Think of your work history as a series of Seinfeld episodes
Eric James Stephens on telling powerful stories in industry
If you have a PhD in the humanities and are struggling to find a non-academic job, I’m back with another hopeful story for you. But even if you’ve never been an academic, I think you’ll find today’s guest fascinating.
Eric James Stephens is a business intelligence developer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has a PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from Clemson University, but he has been a recovering academic since June 2020. Since then, he has also worked as a consultant and business data analyst while building community on social media, coining the popular hashtags #TranslateAcademia and #HireHigherEd and offering reviews of LinkedIn profiles on TikTok.
I spoke with Eric about why he compares leaving academe to leaving the Mormon faith, why he believes personal authenticity is so important, even on professional platforms like LinkedIn, and why you should think of your work history and “About” narrative more like a TV series than like a list of bullet points.
To access the archive of conversations like this one and upcoming interviews, such as my next one with Jennifer Beech, an instructional designer and owner of B-Side Learning, please consider upgrading your subscription today.
A Conversation with Eric James Stephens
Joshua Doležal: So you're in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Is that where you're from originally?
Eric James Stephens: No. I was originally from Utah, but I grew up in Maryland. Went a whole bunch of different ways. I have an older brother that ended up in Tulsa about 15 years ago. And then when I made my industry transition to Gaggle, it was a remote position, so I applied to one of those remote programs that pays 10 grand to move there. So that's what brought me to Tulsa. I love it here.
Joshua Doležal: Very cool. I've not spent any time in Oklahoma, but I did my grad work in Nebraska, which is not terribly far away. I'd seen that you had some history with the Mormon church, but that you'd done your PhD at Clemson, so obviously you can be Mormon anywhere, but I figured there might be a Western connection there somewhere.
Eric James Stephens: Yeah. I have a lot of family back in Utah. I have a brother and two sisters there that ended up back there too.
Joshua Doležal: Well, I’m curious about this because you'd posted about it recently and I've been trying to get my head around this transition from academia to industry and what's useful to share about your personal life or your intellectual interests when you're trying to build a brand on LinkedIn. It's interesting to me that you wrote recently about religion since that would seem to have nothing to do with your current role. But you still bring a lot of personal stuff into what you do on LinkedIn. Is that part of building a brand or is it just part of being a whole person?
Eric James Stephens: I think the answer to your question is both. I mean, what brand you want to develop is the thing that you need to decide. Everybody needs to understand that they are building a brand. Whether or not you are building it intentionally is something different.
I believe you should build an intentional brand. I have heard for a long time that we wear different masks when we talk to people, like we're a different person and we just engage differently. I don't want that in my life. I want to just always be me. And if there's a scenario where I can't be me, I've learned, and this is just even recently, within the past few months, I would say I don't want to be there.
The beauty of LinkedIn is that if somebody doesn't want to be there, they don't have to follow me. And that's super cool. I find that more people are interested in authenticity than they are in inauthenticity. And I think that the need and desire for a personal connection is only going to increase as content developed with the assistance of AI is going to increase.
Joshua Doležal: Interesting. Well, I've been worried about this a little bit because I started my journey out of academe without a job in hand. I resigned a tenured position a year and a half ago and moved with my family to Pennsylvania with the idea of just being an independent writer, not needing to do something for a paycheck immediately.
And so I wrote a lot of hard truths about that transition in The Chronicle and in my Substack newsletter. I've worried that by calling out exploitation or really thinking through some of the institutional dysfunction that has led to the exodus that a lot of us are part of, I'd worry that that would be isolating in industry or seen as negative. But you were doing something similar to that by comparing academia to religion. So truth telling, authenticity – what's the difference between that and negativity, which is perhaps less encouraged in business?
Eric James Stephens: The answer to that question in this context is related specifically to accountability. If you're going to go out and complain about something, and then the reason for the complaining has nothing to do with you. You're just critiquing and not really adding anything. But if you are saying something and you're saying, and this is what I am doing, this is how it has impacted me, this is what I'm doing differently, this is personal, then I think that people see that as a vulnerability worth following. Because nobody wants to be lectured to. They want to learn from other people's mistakes. They don't want to be at the end of Aesop's fable and be told what to learn. They just want to enjoy a really good story. Be an interesting character. Everybody is.
