind of techie company where people would be needed to code or, I don't know, figure out the algorithms or look at data from search results and whatever.
So help me understand better how your training has really benefited the company?
Kate Rogers: Yeah. And so I think I'll talk kind of broadly about the folks that have been in behavioral science. So I think, one, your perception of Zillow as a place where I go and look up homes, like a Saturday Night Live skit, is very, very common. But there's a lot of different parts to the business.
We have the agent side of the business. We also have Zillow home loans. We have a rentals business. There's a bunch of different arms there among others, but typically the way that I think about how our team, what our team does, it's helping people make the best decisions for them about moving, finding a new home, buying or selling their home, whatever that looks like.
And so sometimes this is running experiments to help agents do their jobs more effectively. Other times it's helping figure out the best ways to present and frame information to folks to make the decision that is going to be best for them.
So some of that is on platform types of things that you experience as well. And so, like, on the team, we've had psychology, political science, sociology, behavioral economics, information, I think that's every, all of the degrees we've had. And so people are coming from an experimental background, typically have experience writing surveys or doing survey experiment type of work.
And that's really what we're leveraging a lot of in terms of the methods. But one of the things that makes us really unique is we are really explicitly testing the theories of human behavior. The theories that we all learned in grad school is what we are very explicitly taking into context to test the effect because a lot of times if you read behavioral economics, they'll be doing loss aversion or something like that, and it's with a dollar pencil or a five dollar coffee mug, which is fairly different than hundreds of thousands of dollars for a home. And so it's kind of translating that and testing it in that Zillow environment to see, does this still play out the same way? How should we be thinking about this? How should we be using this information?
Joshua Doležal: Am I right? I mean, what you're telling me is kind of mind-blowing. But I don't know if I'm understanding it correctly. None of what you're doing now would be published in a peer reviewed journal, but it sounds like original research.
Kate Rogers: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And you are correct. We haven't had any research publications. We have had external publications. One was, I did a study during peak COVID times of realtors wearing a mask – when you're looking at a home, they're in the pictures with a mask on, that kind of thing, because we happened to run across that.
And then we've also got some paint research that Zillow has published and used that's available externally, but aside from that, yeah, everything is very good internal competitive intelligence types of things. But it is absolutely original research start to finish, working with the business to identify what are some of these key questions that we need to address, but aside from that starting point of where the question or the issue is coming from.
The process is the same as in academia except for also a much shorter timeline.
Joshua Doležal: Obviously some of your research is proprietary or all of it is. So it's protected within the confines of Zillow. But then people are getting degrees in behavioral science that really don't include, so they are being taught theories that may not be consistent with the human behavior that you've observed.
Do you think there are real gaps there between how people are being educated and what people like you who have different tools and are obviously looking at a narrower human pool for your experiments or your research. But do you think there's knowledge that you have access to as a corporate researcher that would change how certain methods are being taught in academe if it were available?
Kate Rogers: I think that's an interesting question. I don't know that it would change how anything is being taught. One of the big differences between the basic and applied science is testing it in these specific situations. So, in general, loss aversion works this way. However, when you're faced with such a complex decision, like buying a home and moving and all of that, it may or may not work exactly the same way. I don't think that actually changes how we think or use the theory.
Another thing that's often in the back of our minds is everything around the replication crisis. Making sure we're aware of the things that have and haven't replicated and how we may or may not see that play out the same way in what we're doing, as well. But ultimately our goal isn't theory building. So we're applying these theories, but we aren't going to try to figure out that much if it doesn't work, or if it does work really digging into why it works.
Joshua Doležal: I want to go back to your transition, because there's a whole cottage industry out there now for coaching people through that transition to get to the first role. And then once you're part of the club and industry, then all these other opportunities unfold and you know, promotions proceed at a kind of alarming pace. So it seems like once you're part of a team as a PhD, your competence becomes immediately apparent and then leadership opens up and lots of good things happen. But the first leap is the hardest one.
And so it was not hard for you, it doesn't sound like, but when you are counseling other people or looking at applicants, what are some big mistakes people are making? And what do you suggest they do instead?
