What do Screaming Frog and film studies have in common?

How a humanities PhD found a new path as an SEO manager

From After Your PhD

I’m back with another academe-to-industry success story! Today’s guest is Ryan Collins, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Manager at DrTalks.com. Ryan completed a PhD in Communication and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington in 2021. But even before his dissertation was finished he knew that his dream of becoming a film studies professor was a long shot, so he began exploring other avenues. He created a personal website, collinsryan.com, and founded After Your PhD, an archive of resources for academics looking for work outside higher ed. Ryan also leveraged two internships to land a full-time position at Terakeet as an SEO analyst before moving on a year later to his current role.

We talked about how SEO requires critical thinking and creativity, why the complexity of this work remains (so far) beyond the reach of AI, and how other PhDs in the humanities and social sciences might follow Ryan’s playbook to finding non-academic roles for themselves.

For full access to our conversation, and to read other interviews like this, including posts featuring Ashley Ruba, a psychology PhD who has thrived in UX research and human factors engineering, and Elissa Gurman, a literature PhD who is now one of the top business consultants in Canada, please consider upgrading your membership.

A Conversation with Ryan Collins

Joshua Doležal: What led you away from academe to begin with?

Ryan Collins: I did my Ph.D. with this intention that I wanted to be a film studies professor. I always loved going to movies, always loved talking about movies, and I really enjoyed the horror and cult films, just the weirder stuff that people weren't really talking about. So I thought maybe there's a place for scholarship for that. So I pursued my Ph.D. at Indiana University because there was a scholar there who I wanted to work with. But while I was there, I hit this realization that I don't think I can get a job in this field just because the competitive nature of it.

And we just recently had a newborn, so that was adding a lot of stress, and I was like I'm going to have to deal with all the stress and then also help provide for my family. It didn't seem like it was going to happen in academia. I started looking around, seeing what was outside of academia. I just started trying things out — internships, did little side projects. I created my website, collinsryan.com, just to show some projects I was doing. I looked at data science, looked at UX, but ended up in SEO just because it felt like it blended creativity and the technical aspects that I enjoyed.

There's always a new problem to solve and there's always these rabbit holes you can look down, you really expose the different disciplines, at least in my current role. I'm doing SEO, but I have to work with tech and have to work with content.

Joshua Doležal: So I want to also zoom in from that stage where you were experimenting with things and acquiring some of these skills that you would then use in corporate roles later on, or that you could put more on a resume as industry friendly. At that early stage when you don't know exactly what it is that you're going to choose as your pathway, the possibilities can be overwhelming. So you mentioned UX research, data science. I assume there are probably 10 other different job titles or pathways that you could choose from. I want to hear a little bit more about how you ruled some of those other things out. UX research is so popular for PhDs. Why wasn't that for you? Data science seems similarly in demand. So how did you narrow it down to SEO?