Joshua Doležal: Well let's dive into that post then, because I'd seen you promoting other people and doing the #TranslateAcademia, #HireHigherEd stuff. But you had a lengthy post recently about growing up Mormon and how similar leaving that faith was to leaving academe. Are you comfortable sharing a little bit about your Mormon upbringing and why you left that faith?
Eric James Stephens: Yeah, absolutely. I think that leaving religion is very, very difficult. Leaving Mormonism can be more traumatic, I think, than like just not going to church anymore because you are steeped in a culture. You are taught from a young age that it's a peculiar people, right? Mormonism has a deep history in being rejected by American culture and by other cultures. A lot of people fled to the United States for religious purposes. Mormons were driven from the United States for religious purposes, and so there is a sense of pride in being a part of that community, especially as one being raised in Utah. I have ancestors that walked across the plains, right? But my first realization that it wasn't for me came when I was serving a Mormon mission in the state of Washington.
I had about three months left. I was teaching this dude named Stanley. I was sitting in his house and you've seen the blue copies of the Book of Mormon, they're just little flimsy little pages, and he's bending them back and forth, like making the corners touch. And I told him, if you just pray, this will be for you. And he looked at me with the most sincerity that I've ever witnessed a grown man give to a stranger. He said, “That's what everybody says.” And that's when it clicked with me. I was like, This just isn't for me anymore. I don't think that it's inherently bad. I just don't think that Mormonism is any different than any other religion. But I stayed on my mission. I didn't want to go home with the stigma of like, Why did you leave your mission early? That's a thing I didn't want to live with. It was easy to stay out and it was easy to testify and to preach about it because I had seen the good it can do for people. It's just that Mormonism does not have a monopoly on good. And I think that it's almost so similar with academia that like someone the other day was debating with me, I guess it was a debate, I don't know, commenting online about how academia is not a religion.
And I'm just like, how can you say that academia's not like religion after going to a graduation ceremony, spending thousands of dollars on regalia for no reason, which has nothing to do with the acquisition of knowledge and has everything to do with showing off everything that you've accomplished.
Joshua Doležal: Let me play devil's advocate just for a bit. You and I perceive academe that way because we were primed to find a singular calling, and to think of ourselves as set apart from the world. I was raised Pentecostal and taught to invite persecution because it confirms that you are chosen in a certain way. So if you put all your eggs in the academic basket, you think this is me not being of the world, but part of this select group of chosen people, that's one way of looking at it. But I wonder if there are other people who come at academia more like my Lutheran friends or some of my Catholic friends, where they don't see the text as an inerrant truth. You know, they're not looking to say, God said it, I believe it, that settles it. They're fine with ambiguity, they're fine with many paths. Do you think academe forces narrowness, or is it a perspective that you and I have brought from our own backgrounds?
Eric James Stephens: I don't think we can see anything other than what we see from our own perspectives. So there's that caveat. But here's what I do know about people and communities in general. People crave community, they love it. And community at its core, when you look at it through the process of negation, is defining who you are not. It's like, I'm not a DC person, I'm a Marvel person.
And then you take pride in that, and then people at their core are arrogant and self-serving, and so they want to be a part of a community that reflects that. What I hate when it comes to religion and academia is when institutions take those passions that are abstract and cannot be articulated and then conform people to a certain behavior that often influences their bottom line through tithes or tuition. I'm just not a part of that.
Joshua Doležal: I was looking at your degree, and your PhD is in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design. It's an interesting hybrid degree. Is that a common one or is that unique to Clemson?
Eric James Stephens: Unique to Clemson. It was started by my dissertation advisor, one of my mentors, Victor Vitanza. He was invited to Clemson to start a PhD program that was not defined by a department that rather lived in the college. And so the idea behind it was that we would have professors from the English department, from architecture, from arts, from anybody and everybody across the university, because his belief is that rhetoric is the meta discipline, that there are no disciplines that exist without rhetoric. And to me that's the same thing with information design. There is no information that exists that is not designed, and something that is designed is rhetorical. And so yeah, that was the program. The reason that I went was for a single line in the description that said, we are preparing students for positions that have not yet been created. Every position I've gotten into in grad school and after has been one that I have either created or has been created for me.
