Industry needs an education in the value of a PhD
Industry needs an education in the value of a PhD
Elissa Gurman on her pivot from researching love plots to corporate consulting
This week I continue my interview series with academics who have transitioned to new careers with another hopeful story from the humanities. Elissa Gurman is a Principal Consultant at MacPhie, a firm devoted to helping Canadian organizations thrive on the world stage. Elissa completed her PhD in English at the University of Toronto in 2017. During her first year as a graduate student, she won the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Storytellers Competition for a 3-minute video explaining her work and its relevance. Elissa’s dissertation was also featured on an episode of CBC Radio’s Ideas from the Trenches. As she recounts in this article for University Affairs, her first industry role was a low-paid internship. But that position allowed her to expand her network, which ultimately led her to MacPhie in 2019.
We talk about how Elissa’s teaching experience helps her develop workshops for her clients, the value of her writing expertise in industry, and how her attitude toward sales has evolved since she left academe. She also explains why she feels that PhDs already have most of the skills necessary to thrive in industry and how graduate programs might focus less on upskilling their students than on educating industry about the value that traditional academic expertise offers.
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A Conversation with Elissa Gurman
Joshua Doležal: I can't wait to hear what a Principal is.
Elissa Gurman: Yes, absolutely. When I got promoted, I told my daughter that I was now a Principal, and she was extremely excited because to her that means something really different. In consulting, many firms have the role of Principal; at ours, it’s one below Partner. I lead my own projects, have my own client relationships, manage multiple members of the team, and get to actively contribute to running the business itself.
Joshua Doležal: Well, that matches my perception, which is that you had started kind of at the bottom and worked your way up to senior leadership in not really much time at all. So that's a powerful story and I can't wait to get to it. But I kind of want to start with the moment when you knew you were going to leave academe, because that's not something that people go into a PhD program expecting to do, right? You don't approach a PhD program as, oh, I'll just kind of see how it goes. But it sounds like you knew you were going to leave academe before you were done with the PhD?
Elissa Gurman: Yeah, I mean, there was always a part of me that was thinking, maybe it'll work out, you never know. But within the first three years of my PhD, I saw what was happening with my more senior friends, and I knew what was happening in the job market. I'm very much a realist. I saw what was happening to everybody else and I knew that it would happen to me. I've always been really clear about the things that I've wanted in my life. I'm very family-oriented. I got married during my PhD. I dragged my now husband across the country to live where I was completing my PhD, and I knew I would not be able to move him again. And I also knew that I didn't want to move again. I just was entering a different phase of my life where I wanted to be settled, and I knew that the only way to pursue academia was likely to move to a really small town in a different country. And even then I'd be super lucky. So, if I could find a job in academia where I didn't have to uproot our life, then of course I would've been thrilled to stay. But I knew that was unlikely to happen.
Joshua Doležal: For a lot of graduate students there's a kind of purgatory you would enter of visiting positions or some kind of adjuncting instructor-type role that you would hopefully leverage for experience to get the tenure track job, and those odds are not in your favor in English. So you have a PhD in English from the University of Toronto. What was your area?
Elissa Gurman: 19th-Century American and British literature with a focus on women falling in love. So, I talked about the love plot within novels from the 19th-century Anglo-American tradition. And I looked at consent in the love plot, how and why consent comes into play in representations of women falling in love in these novels. It was a real passion project. I mean, you can probably hear it in my voice. I am still extremely passionate about the topic and super glad that I did it, and I love talking about it.
Joshua Doležal: Well, I'm sure there was all kinds of teachable stuff for your students too that you, you could work into your courses. But having the American and the British, it seems like you would've had some flexibility, but you probably weren't geared for the R1, super niche research agenda.
Elissa Gurman: No, and it was really tough because U of Toronto is very research driven, so I had a lot of trouble getting a supervisor for that work because no one wanted to supervise a Trans-Atlantic project. So I ended up being co-supervised for a couple of years until one of my supervisors left for a different role. And then I had one Victorian supervisor and Americanist on my committee. It was just exactly what I wanted to write and I wasn't willing to compromise.
Joshua Doležal: So you never applied for any academic positions?
