Late-Night Talk: Ilana Horwitz, PhD. The Entrepreneurial Scholar. How to Think Like an Entrepreneur in your PhD and more

Students and Graduates!

Ilana Horwitz, PhD, is an assistant lecturer of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Tulane University, New Orleans. Ilana presents her released book The Entrepreneurial Scholar. A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond, along other future projects.

Buy Ilana's The Entrepreneurial Scholar on Princeton Univ Press and get 20% OFF by typing IMH20: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691240893/the-entrepreneurial-scholar

Ilana's website: https://www.ilanahorwitz.com/

Ilana's LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilana-horwitz-447b092/

Thank you all for tuning in, it's been a pleasure!

Students and Graduates!

This is a mid-roll from my late-night talk with Ilana Horwitz, PhD, about her book The Entrepreneurial Scholar. A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond. Use the code IMH20 when buying her book at Princeton Univ Press

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Students and graduates,

Have a break from this session by hearing a late-night talk I had with Michael Gerharz, PhD, about the impact of communication in your PhD and in public.

Thank you all for tuning in, it has been a pleasure!

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Chapters

• 3:36 Welcome to PhD Lounge
• 8:35 Meet Dr. Ilana Horwitz
• 18:54 From Academic to Entrepreneurial Mindset
• 36:51 Adapting to COVID as an Entrepreneur
• 44:04 Why PhDs Need Entrepreneurial Thinking
• 58:54 Overcoming Perfectionism in Academic Writing
• 1:12:59 Multiple Research Streams and Funding
• 1:26:28 Using AI and Editors in Academic Work
• 1:35:22 Book Release and Future Projects

Transcript

Speaker 1: 3:36

Hello students and graduates, welcome to PhD Lounge, the podcast of late-night talks in which PhDs have a drink and talk about their research topics. I'm your host, luis, and we have a new late-night talk. But first and foremost, we're at half-term of the second semester and I was immersed not only in my PhD thesis to structure my main argument after having feedback from my supervisor but also engaging in other activities. Let's start with my birthday. I recently turned 31, back on March the 3rd, where I played bowling, air hockey and pool with my mates from uni, all of them PhDs around the same age as mine. I had fun time playing and eating with my friends and talking about life, family and friends. It was a great moment to celebrate my 31st birthday, the welcoming entrance to the decade of the 30s, and I must say that usually male quote-unquote life begins at 30 years old, or even a bit earlier, or depending on each one's life circumstances, without diverting too much. I developed more responsibility, discipline and organization skills since I started going abroad at 23 years old, but obviously it increased until now and hopefully even more for the years that shall come.

Speaker 1: 5:03

Besides my birthday, I undertook a mini course about media and communications called Aspired to be iBroadcast working on a mini project of social media promo content of an art and craft business based in Swansea. This project was a small introduction of some specific media techniques when we see on TV with reporters, hosts and pundits performing to engage with both the audience and the environment that they work in. It lasted two weeks and, personally, the objective was to engage and learn the basics in working within the media. Not that I want to work on some sort of corporate media job, but what it mattered was the experience in meeting the organizers of Aspire2B iBroadcast students who were also working with me and to have some ideas to develop in order to enhance the outreach of PhD Lounge in the future. On the past 6th of March, the last day of this experience, I had to present a local art business called Wool and Silk Art Studio alongside my peers, showing shorts and short and long-term goals for this business to get more people to engage with the art of felting as well as increase the value of its brand through social media. Alongside wool and silk art studio business, me and my team competed with two other teams of students running promo content of two other businesses Bowler and the Swig. The winner was the Swig, although I was hoping for Wool and Silk Art Studio to win, but nevertheless it was a great experience where I've met students from different fields, including law, history and media and communications respectively, networking with the organizers who made this mini course project a reality as well. A big thank you to all the organizers, business owners and my colleagues who were at the event. If you're tuning in to this late night talk, last but not least, I'm one month away from concluding the spring term of my teaching placement in history of art with the brilliant club where I'll give my final tutorial at saint richard gwynn in early april. In this final tutorial, my students will receive the final feedback of their final assessments, congratulating them for their continuous assistance and significant engagement throughout the tutorials when sharing their ideas and thoughts about portraits. So, for my students, a huge congratulations to you.

Speaker 1: 7:49

With this brief introduction, it's now time to introduce the following guest of this late night talk. This guest is from Tulane University, who I have said in a previous solo session and has written a book which the guest and myself are going to talk about at the PhD Lounge. This scholar is an assistant lecturer in Jewish studies and sociology and has appeared in several publications and media outlets, including the New York Times, washington Post Unorthodox Podcast and many more. The book is called the Entrepreneurial Scholar and my initial thoughts about this book is an insightful and give you plenty of advice on how to be an entrepreneur during your PhD and after you graduate. And, spoiler alert, entrepreneurial Scholar isn't a book on tips and tricks to become an entrepreneur and earn M's, but rather think like an entrepreneur during and after your PhD, if you are an academic working at university or an industry employee or self-employed.

Speaker 1: 9:04

Besides this book, the guest also wrote God Grades and Graduation Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success back in 2022, earning the Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association section on religion. All these and other details are on the guest's personal website and are added on the show notes. So, without further ado, grab your drinks, have a seat and let's give a warm welcome to Dr Ilana Horwitz. So, ilana, welcome and pleasure to meet you.

Speaker 2: 10:16

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to meet you as well.

Speaker 1: 10:18

So, first and foremost, congratulations on writing your newest book, and I did check your website that you had another one and it was called God Grades in Graduation. What was in summary? What was it about writing that? Was it your first book ever?

Speaker 2: 10:38

Yes, god Grades in Graduation and the subtitle is Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success. Yes, that was my first book and it did emerge out of my dissertation. I had written my dissertation as a three paper dissertation and then I had a sort of an idea for this book as I was writing my dissertation, and it was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. And this year I actually found out that it won a Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association, which was really such, you know, an honor, because I wrote it in a way that I had hoped it would be really accessible to both scholarly and lay audiences, and the reason it won, uh, an award is because of its accessibility and teachability.

Speaker 1: 11:29

So so that was great and speaking of academia and also the teaching, uh, nowadays we just have to update our how we see academia and also the teaching nowadays, not not just grasping like doing the lecturing lectures, but also seeing other ventures in order to enhance our teaching skills, but also seeing other opportunities that may arise.

Speaker 2: 12:01

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I tend to think of a lot of my work in the teaching domain. Even some of my work that falls within the research domain is, for me, teaching. In fact, doing this podcast is also a form of teaching right. Teaching is basically trying to shape the way that other people think, and so in doing my research and writing a book that's so much about teaching right, basically in that book, my goal was to get people to think in new ways or ways that they are different than what they thought about previously, about how kids' religious upbringing might influence their academic trajectory. So does being religious affect how kids do in school, and that's not a question that a lot of people necessarily think about on a regular basis. And so writing that book was really a form of teaching for me, because I was getting people to think in different ways about that topic.