Kate Rogers: One, reach out and talk to as many folks as you can. And you can do this by looking at your network. You can also do this by searching on LinkedIn or something like that, just searching for jobs that sound interesting to you and finding people that way and messaging them. I think a lot of times folks have the hardest time with identifying the right jobs or what might fit for them.
I think this is especially true for humanities. I think psychology, often, the default assumption is either data science or UX research, to be honest, outside of maybe some niches in psychology, but there's certainly a ton more out there than that. And that's where talking to folks who are in industry or in government jobs or a nonprofit jobs and getting a sense from them about, hey, what types of titles should I be looking at, I think is really helpful. Really putting the time and energy into your resume. Really translating what you did in academia to how that aligns with what you're wanting to do in industry and really focusing on the impact of what you did.
Whereas I feel like a lot of times, at least in my area of academia, we focus a lot on the methods that we use to get there or that kind of thing, but have the impact. Depending on the role you're looking for, the method you use may or may not matter at all.
Just apply to everything. You don't have to fit 100 percent by any means.
The other thing I encourage people to do a lot is to really sit down and break down the parts of what they're currently doing that they love, and maybe that they dislike, whatever that looks like, so being really thoughtful and splitting apart the different components of what it means to be a grad student or a professor because there's so many different things that you're doing with that and looking for that type of match.
Teaching is huge, because when you're teaching you've learned to communicate to a different audience. That is exactly what you're doing in industry. If you know how to tailor to one audience, you can learn to tailor to the other audiences. So I really encourage people to highlight that piece and how that is effective and useful for them. Because a lot of times when you go academia to industry, you know how to do kind of the hard skills of the job. What you're learning to do is be in business and work in that way. And if you have a track record of, well, I know how to, change in this way to meet this need, you can probably do it again.
Joshua Doležal: I want to shift to the bigger picture of higher ed, because even though you've left, I don't know if you have kids or plan to have kids, but I have three children and I find myself caring almost more about some of these trends and systemic problems in higher ed as a parent than I did as a professor.
And so in your case, it sounds like you didn't grow disillusioned with the job and leave because of a values mismatch. It was just your spouse's job and personal reasons that caused you to move. But why do you think it is that Ph.D. programs are still credentialing people in fundamentally the same way, when there are so clearly fewer jobs and many more of them are becoming outsourced to adjunct, contingent type positions? Like it's over 70%, I think, of people who, are teaching or hold academic positions are now either adjuncts or lecturers. Why do you think PhD programs are still operating with business as usual and not adapting?
Kate Rogers: There's a lot more acceptance and awareness of people doing industry internships throughout grad school that I think is super helpful and it's making a big difference. It's not necessarily a big bad secret if you're a PhD student wanting to go into industry compared to how it would have been when I was there.
The system is big and old and change takes a long time. Assuming you aren't going into massive amounts of debt for your PhD, if you want to do a PhD, you should have that opportunity. I would not recommend doing it if you're going to go into debt, but going into it with your eyes wide open and having that awareness of yeah, this probably won't result in a tenure track job for me, I think is a key part of it. But I don't think there's necessarily anything bad in learning for learning’s sake.
Joshua Doležal: When I began teaching, I felt like the institution valued what I brought as a humanities expert. By the time I left, I didn't feel like that was the case at all. I felt like the curriculum was shifting toward job skills, not what I would think of as lifelong benefits of humanities education. So there's a current climate of stressing employability as the primary good of a college education. And I don't know if you were reverse engineering your own education to prepare yourself for the role you're in now, do you think the current trends are a good thing? Or was the more conventional education you received actually better for the work you're doing now?
Kate Rogers: I mean, for the specific stuff I'm doing now, we require a PhD. So that was the right thing for me. That being said, yeah, I went to a liberal arts undergrad. I think it is very important to have that well-rounded piece. I think it does make it harder to be immediately employable, right, because you just don't have that translation right away, but at the same time, I wouldn't trade it for the world.