Elissa Gurman: I did apply for some academic positions, just in Canada, just in the environs of Toronto, more or less. I think I applied for one in Calgary because I just wanted it badly and we have family there. So, I applied for a small handful of jobs, probably under five jobs.
Joshua Doležal: You must have been doing other things concurrent with that… You were sort of retooling yourself for industry at the same time?
Elissa Gurman: Sort of. Like I said, I'm very practical. At the end of the day, I was working to make money. I guess in a way I was working to retool myself for industry, but also I did not want to live on a graduate student's salary. I have always worked, since I was 15. I was hopeful that the work experience I gained during my PhD would help me get a job. It didn't. But mostly I worked because I didn't want to make $10,000 a year. I don't know anyone who does really.
Joshua Doležal: So you already had some experience then before you were starting to apply for full-time industry work?
Elissa Gurman: Yeah, I worked for many years, throughout my entire PhD, for an admissions consulting firm. It was a small, family-led firm that helped people get into competitive university programs. I specialized in medical school, dental school, and law school. This did not mean I wrote applications for students. It was a lot of coaching, a lot of practice interviews, a lot of editing. I also created some online courses to help people put together better applications. I was with them for so many years; I started off just editing documents and running mock interviews, and then started doing anything they needed me to do and became kind of a go-to person on their roster. I did that for about six years. I also taught a whole bunch. I kept busy.
Joshua Doležal: It's even more surprising to hear what you wrote about in an article in 2019, that your first industry role after completing the PhD was an internship. So you had six years of experience, and that would seem to me like you already had a resume that would qualify you for some kind of paying job. And to complicate things, you were pregnant at the time. Age 30, PhD, and the best you could get in your first industry role was an internship? How could that possibly happen?
Elissa Gurman: It was pretty brutal. I mean, I must have applied to 40 plus jobs. I know now that I wasn't going about it in the right way, in that I was reading job postings, and I was applying for jobs. That would seem like a logical way to look for a job, but that is actually not an effective way to look for a job. So, I definitely wasted a lot of time doing that. Perhaps if I had given it more time, I would've been able to find a job sooner that was a real job. I don't know. But I can't sit still, I need to be busy. I have goals for myself. My graduation was coming, and I did not yet have a job. I had probably been looking for three or four months during the tail end of my PhD – just applying for jobs and getting zero interviews. And so I got the internship because I finally swallowed my pride and spoke to a friend. I was embarrassed.
One thing that I would advise that I think a lot of grad students don't do is to have friends who are not grad students. Don't just have your network with grad students because they will not be able to help you. I mean, you don't have friends just so they’ll help you, but I maintained a ton of friendships from my life before my PhD and so I turned to my friend who at the time was a director at a big company and I was absolutely mortified and I said, I can't find a job.
And he got me the internship. He said, well, we have an internship starting in a couple of weeks. Let me see if I can get you an interview. That's how I got the internship. So maybe if I had swallowed my pride sooner and asked people for help in getting a job, I could have gotten a better entry-level job.
But I couldn’t stand the idea of being unemployed. I wanted to go right from graduation to some kind of job. That's how I ended up at the internship. It was paid a little bit. I got paid minimum wage.
Joshua Doležal: Oh, wow. Better than, than nothing, I guess, but still hard to accept. I want to back up just a little bit because I think I might be doing what you are describing, applying for jobs. I heard someone tell me yesterday in an informational interview, he was looking at my cover letter for a different position and saying, You're doing a great job of telling the story of a challenge, you know, that you tackled and how you solved it and what the stakes were and why it matters.
But you're not telling the story of why this job, why this organization, how your story dovetails with their strategic plan or whatever. So is that kind of what you're saying, that instead of putting your resume out there, you know, throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, you should be more selective.
What's the difference between applying for jobs and a better approach?
Elissa Gurman: I think you have to go through people when you're a non-conventional candidate. I hire now, in my role. I get a lot of conventional candidates, and what I mean by that is candidates who in a very logical, linear way, fit the bill. It is extremely hard to stand out against those candidates when you are unconventional and the person on the other end does not understand your background.
Since I have been at MacPhie, we have hired another PhD grad in an unrelated field. Why was her resume noticed? Because I read it. Nobody else would've thought this science PhD could do a really great job here, because why would they when they have applicants who have experience doing the same thing we do, just at a different firm. That’s what you’re competing against.