Speaker 1: 13:03

Right. And you said about religion and I do think religion has some major influence, whether we write an article, a presentation, a conference paper, including the thesis and a book the thesis and a book. So when you wrote, entrepreneur Scholar, was your religion, your religious beliefs, did it also influence while you were writing?

Speaker 2: 13:31

No, actually my own religious beliefs I really or practices or my religious commitments don't, I think, intersect with my work in any way. I ended up writing a book. My first book is actually about conservative Christians and I myself am Jewish, and so when I wrote that book I really have like no skin in the game, and when I came to that topic it wasn't actually out of any personal interest about my own religious commitments, and so also with this book, the Entrepreneurial Scholar really like, my own religious commitments have actually nothing to do with the thesis of this book or my motivation for writing it.

Speaker 1: 14:09

Nice, nice. So I can see a different, completely scenario. Just to shifting religious beliefs to another, setting the entrepreneur, the entrepreneurial mindset, to write the book and also doing other ventures. So what happened to you after you became a PhD graduate? Were you going straight into academia or did you do something before?

Speaker 2: 14:35

So when I walked across the stage at my graduation for my PhD and my PhD is from the School of Education at Stanford and so my PhD is in sociology of education and Jewish studies I actually had no job lined up in academia. I had gone on the job market three times and had been unsuccessful in all three attempts. And because I'm very entrepreneurial, I had figured out a way to basically do a consulting job on the side where I leveraged existing contacts that I had and I basically figured out that, because consulting jobs can pay really well, I really just needed to work like 20 hours a week to make the same amount that I would make as a postdoc, and that I would spend the other 20 to 30 hours of my week continuing to publish and make my CV look more desirable for an academic position. And I had also figured out how to not confer my degree so that I could remain in student status, so that I could stay in Stanford student housing and I could continue to use the library and continue to use the Stanford letterhead. And so I was really sort of creative about how I thought about this next step. And then actually during the reception, after you know you get your degree.

Speaker 2: 15:58

A colleague of mine, a professor at the Graduate School of Education, came up to me and it wasn't a professor I had ever had, but she and I had met at some happy hour and I had just kind of briefly told her about the work I was doing. And she came up to me and she was like hey, she's like are you still looking for a job? And I was like yes, I am. She's like I think I just found you a postdoc on campus for two years. And lo and behold, the Stanford Center on Longevity was looking for somebody with an education background that studied the life course and that could be a postdoc for two years. And that is exactly what I was doing in terms of my research. And so three days later I had this amazing postdoc lined up. And it was because of this kind of like very unexpected networking.

Speaker 1: 21:05

Yes, so what was the postdoc about?

Speaker 2: 21:08

So I worked for the Stanford Center on Longevity, which basically was thinking at the time about, given that people are generally living a lot longer, how can we redesign the different features of life, given that people are living a lot longer? So they there was like several postdocs who were thinking about things like how should our healthcare system be redesigned and how should technology be redesigned? And I was in charge of the education question, and so the question was like how might we rethink learning, which we tend to think of as happening mostly from the zero to 20, you know, five-year-old stage, right, that's when we pack in a lot of formal education but we don't really think about learning as something, especially formal learning that happens along the life course. And so I was thinking like, if people are really living you know, 80 to 80, 90 or or 100, how might we rethink the role of education in someone's life along this life course?

Speaker 2: 22:09

And it was a really, really amazing postdoc for several reasons. First of all, it allowed me to stay at Stanford, which was beneficial in many ways because I was also running other projects that I was able to continue doing. And two, because it introduced me to life course research, which actually ended up being very, very influential for me, and now a new book that I'm writing, a third book and a fourth book also all take a life course approach and so, because I did this postdoc, I ended up sort of developing sort of theories and frameworks and applying them to my work in ways that I never expected.

Speaker 1: 22:49

Wow. So you had a handful of so many projects that you had all in once while completely completing your postdoc, and it's kind of amazing and sometimes we need to hear other people that went through a lot and they had to grab, juggle, many tasks at the same time in order to make the CV more presentable Well tailored to become more presentable, networking here and there in order to gain awareness, and since nowadays we are directed towards LinkedIn and other social media in regards to getting academic or industry jobs, then we need to grasp what we can. What we can, what grasp, in a sense of reaching what we have in front of us and then you make the use out of it at its the best of its abilities. So, from what she's saying, I think all of us now, nowadays, phds, have to grab anything that they can in order to I don't like to say selling themselves, but in a way it is what it is nowadays.

Speaker 2: 24:07

Yeah, and I think this idea of selling yourself is really icky and I'm actually quite bad at it and I don't like that idea. But what I do really feel committed to is the idea of making my ideas influence public discourse. And so when I put uh stuff out on LinkedIn or or on any other social media, it's really because I'm uh trying to get my ideas to influence how other people think about things. Um, and when you think of it in that way, it doesn't, it doesn't sort of feel as uh, as icky, I guess. Um, you know, I never actually intended to become an academic.

Speaker 2: 24:45

I thought faculty when I was in college were kind of like fairly boring, irrelevant people and I never really wanted to be one. And I didn't start my PhD with a goal of staying in academia. And then in my first year I really changed my mind about that because I realized that sort of what I thought getting a PhD was. It was really different, uh, and I actually really loved what it turned out to be. Um, but when I decided that I wanted to stay in academia, I made a commitment to myself that I was not going to be one of those academics whose stuff just like collected dust on bookshelves and that I was really gonna, uh, work hard to disseminate my information beyond the academic journal articles that are generally so jargony and behind a paywall. And so now, anytime I write anything for an academic audience, I will also write some sort of public piece, like a public piece of scholarship, an op-ed or maybe something in the conversation, which are more explanatory pieces, and I'm, you know, I have the actual technical skills to do that because I took a class on it.

Speaker 2: 25:54

But you know, a lot of grad students I know, don't it's? They might have the sort of desire to have their ideas out in the public domain, but they don't necessarily have the training to do that. So, yeah, people need to think about how do you develop both of those, both the motivation to have your ideas out in the public domain, as well as the actual skill of how to do that, and also, as you mentioned, like you, kind of need to latch on to anything. I mean you have to be strategic and diversifying your sort of portfolio of ideas and what you're going to spend a lot of time. I mean you have to be strategic and diversifying your sort of portfolio of ideas and what you're going to spend a lot of time on and you don't want to just like sort of grab on to anything. You do want to be thoughtful about what you're pursuing.

Speaker 1: 26:36

Yes, and you did say something that is really important is writing papers, articles really important? Is writing papers, articles, even the books, not just from an academic context, because it is a niche in that sense, but also to the wider audience, which is so important nowadays that even lecturers praise for that. They encourage their students to write their works without sounding too academic, otherwise they fall into the trap of I'm too academic for this. Then I don't want to share this to the general audience, which is a wrong perspective. And I think nowadays I think nowadays the younger lecturers are trying to shift the paradigm of writing, to write your work.