Joshua Doležal: Very cool. So the information design portion of that degree seems to have been the salient thread, and as you're saying, it's all intertwined, but there's a technical aspect to that, I assume that's been very useful to you in industry.
So tell me if I'm wrong about this. When I see you on TikTok doing reviews of LinkedIn profiles, you are reviewing information design and rhetoric at the same time?
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Eric James Stephens: As Rick Rubin would say, everything that you have ever done to where you are right now, that is your content. That is what he calls your source material. So how would you talk about your professional experience on LinkedIn? There are a lot of ways that you can do that. You can do it through storytelling, you can do it through promoting other people.
The way that I went about it was raw. Sharing my story in summer 2020 that I was going through something very difficult. I was moving into my parents' basement with three children. One was just born at the height of the pandemic. The reason my story resonated was not because I was a good storyteller, it's because nobody wanted to see their lives become mine. Nobody did. And so they followed it, right? And then from there, once I understood that, oh, I have a platform, I would rather build a platform and promote other people. Very intentionally, I kept saying, Hey, look over there. They're amazing. Look over there, they're amazing. When you go out and you use everything that you are to promote other people, good things are going to happen to you. This is a fundamental belief that I have.
Joshua Doležal: I didn't follow you in 2020. I was going through my own isolating experience and crisis with my family. But it seems to me like you weren't charting an exit from academia in the strategic way that a lot of people talk about. You weren't doing informational interviews, you weren't building a portfolio. You were in more of a similar boat to me, where you had a rupture in your life and you were not necessarily applying from a position of strength. You were trying to figure out how to get your way back through the gate after having shut it behind you.
Eric James Stephens: I was applying to jobs that were disappearing. I'd wake up, look at my spreadsheet that I had made, and check which jobs had been taken down. There wasn't really a big community out there saying, go build a portfolio. Go do this, or go do that. I got on LinkedIn and there was nobody. There was no academic presence on LinkedIn at all.
That's why I created the hashtag #HireHigherEd. My goal in creating a social media campaign was to bring academics to the LinkedIn platform to help their community of people. I went out and I talked to everybody I could. From May, 2020, until August, 2020, I conducted over a hundred informational interviews with different people asking this question, What do you do? How could I do something like that? And I learned that I couldn't walk into a room and say, I have a PhD. You should hire me. I had to learn what I told my students as a writing teacher: show, don't tell. Don't say I've got a PhD. You should hire me. Say, you know what? Go Google #HireHigherEd. Anything that you see that exists there exists because of me.
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Joshua Doležal: Yeah. You were doing a lot of things instinctively or just out of your sheer drive and initiative that have been more standardized. There's a more conventional playbook now for people who are trying to make that transition. But tell me how you landed your first gig with Gaggle as a business analyst, which is a long way from being a PhD in information design.
Eric James Stephens: I decided to plan an event. I just went out and started talking to career coaches and they're like, let me sell you my product. And I was like, I'm sorry, I don't want your product. Can I help you bring your product to other people though? How about you host a webinar on this date at this time, and I'll tell people to go to you. You use my hashtag and you promote what I'm doing in August. So I put on a two day event. I had 50 speakers, I had 19 workshops. I had 9 panels of thought leaders of three to four people each that I live streamed and moderated and produced onto three social media platforms. I had 280 people register and for every night, for all the 19 workshops, an average of 15 to 20 people attending. Why? So I could go up to somebody and say, I'm more than someone with a PhD. Look what I just did. You want that on your team?
Then I just decided I couldn't stop and so I kept going and I started doing weekly events. I put out a thing and I said, Hey, I want to do an event where I talk to Ed Tech people about what it would take for them to hire someone like me and Jennifer Beech – amazing woman, thank you so much, Jennifer – she commented and said, Jeff Patterson, you should talk to this guy. He's the CEO of Gaggle. I reached out to him and I said, Hey, can I talk to you sometime?
Very first thing he tells me is, I don't connect with recruiters. And I was like, oh, well, I'm not a recruiter, I'm an unemployed academic. How about we chat? And he is like, oh, okay, cool. And so we chat back and forth. I’m trying to get a phone call with him and he's like, yeah, I'm not interested. My opinions of higher ed are not popular. They're not high. And I was like, neither are mine. It'd be great to chat sometime. Two weeks later, he calls me.