One of the things that I realized is, I love psychology. I love it. But most of what students get out of my classes is not going to be related to psychology facts. It's going to be that general…people are different. We should think about how we communicate and that. And one of the most important values or things that I tried to actually train students to do was learning how to learn. And so I spent a lot of effort and time designing my courses so that they would learn how to learn, because I think that is one of the things that can best serve them forever. And I think that is a skill that not everybody knows. You do come out with skills. It's just figuring out how to make that clear to other people.
If I had a kid going into undergrad right now, I would encourage them to major in whatever it is you are interested in and want to do, and maybe minor in one of those practical things, that type of thing to get a little bit more to make that jump easier potentially for them. Especially since I don't know what it's like to get an undergrad degree and then go get a job, but absolutely still value that liberal arts, humanities education piece.
Joshua Doležal: I've been thinking about this and have a theory that I think is fairly simple, that a lot of people who've made the transition, when they're translating their skills, they are making the kind of case that typically something like an internship makes by default. If you had an internship as an undergrad, that is your bridge into industry, that's your first industry experience. You don't have to do all this unwieldy translating or not as much of it because there's not a big gap. You've already built that bridge across.
So instead of trying to teach Shakespeare for employability, instead of reframing the purpose of a humanities education with employability as the higher goal, I wonder if the more traditional model still holds. And it's just a matter of in the junior or senior year finding some of these more practical pathways. It wouldn't even have to be a minor in communications or a minor in business. It could be something like an internship with a nonprofit or an internship with Principal Financial in Des Moines, which was one of those places where a lot of our Econ graduates or business graduates went to work, and there's no reason why an English major couldn't have an internship at a place like that in their senior year as well.
I don't know if that passes the sniff test for you as an industry insider, if it would be as simple as, instead of reframing the whole conventional curriculum with industry in mind, just creating more industry-specific bridges like internships?
Kate Rogers: Yeah, I mean, I think that's very viable. And I think I know at least UBC had some really strong programs for that. And I think UTC was also doing more with that. I think the part that gets tricky to me with internships is the unpaid versus paid part and making sure that they're not just unpaid so that everybody who wants to have this opportunity can actually afford to have the opportunity. The financial component to everything related to undergrad, is a key part of that conversation to me, because too many people are going into massive amounts of debt for it. That's not great. And it's keeping people who would love to go to school from being able to go and all of that. And so making sure that when these opportunities are available, that they are equally available, so someone who needs to work or is supporting a family or going to school at night still has some of those same opportunities for them.
Joshua Doležal: I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this for myself to borrow Simon Sinek's phrase, the “why” of things. Professors have a why. People who naturally gravitate to business have a different why. And I'm curious what your why was as a professor, what your why is now at Zillow, how the two overlap or differ?
Kate Rogers: Something I was worried about going into industry was, you know, would I still find these questions interesting. But answering these questions is hugely satisfying to me. The other kind of why that is actually between both of them, too, is still that mentoring and helping people grow in their careers, how it looks is different between when I was a professor and working with undergrads and grad students. But that's been I think a big piece for both. I really enjoy helping people get wherever they want to go. I don't care. Where did you want to go? Let's see how we can find the ways to get you there. And I love finding opportunities for people to shine and succeed and grow in those skills. And that was something that I could do as a professor – I can honestly do it a lot more now, because more of my job is that now. But for me, the whys have stayed, honestly, pretty similar. It's just how it's translated in action that's been different.
Joshua Doležal: Thanks for listening. And big thanks to Kate for sharing her story.
Today’s episode is free. To unlock more exclusive interviews, essays, and craft resources, please consider upgrading your subscription at joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe. I look forward to welcoming you to The Recovering Academic community.
If you enjoy this series, you might also like the Recovering Academics Roundtable, where Gabrielle Filip-Crawford and I host conversations with industry experts for academics who are in transition or who are contemplating an exit from academe. We meet most Wednesdays on Zoom at noon, Eastern time, and you can follow me on LinkedIn for weekly updates.
Goodbye for now, and I hope you’ll stay tuned for Friday’s discussion thread, where we can unpack my conversation with Kate together.
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