Speaker 1: 27:37

On both sides of the coin, you have the general audience, who doesn't understand your field of expertise, but they're probably interested in hearing some of your work in simpler terms, whereas there's the like, the high status, or the old school scholars who preferred that, the academic view. They like the eloquent words. Well, those is a small percentage, I would, I would assume, but nowadays we need to. We need to see on both sides. We need to write in a in a concise and sweet, short and sweet language so that everyone can understand you. And when you speak and share your content, then it's it gets even easier when you, when, when, saying to the public, to the, to the general public, what you are writing and why you think this is important.

Speaker 2: 28:29

Right, One of the most influential courses for me. I actually took this in my sixth year of my PhD program. I was just auditing it, but it was about how to write for a public audience and it was taught by Professor Sam Weinberg, who does really great work on historical thinking, but he's also been very committed in his career to reaching out into the public domain and actually was teaching a class about this, and it was actually out of this class that this entire book emerged. But what he made us do and this is a really good exercise for all of your listeners is, he said I want you to write a letter to a family member or a friend, somebody who, like has a college degree but is not by any means like an expert in your field, and I want you to explain your research to them in this letter. And I want you to explain your research to them in this letter.

Speaker 2: 29:26

And it sounds so easy and it is actually, for most people, remarkably difficult to be able to convey what you're doing to a non-specialized audience, and I think doing that helps us clarify in our own mind what we're writing about and why we're writing it, and it's actually a really good skill, not just like for your own dissertation or research, but also when you apply.

Speaker 2: 29:47

I've learned this over time as I'm applying for different grants that most times grant applications are being read by people who do not have a specialty in your field, and so you have to be able to really explain in very clear, quick terms why you're doing something and why it's important and why they should fund your research. So, yes, being able to write for a non-specialized academic audience is a really, really important skill, and we know look, I can see in my undergrads their brains have changed. Like social media has made them have a lot less appetite and tolerance for long form. You know monographs, and, as sad as that makes me as a professor, it's also the reality. Like their brains are filled with tweets and things of very, very, very short form, and so I'm not saying that we need we as academics need to sort of pander to that, but we need to be mindful of how people's brains have changed in the past couple decades with social media.

Speaker 1: 30:48

Yes, and I think also that we need to update ourselves and nowadays, obviously with what we call Gen Z, they want mediatic things, they want shorts, they want small text you said the tweets.

Speaker 1: 31:06

They want small text that says basically everything.

Speaker 1: 31:10

And one of the things that I also self-teaching myself and also whilst learning from from from other ones who had the, who have the experience, is through, for example, with my podcast, when I write my, I'll try to make it casual, but not too casual, and I do blend some academic words that sometimes it is necessary to explain what to put them and then I explain it why. But most of it, most of the scripts, is trying to be more casual in order to get the attention of my audience, which ranges usually from 23 to 35 years old, and most of them are in their early PhDs. Most of them are also at the mid PhDs, final years of their PhDs and post-PhDs, and I think that is so really, really important to find that specific language that doesn't sound neither too academic nor too casual, but something in between. So now the entrepreneurial scholar. I wonder if, during the pandemic, it shaped the structure that you previously had, the idea for this book came about a little bit later sort of as the pandemic was subsiding.

Speaker 2: 32:53

I wrote this book mostly in 2022, 2023. But first of all, I should define what I mean by the term entrepreneurial scholarship and what it means to be an entrepreneurial scholar, because a lot of times people assume that I am talking about trying to make money off of your ideas or trying to start some sort of business, and that's actually not what I'm talking about when I talk about entrepreneurial scholars and I use the word world. That's exactly what they're trying to do. Like most entrepreneurs don't go in saying like, oh, I want to make a lot of money and so I'm going to invent this product. They're like, oh, I see some sort of like problem in the marketplace or some sort of need and I have a solution. And then, if their solution is good, right, and they're able to leverage their resources and their human capital and their social capital, they're able to leverage their resources and their human capital and their social capital.

Speaker 2: 34:09

Then that's when startups really start to come to fruition, and so I think a lot of scholars are actually quite entrepreneurial. They would never use that term themselves. No-transcript was working much more intensely than he had been before, and because I had a postdoc at the time, it was seen as like oh, I had the more flexible job and so a lot of the childcare work fell on me and I felt this like great resentment about the sort of gender disparity and had a really challenging time. And I also had a book contract at the time and I knew and I had very limited time to work and very limited sort of brain capacity. I also so I am a sociologist of education, so I spent a lot of time thinking about inequality in higher education and when COVID hit and I was at Stanford and students got sent home, one of the first thoughts that I had this was even before we realized sort of like how long and hard COVID would be. But when students got sent home I was like, wait a minute, if students are being sent home, that means that they're going to lose their work, study jobs on campus, which for many students I know is like a really important source of income that they often either use to fund their own life or send back to their families, and I had been a work-study student myself, which is why these students were really on my mind. And so during the spring semester because students at Stanford got sent home right before spring semester so for spring semester I figured out how to hire about 10 work-study students to be my research assistants, because it was a job that they could do remotely, they didn't have to be on campus and it allowed them to maintain their work-study status. And then it was so successful and several of them enjoyed being on my project so much and I got so much out of it, that over the summer, a bunch of students that summer this was the summer of 2020, had their summer jobs and summer internships completely canceled, and so I was able to hire about 20 Stanford undergrad students to work for me full time, 40 hours a week, for the entire summer, and this cost me absolutely nothing.

Speaker 2: 37:00

It required me to be really creative, because I needed my, and to have a really good relationship with a few of my professors, because I needed them to buy into this, to convince them that, like no, their, their accounts will not get charged, because this comes out of both the federal government as well as uh, the Stanford financial aid office. It does not hit faculty funding at all and that I, you know they had to sign off a bunch of uh on a bunch of paperwork to make this happen, because as a postdoc I didn't have like the institutional authority, so I was able to like leverage the really good relationships that I had built with faculty to make this happen and I was able to see, like I don't have the time to to do a lot of the analysis that I had planned, but some of that could be done by Stanford students who are highly, highly competent. And as a result of this, first of all, it also just really helped me improve my own perspective.

Speaker 2: 38:01

I was really intentional about hiring research assistants who came from really diverse religious backgrounds this is when I was writing my first book from different sort of regional backgrounds and different racial backgrounds, so it helped me make sure that I wasn't sort of reading the data just from my own lens, but several of them actually ended up going on to pursue their own research projects. Some of them applied for master's or PhD programs because it was like this very intensive hands-on research experience that they had. And so when I think about like how did COVID affect me in terms of entrepreneurship? This was a very entrepreneurial sort of venture, right. I was like, oh, this is a time of high uncertainty for a lot of people. I have very limited resources. How do I leverage what I have at this moment? And that was, and that worked out really great.

Speaker 1: 38:53

And then what happened to the students who were working with?

Speaker 2: 38:57

you. Well, you mean what happened to them Like after the pandemic got cleared. Yeah Well, them, like after after the pandemic got, uh, cleared, yeah well, several of them continued to work with me. So if you looked at my cv, you'll see like a few of them are co-authors on papers, um, for several of them, I, you know, wrote letters of recommendation, um, and I've stayed in touch with a few of them, um, and have, uh, and it has been really, really wonderful to see how that very unexpected research experience ended up influencing their lives.

Speaker 1: 39:31

Wow, that's an amazing story and that's the best of it to having a problem and finding a solution, but also helping other ones to elevate in their career paths in the future. And it is great to hear from you to seeing as an example of helping others to thrive, whether they want to work in academia and also in industry, and seeing this helps others to learn and also think for themselves on how can they be entrepreneurs as well.

Speaker 2: 40:07

Yeah, and I think one of the things that helped me but I think that other people can sort of cultivate this mindset as well as I came into academia Academia is my second career. I spent the first part of my career working at startups and in management, consulting, and I have probably a love of Excel spreadsheets and a sort of love for organizing projects and sort of executing projects in a way that maybe isn't super common in academia. So I'm able to sort of think about delegating, because in consulting you are working in very interdependent, multi-disciplinary teams on a very regular basis, and so for me to bring on a large team of research assistants didn't feel that foreign, um, as it would maybe for somebody who's, like, spent most of their life in academia and has mostly worked in, uh, independently, um, so you do have to be able to really think in a kind of like scholarship as a community sport as opposed to like a very isolated endeavor.

Speaker 2: 41:13

So if you can think about the human capital that other people have and sort of how to bring people together, that can make your own work much stronger than if you were just operating on your own.

Speaker 1: 41:27

Yes, and after all it becomes teamwork, and that's really helpful, and we in academia we're just not individuals, but we also work in different departments, but in the end we become a team, we become contacting other people from other departments within the same university and trying to figure out something in order to help ourselves out, as well as those who pay basically the tuition fees in order to develop the departments, the lecturers and the students themselves, and I think that's one of the most entrepreneurial actions that many of us must develop to be successful. One of the things that I've noticed as well is that the characteristic of a phd candidate is to build healthy, entrepreneurial relationships with their supervisors, second supervisors, research assistants, mentors, postdocs, and even to those who rejected phd proposals in the first place. And so I. Why do PhDs hold back their relationships with these people as academic, short-term contacts instead of lifelong collapse when an academic or non-academic future project is announced? And I ask a second question does that also affect PhD topics ranging from STEM to arts and humanities?

Speaker 2: 43:09

I'm not sure that we have the actual empirical evidence to say that once you get your PhD, that you don't develop lifelong collaborations. I think it's probably really varied. I think some people hold on to some of those relationships that they formed during their PhDs and and some people don't. But I will say like I can I can certainly understand why some people are reticent to hold on to those relationships, because some of those relationships may have been really unproductive, very difficult, very like emotionally challenging. Right, there's a lot of power dynamics in the academy and I know from mentoring dozens of doctoral students that some advisors are really fantastic and some advisors are not. Some advisors give their students a lot of agency but also direction, and some people you know sort of create really toxic dependent relationships where grad students feel constantly like beat down and never really uh, like they're contributing, and that can feel really icky, like why would you want to maintain a relationship with somebody who kind of berated you, you know, constantly, even if maybe they had like good intentions to try to get you to think better and to be your best self, um, it doesn't feel good right To to cultivate um, or to to hold onto a relationship in which you feel really emotionally scarred by Um and so, for sure, there are um. Those are some of the reasons I think people wouldn't hold on to those relationships and I think other people you know. I do try to encourage people don't be dependent on your advisor. Really, try to have a team of people who are supporting you.

Speaker 2: 45:15

When I was in grad school, my advisor was amazing in many ways and there were ways in which he wasn't really helpful to me and so I reached out to other professors, um, I also reached out to a lot of professors who are emeriti or emeritus status because they really um wanted to engage with students, like they were kind of at the part of their career where their legacy is what they're um able to pass down to next generations.

Speaker 2: 45:43

And so I had coffee with several professors who were like in their 80s and their 90s and they were, they would read my work and they would give me feedback and they were like such amazing sources of wisdom and I didn't have those kinds of like those power dynamics weren't there in a way, because they had nothing to prove and they had a lot of time for me there in a way, because they had nothing to prove and they had a lot of time for me, so so, yeah, my advice to people is like, if your relationship with your advisor is not working out like, make sure you are really diversifying the people who are on your team and hopefully those relationships will carry on as you pursue your career, regardless of whether you stay in academia or not.

Speaker 1: 46:25

And also even during the PhD, the relationships can be toxic, as you mentioned, and there's also the chance of changing your advisors, and I've heard many stories about PhD candidates, especially from STEM, who couldn't, who were doing their lab works and they couldn't hold on to the behavior of their advisors and so they were trying to struggle their behavior, which would affect their mental health, and also doing eight hours straight lab work also doing eight hours straight lab work.

Speaker 1: 47:06

And so one of the good things that here in Swans University we have is that we have a postgraduate research society where we do have a WhatsApp group where we exchange ideas, we exchange thoughts and also, if something doesn't feel right, we ask advice to each other on how can we change supervisor, second supervisor, etc.

Speaker 1: 47:29

And then some of that some of those who are post PhDs and are still on the society they advise us to reach out to the well-being team of the university to ask for some advice and, if there and many and other ones, just as you said, reaching out to people who are already retired and but they have experience and they've known our current advisors to change and work some working on something else, allowing us also to have the capacity to think for ourselves and trying to figure out what was the what is the best way in order to feel more productive, but also having a well-balanced state of mind. So Another thing to now, this time to chapter one. What are the major flaws that PhDs have in not having an entrepreneurial mindset when they began their degrees?

Speaker 2: 48:35

So when PhD students begin their degrees, they often enter with this very specific and narrow mindset, right Once shaped by the structure of academia, because the traditional path tells them you focus on deep specialization, you aim for a tenure-track job and you measure your success by publications and by grants and conference presentations. And this is kind of this like linear and institutional, institution-dependent way of thinking, and the problem is that this mindset is out of sync with the realities of both academia and the broader job market. So let me outline, I guess, three flaws and then I'll give some strategies for how PhDs can shift their mindset early. So the first flaw is this one-track career mentality.

Speaker 2: 49:20

Phds are often in condition to believe that there's a single legitimate path. You go from a graduate student to a postdoc if that's applicable in your field, to a tenure track job, to a professor. And this kind of path makes us resistant to exploring alternative opportunities, whether it's in policy or in industry or nonprofit work or public scholarship, because you feel like anything outside of tenure track academia is failure. And in reality, phds do have skills that are highly transferable across sectors, but many of us don't start considering alternatives until it's too late in the game.

Speaker 1: 49:56

Sure.

Speaker 2: 49:57

The second flaw is this over reliance on institutional validation. Phd students are taught that success is externally granted, awarded by advisors and journal editors and hiring committees and grant reviewers, and they wait for approval instead of creating their own opportunities. I think the most entrepreneurial scholars don't passively wait for recognition. They're actively trying to shape their own professional trajectory by doing things like publishing in non-academic outlets or building networks outside their departments or launching some independent projects. Right, they're the CEOs of their own education and professional careers.

Speaker 2: 50:37

And a third flaw I would say is this fear of self-promotion and visibility that you talked about. Look, many PhDs are deeply uncomfortable with self-promotion because academia teaches us that our work should speak for itself. But in today's world, whether in or outside academia, visibility matters, and so I think scholars who are able to embrace this kind of entrepreneurial mindset understand that sharing their work in accessible ways it's not selling out, it's expanding their impact and their reach. So how can PhDs shift their mindset early? How can they adopt a more entrepreneurial approach early on? Here are three things. One is expand your definition of success. So, instead of viewing tenure as the only legitimate outcome, consider multiple paths where your skills can be applied meaningfully. Two, create instead of just consume, so write for a public audience. Start some sort of a newsletter, experiment with different platforms. Don't just wait for peer-reviewed publications to validate your expertise. And three network horizontally horizontally, not just vertically.

Speaker 1: 51:49

So too often, phd's only network with advisors and senior faculty, but peer connections inside and outside of academia are often even more valuable for long-term um career opportunities yes, and I do agree with that because, uh, there's, there's a vast network of people who are related to the field that you are studying, that you are writing your thesis, and they also have the knowledge and they don't need to be even academics they can be even leaders and CEOs to work in the industry, in the field that you are in, work in the in the industry, in the field that you are in. Let's say, for example, you are working in cell biology, for example, and, yeah, and you want to teach. However, there's also other ventures where you can explore cell anatomy. I don't know, I just just came out of the top of my head, but that is a, that is a substance, is a, an array of opportunities to network.

Speaker 1: 52:46

You just have to be mindful about what do you really want, and we were explaining this earlier at the end of the talk, that there's a lot of ventures. We have to be precisely on what you really want to choose to follow with, what you really want to choose to follow with, and you have to have not just one thing but different outcomes. That goes within, more or less, the field that you want to progress with and, again, it's self-promoting yourself on, in this case LinkedIn, for example, and networking in different conferences, conferences related to your field, within your field, and again, linkedin. Linkedin is a powerful source and the more active that you engage with other people in that social media, the merrier.

Speaker 2: 53:48

Yeah, and I would say, ultimately, the biggest flaw isn't that PhDs lack an entrepreneurial mindset, it's that they don't realize that they need one until they're already facing career uncertainty. So the sooner PhDs can recognize that they have to actively shape their own careers rather than just following a preset academic path, the more options they'll have when they graduate.

Speaker 1: 54:05

Yes, and I think, as you said as well, that they become too dependent from their advisors on okay, what should I do next, what should I do next, what should I do on this and that? And, as you said, phd, it's like having a business, basically, and you have to think for yourself, yourself, not just being too dependent from your advisors only when you can ask, only when necessary, when you feel lost and you just can't get out of that loop. And so sometimes the advisors are good in that sense to provide a fresh perspective. Otherwise they encourage you indirectly, should I say, to think for yourself. Then just grabbed onto something that this would be for you. You can ask advice as much as you can, but they keep pushing you to think for yourself. You're an adult and this is your PhD, not mine. So, and I do ask on that follow-up question, that is it their lack of confidence and, as you said, also there's the uncertain times or is it something deeper when they're trying to pitch in their ideas for their advisors?

Speaker 2: 55:25

Yeah, I think the hesitation that PhDs feel when pitching their ideas or talking about ideas, whether in academia or non-academia, it's not just about a lack of confidence. I think it's something deeper a rigid academic culture that conditions us to seek certainty and avoid risk and fear public scrutiny. So let's take those each in turn. So there's this perfectionist trap and fear of being wrong. Right, phds are trained to avoid making claims without exhaustive evidence. That's a good thing, and academic culture prioritizes rigor and precision and airtight logic. But these very traits can also make scholars really reluctant to share ideas before they feel complete. In contrast, entrepreneurial thinkers understand that ideas don't have to be perfect before they are valuable. So in the business world, people launch what is called like a minimum viable product, an MVP, all the time, and they know that they're going to refine those products based on feedback. And PhDs often wait until their ideas are really fully developed and they miss key opportunities to engage audiences early. Second, there's this fear of public judgment and reputation risk. Right, phds are conditioned to seek approval from the small group of experts, advisors, peer reviewers, conference audiences and this leads to this deep-seated fear of looking unserious or being criticized in a public forum. And it's true, and academia, mistakes can be really career damaging. But this fear of judgment prevents PhDs from taking risks, whether that means pitching an op-ed or proposing a new research agenda or applying for roles beyond the university setting, and so you have to sort of be able to overcome that. There's also this kind of lack of training and idea pitching. So this is a technical problem, right?

Speaker 2: 57:16

Another issue is that PhDs simply aren't taught how to pitch their ideas. So entrepreneurs tend to be trained in storytelling and persuasive communication, whereas academics spend years learning how to critique and analyze and deconstruct, but not really how to market themselves or their ideas. So they don't know how to communicate their research in plain, compelling language. We talked about that earlier how to adapt their messages to different audiences, right. What you would say to academics versus policymakers, versus journalists, versus industry professionals is really different. They don't know how to frame their work as urgent and relevant rather than just interesting, and without these skills, any kind of pitching or talking about your idea can feel really daunting, not because the ideas lack value, but because scholars don't know how to translate them into compelling networks. So I would say here are some strategies.

Speaker 2: 58:11

I would reframe pitching as part of the research process. Instead of waiting until your ideas are totally finished, test them early in seminars and blogs and public talks, and view each pitch as a way to refine your ideas, not as a final verdict of their worth, and also develop a strong narrative that you can adapt to different audiences. So, instead of overwhelming people with details, focus on the so what? Why does this idea matter? Who benefits from it? And try to shift from a critic to a contributor mindset. So academia does a great job of teaching us to critique other people's work, but entrepreneurial thinking is focused on building and improving and offering new insights. So, rather than thinking of pitching a self-promotion, start seeing it as a form of contributing to a conversation that needs your voice. The first pitch doesn't have to be perfect, it's fine. Iteration is really key, and rejections don't mean that an idea is bad. It means that it wasn't framed the right way for that audience.

Speaker 1: 59:13

Yes, and I think the more ideas that we present and then we pitch and the rejections that come after, we should have to take that as a positive attitude. And we should have take that as a positive attitude because it's it essentially, it is a feedback, no matter how negatively can impact the PhDs. But also we have to see from the other side. So if they, if I got rejected on this one, I mean, for example, I've got rejected to one of my abstracts I present that I submitted to a conference that was in classicsics, in Ancient History, to be held in Helsinki in Finland, got rejected. And then I've reread it and I said, well, this has to be shaped the other way around. And so I recycled that one to present to another conference, which was last year, and got accepted.

Speaker 1: 1:00:12

And so that's the power of the positive power of getting out of the comfort zone and sometimes being rejected leads to a positive outcome in PhDs, because many of us are too afraid to fail, as you said, and we want to be perfect, and a supervisor with good sense and wants to see their students thrive, they will say in advance that your PhD won't be perfect, it will have major flaws, because you will get examined by your examiner during the viva, and so you have to basically pitching your main argument during the viva, which will serve for after you become a graduate and trying to look for a job, and pitching your idea. You can have even a business model and pitching your idea, and that's the good thing and sometimes getting rejected during their PhDs, which means that you have to thrive, you have to improve and that's the good thing.

Speaker 2: 1:01:18

Yeah, well, congratulations on getting that paper, sort of being willing to dig it out and revise it and rethink it, and that's really hard to do and I'm really glad to hear that it got accepted, congratulations.

Speaker 1: 1:01:30

Oh, thank you so much. I did present it last year at Warwick University, so it's in Coventry, it's near Birmingham, so somewhere in the Midlands of the United Kingdom. So and now for chapter two, that you share the journeys of scholars who shifted from academic to entrepreneurial mindsets, framing failure as a stepping stone to growth. And then yet, in today's world of academia and industry, marked by demands for instant results, the fear of rejection, as we said, and then the pressure to publicly showcase achievements on platforms like social media, can stifle this mindset. Do you have any practical steps you would suggest to help them to proactively create opportunities? I understand we've spoken here before, but how then they can embrace the risk and then cultivate the patience to continue to tackling those opportunities?

Speaker 2: 1:02:35

Yeah, you're absolutely right, and the need to constantly showcase achievements, whether through social media or grant funding or high-impact publications, can make failure feel really catastrophic, rather than a necessary part of growth, and for PhDs, who are often trained to be perfectionists and risk-averse, this can be particularly paralyzing. One of the key takeaways from the scholars I profile in Chapter 2 is that those who successfully transition to an entrepreneurial mindset stopped viewing failure as a signal to stop and instead saw it as essential feedback. When we look at academia through an entrepreneurial lens, failure isn't a personal flaw. It's an experiment that provides data to refine our approach, and this shift requires unlearning some of the perfectionist tendencies that academia instills and instead thinking iteratively. So some practical things people could do.

Speaker 2: 1:03:36

I haven't by myself, you know, experimented with all of these, but I was just brainstorming some ideas. Perhaps you have like a failure budget right, give yourself a set number of applications or pitches or ideas that you're willing to let fail before assessing whether to pivot. This normalizes rejection and helps avoid premature quitting. A second idea is to adopt a prototyping mindset. So, instead of waiting until something is perfect, launch smaller, lower stakes versions of your ideas or test your ideas with more limited audiences. A third idea is to be thinking about like build a portfolio, not a pipeline. So what I mean by that is academia trains us to think in long term pipelines dissertation, job tenure but an entrepreneurial mindset means that success is about diversification. You should probably have multiple irons in the fire, whether through consulting or writing or public speaking, so that you're not dependent on any single outcome and having that diversification can be really helpful. And then, lastly, create an accountability network. So surround yourself with other scholars or professionals who understand the value of risk-taking and can support you through those setbacks.

Speaker 1: 1:04:57

Yeah, and I think those three characteristics are really important in order for a PhD to develop him or herself within academia and industry and it will take a positive out. It will take positive outcomes and one of the things that I that I've checked while I was reading chapter three, that you mentioned one sociologist named Dalton Conley that having multiple streams are really important and I wonder if whether the supervision and peer prescience can stop PhDs from solving and personalizing problems within their dissertations, their dissertations. So I wonder if that also can make, can have an impact over PhDs whilst doing their dissertations.

Speaker 2: 1:05:55

Right, you want to both be focused enough on your own research while also trying to have a lot of like fires in the sort of going or irons in the fire, as they say. So, and that is a hard balance. So I'll give you like an example. So while I was working on my own dissertation, I started this whole other research project where me and a few of my colleagues decided to do a longitudinal study of college students that we would follow over time, because we wanted to think sort of long-term that when we got into faculty positions and we didn't have time to collect our own data, that we would have already data that we could publish off of. And so that's an example of what it looks like to have multiple streams. Now, did that pull my attention away from my own research? Sure, at times, but I would say sort of in the long term. It was also like you can only work on your own research for so long before your eyes glaze over and you kind of reach the point of diminishing returns.

Speaker 2: 1:07:01

So I think it can be really helpful to pursue different things. First of all, it gives you career flexibility. If one research agenda stagnates, another may gain traction. You might also be able to have more publishing and funding opportunities, because different streams allow scholars to tap into different grants and journals and collaborations. And then there's also interdisciplinary leverage. So engaging with multiple areas allows PhDs to connect with broader conversations beyond their immediate subfield, and that can make your work more meaningful. But of course, it's really hard to maintain multiple research streams because there's external pressures from advisors and departments and academic culture. Like it's hard enough to finish one research stream. How can you possibly do more? So you have to know your yourself really well to know like, how much can you um manage in terms of having multiple? Like, can your brain operate in multiple domains at once?

Speaker 1: 1:08:01

And for some people they can't um, and for some people they can um yeah, there's a bit of everything and uh, and, and see from this perspective that a day takes 24 hours and in 24 hours, you how we can train our brain to do many activities and say so. Say it like this normally we do phds, for phd, full-time, it's an eight hour of research, and then we have after that eight hour we can do other activity. Uh, we can have side hustles and working with them for another eight hours that will be 16 hours and then try to eat and then sleep and then doing their hobbies. That would fulfill a day of a PhD, basically. And so I do think these are quite important in having this balance, in trying to make the most of of your phd but, at the same time, having these side hustles in order to gain some extra income, for example. Right, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 1:09:21

And so you've said also also about uh funding and other. Some of them are also self-funded, and I wonder whether PhDs should think about investing of their more financial resources and alternative grants to increase their chances of obtaining more money and then paying their student debts quickly. And I wonder also if they should network with economists and PhDs in economics to find those alternatives that are not usually to the public audience and I say something just before hearing your answer is this I'm a student with a student loan, so I'm still, uh, refunding my master's loan as well as my PhD loan. So this also resonates with me, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Speaker 2: 1:10:15

I mean on this question, by the way, of a fund of financial resources that I would recommend that your listeners listen to, uh, or read advice from Emily Roberts, who who runs Personal Finance for PhDs. She has a really great podcast that I've been on a couple times and gives great advice on her websites.

Speaker 1: 1:10:36

What's her name?

Speaker 2: 1:10:37

Her name is Emily Roberts and her website is I'm looking it up, it's personal finance for PhDs P-F-F-O-R PhDs personal finance for PhDs. So people just Google that they can find it and it's a really great resource. But, um, when thinking about the financial aspect of this, first of all, I don't know. I don't think that economists have the answer to this. I think you right Ask like, should they network with economists, uh, to seek those alternative grants? And I don't actually think economists necessarily know the answers to this, so I'm not going to privilege them in any way, but I will say, like, grants are more than just money. Right, they provide credibility and professional connections and institutional backing that can open new doors.

Speaker 2: 1:11:36

And there are different ways to think about grants. Like I've I'm generally, since I've been at Tulane, where I am currently a faculty member, I've been pretty successful at getting these like low, uh, low, low amount but low effort grants. So, like I'm regularly applying for things that are like $500, $5,000 up to $10,000. They generally don't require a ton of work and I have a very I've had a very good sort of application to award ratio and I've been highly unsuccessful at getting the big grants that take a lot of time. I've been rejected from like the Spencer Foundation several times and from other really big, prestigious ones that take a lot of my time big, prestigious ones that take a lot of my time. So people should really evaluate like, how much of your material can you reuse? But diversifying your funding also reduces your risk. So you want to try to not rely solely on one major source of funding, like a university stipend or a single large grant, and try to pursue multiple smaller funding streams to cover gaps in research expenses or living costs.

Speaker 2: 1:12:55

And when I was in grad school, I had several consulting gigs on the side and some of them paid really well and some of them didn't Like one of my first consulting gig I got paid $12 an hour. Them didn't like one of my my first consulting gig, I got paid $12 an hour and um, and it was actually really beneficial because it was the first time that I was able to uh, have my own survey data to work with and Stata Um, and this was really helpful because I didn't I didn't want my sort of dissertation to be the first time that I really got to apply the stuff that I learned in all my stats and econometrics classes to the real world, and so I was able to like learn how do you actually run a regression, what does it really mean to clean data? And so I did that and I got paid $12 an hour and I um, I got, uh, I got great experience out of that and you know, it helped me cover a bunch of my living expenses.

Speaker 1: 1:13:49

So so I think, diversifying where your money is coming from and really thinking about the value of doing a side hustle, not just for the money of it, the financial aspect of it, but what else you can learn from that experience- yes, and you said something right and that also, as I said previously, it resonates also with me me doing a teaching placement and I work also a part-time job at a restaurant and obviously money is important, but just keeping thinking about the money that you're probably not going anywhere unless you think about on how you're going to use that money, to invest in it so that it can work for you, and also thinking about on the different grants, small grants that we can apply that can be easily applicable and hopefully some of them you can be rewarded with.

Speaker 1: 1:14:49

I've tried to apply to several times in small bursaries. Obviously, I've got rejected, but that's part of the journey and we just have to persist in order to cover up our debts. Most of the students are covered in student debts, so it is. It is really difficult, but it will. It will be pay off. It will be. It will pay off. One once we think about of how to have a, how can we have a side hustle in order to help ourselves and getting the experience from from those experiences right so I now on on chapter five, and and we we spoke about the thinking, our dissertation as as an mvp or as a as a brand.

Speaker 1: 1:15:40

We've touched upon that, the, and I wonder that about the writer's block and just an example, I do have an episode about me arguing that the writer's block doesn't exist or is a nonsense, basically because we are keeping writing. We keep writing every single time, but I do think, do you think that there is writer's block in your own perspective? And I wonder if there are some techniques that you advise for PhDs?

Speaker 2: 1:16:14

It's hard for me to say whether it exists or not. I know a lot of people talk about it. I've not personally experienced it, but I don't want to be the one to sort of like negate people's lived experience. But look, phds do struggle with writing, whether due to perfectionism, fear of criticism or simply not knowing where to start. That is a very real feeling, and so one of the things that I like for people to think about is like writing is a process, it is not a final product.

Speaker 2: 1:16:43

So one of the people who I interviewed for the book, david Laboree, who was one of my greatest mentors at Stanford he advises that academic writing is never the last word on a subject. It's a conversation, and if you wait for certainty, the field will move on without you. So, instead of aiming for perfection, try to focus. You know he says focus on being usefully provocative rather than being boringly correct, and he says I have this quote for him right? He says, like you don't need to be absolutely certain, yours is not the last word on the subject. Add a credible and provocative contribution and let others provide counter arguments. And so I think the shift of perspective removes the pressure to be flawless and instead encourages meaningful participation and scholarly discussions.

Speaker 2: 1:17:28

And then a second piece of advice that I think has been very important to me, and this comes from Christian Smith, who's a sociologist at Notre Dame. He says, you know, I asked him once he had written, like I don't know, dozens of books or a dozen books, and I was like Chris, how do you do this? And he's like you know, for me writing isn't like a technical challenge, it's an existential sort of challenge. And he said writing productivity isn't just about time management or technical skills, it's this existential problem. And what he means by that is like your biggest motivation comes from feeling that you have something important to say.

Speaker 2: 1:18:15

Right, you can wake up at 4 am and set Pomodoro timers and come up with all sorts of technical strategies, but ultimately, if you don't think that what you have to say is important, you're not going to feel motivated to write about it. You need to feel that the existing conversation that you are trying to join into as a scholar is missing something that you are actually contributing to it. So ask yourself, like what's missing in the way that a topic is being discussed? What misconception do I want to correct? How can my research reframe the conversation and the urgency of contributing to a larger discussion is often the best motivator to write. Without that, all those productivity techniques in the world won't really help.

Speaker 1: 1:18:51

No, it won't, and I also did mention that. The fact during an episode that I had, that no matter how many techniques you can have and hacks productivity tools, you just have to write. You have to write and you say and you say it right that it is an existential challenge and anything that you feel that you have to write, not even for 30 minutes, just write anything. Just write anything. Even even advisors encourages us to write the draft. Write your drafts. It can be it's not perfect, and just simply write. Write anything, because you will be subjected to feedback nonetheless. So did you also have that situation while you were writing Entrepreneurial Scholar.

Speaker 2: 1:19:48

You mean the situation where I struggled to write?

Speaker 1: 1:19:51

Yeah, where you struggled to write, or you just had the challenge of writing straight away a dozen of words that wouldn't make any sense.

Speaker 2: 1:20:01

So one of the things that helps me never feel stuck is like I always have data that I'm working with, so that data are either survey data or analysis of some sort of survey data or analysis of interview data. And so, even in writing the entrepreneurial scholar I went out and I interviewed about 45 people. And so whenever I'm stuck on what I can say, I go to someone's interview transcript. I'm like what is interesting in what they said, and I pull out a quote of theirs and I just start writing about it like free flow, word vomit on a page, basically, and then I try to like maybe I'll pull quotes that somebody said around a particular theme, right, like, oh, this guy talked about motivation to write, and this guy talked about motivation to write. I'm going to plop in all their quotes and I'm going to try to write what connects them and what's different about them.

Speaker 2: 1:21:02

And so I think one of the reasons I'm sort of never at a loss for words is because I always have other people's words that I'm building on, as opposed to like like I could never be a philosopher, because philosophers, for example, just like write about ideas. Uh, and I can't just write about ideas. I need my ideas to be really rooted in data. So, um, if you're somebody who works with data, just like, put the data in there and just start writing what your data are about. What do you see in your data?

Speaker 1: 1:21:28

Right, just what is your new data and just make it into practical terms.

Speaker 2: 1:21:34

Yeah, and I'll say also like what's something that I didn't understand until way at the end of graduate school and that I wish people understood sooner it's okay to have an editor. That is actually not cheating, meaning like at the end of grad school, someone a colleague of mine at Stanford was like oh, I'm like working with a dissertation editor. Do you, do you need his info? And I was like, wait, that's a thing Like somebody can help you with that, and at the time I didn't need help. I'm a pretty good writer.

Speaker 2: 1:22:03

But actually since then I this editor.

Speaker 2: 1:22:07

I have worked with him for over five years and he makes my work shine, because sometimes I'm really good at getting sort of a lot of ideas on a page but they don't necessarily unfold in the best way, and so I will like have all the content there and I will go to him and I'll say like, can you organize this chapter or this paper for me, or can you read through this paper and give me feedback? And like, yes, I pay for that, but for me, that investment of resources is really, um, uh, a really sort of smart use of my uh, research funds, and at a time before I had research funds, I just paid for him out of pocket, like because also it provides a form of accountability, like I know that I'm supposed to send something to him by this date and I'm on the hook for that, and so it keeps my work moving and I think most people don't know about this as like a resource that you can use. It is okay to work with a developmental or copy editor to improve your work.

Speaker 1: 1:23:05

Yeah, and also even that supervisors do not say about that. You have the freedom to do it anyway, and I also ask you in advance that many PhDs who I have talked with, some of them use AI. So what are your takes on it? Obviously, it's a bit risky to say it, but at the same time, it can have some benefits in just small tasks that the PhD find incapable of solving them. Do you think AI can be helpful in those situations?

Speaker 2: 1:23:43

I do. I do use AI. I think AI like sometimes I get kind of stuck in my own head and I wish I had a thought partner. And AI actually is a good thought partner because I'll like put in an idea. I'm like help me sort of see the pros and cons of this idea, you know, or like this kind of statement, and it's really good at sort of getting me to think about things that I hadn't thought of before.

Speaker 2: 1:24:05

And in terms of my, it helps me also with, like my Stata code, for example. Like sometimes I will forget how to, you know, code a piece of data and I'll ask now AI to help me. So it helps me with that. And then also, like sometimes I can tell that my ideas are all there in a paragraph but it's not sort of organized well, or that my transition between paragraphs is not as fluid as it could be, and so I've had AI like say, like help me transition from one paragraph to the next, or like, help me figure out how to tighten this paragraph. So I think, as long as the ideas are yours and you're using AI to help you improve your work as opposed to replace your work, then I think it's kosher.

Speaker 1: 1:24:53

Yeah, and straight to the point, I think AI is really helpful, but no need to abuse from it, because then it becomes unclear, it doesn't become linear of what you actually do if you just rely solely on AI and I think the editors are a great aspect to also help PhDs to improve their writing skills and also in case that our dissertation needs to be polished and readily presentable to the examiner. Dissertation needs to be polished and readily presentable to the examiner. Then the editor is the go-to, instead of just using the AI to do the whole process of proofreading the dissertation and changing up the words that we utilized.

Speaker 2: 1:25:44

Yeah, and I think it could also be a really helpful tool for refining your research question and really thinking through your data and your methods and the limits of them. I mean, I teach a sociology class at Tulane and now I'm having my students, like they do their own empirical research projects where they have to, you know, come up with a research question, design the methods, and I'm like it's okay to use AI to help you figure out how to best ask this question. Should it be an open-ended question Like what, if you reframe it in this way, is the scope of this question reasonable within this amount of time? Like, is a survey or interview method best? And they can ask AI, like you know, tell me about what, what, what it would look like to collect this data through a survey versus interview, and so it allows you to, um, I think, think through things, um, in a sort of faster and more holistic manner than if you were just like stuck inside your head all the time. I mean, it's a thought partner.

Speaker 1: 1:26:37

Yeah, did you have a situation where a student of yours used AI at all? Just the whole thing, the whole work.

Speaker 2: 1:26:47

I haven't really seen a ton of that. I mean, I did have like one student, I remember, email me and it was very clear they were asking to over-enroll on a class and it was very clear that their email was AI generated. And I even wrote back to them and I was like, yes, you can enroll in my class. And, by the way, I noticed, you know, and I said like that I think you're using AI and I just want you to know, like the tone of your email, um, uh, it's sort of clear that you're using AI. And the person wrote back and they're like, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. You're totally right, I'll be more mindful of that.

Speaker 2: 1:27:20

Um, but I have definitely changed a lot of my assignments over this year and last year because, uh, I assigned a lot of writing and I had to make it so that it couldn't be easily AI generated, and so, yeah, the nature of my teaching has changed drastically. But also, ai has helped me organize my PowerPoints and helped me explain concepts to my students. So I think I am embracing AI in the way that I think we, you know, like AI is changing the world and the way that the internet changed our lives in the. You know I would say like in the late 90s, for the average person in the early 2000s.

Speaker 1: 1:27:56

So I'm learning to work with it and figuring out how to use it smartly and ethically, as opposed to like thinking that it's going to go away it's going to go away, yeah, and I do think AI will stay in academic jobs and it will be a resourceful tool to guide us and also aid any circumstances that we have during our workflow, as long as we don't just don't use it. Not use it, but just generated the whole thing without changing a bit in our own language. Otherwise it would be fully AI-generated everything. So now in your conclusion of the book, I've read Landon Schnabel's successful academic story where he had an entrepreneurial background and he was thinking like an entrepreneur when he was studying, and a bit of his story, and I ask you as well any advice that you have for PhDs to successfully run the doctoral milestone and for those who want to start a PhD.

Speaker 2: 1:29:18

Yeah, yeah, landon is a close colleague of mine so it was really fun to write about him in the book and I'll say like my collaboration with him has been one of the um most fruitful things that I've done in academia. And uh, and it's funny, like the way, so he is now a sociology professor at um Cornell and we were both kind of in the sociology of religion world for a time and I was going to conferences regularly and he was like winning all these awards and I'd never met him. And I was like, who is this Landon Chababel guy? He wins all these awards. And like, um, I was really um inspired by it. And then a colleague of mine, a professor at Stanford, when I was there he was like, hey, he's like I saw on Twitter or something like that Landon Schnabel is coming to Stanford for a postdoc. And I was like, oh my gosh, I can finally meet the meet this guy. And so I emailed him right away and I was like, hey, like you don't know me, but, um, I'm a big fan of yours. And like, congrats on all your accomplishments. I heard you're coming to Stanford. Like I'd be happy to give you any advice on housing. I've lived here for a really long time, because the paper at that point really needed like a gender reframing. And I wasn't a gender expert and I was telling him and I was like, oh wait, like you are actually somebody who really understands the gender literature, it's one of his areas of expertise and so I invited him to come on to be an author on this paper and actually this collaboration ended up leading this paper to get published in the top sociology journal, the American Sociological Review, and I think it's. And Landon and I have gone on to collaborate and write together multiple other other papers. We were also sort of in a book uh group together for several years because we were all writing our first books and so we would workshop each other's book chapters at every different meeting.

Speaker 2: 1:31:20

Um, and one of the things about him that I think is like a big lesson is you have to it's best to find people who you have really like complementary skill sets with not exactly the same skill sets. And so Landon and I come from very, very different um sort of uh personal professional backgrounds. We grew up very differently and we have uh different strengths. Um, he doesn't do really any qualitative work. Um, he's like amazing at framing things, um and uh, and we sort of just work in in very um, productive ways.

Speaker 2: 1:31:57

Um, and the thing about him you know, I, I, I one of the stories that sticks out to me about him is like when he was growing up, um, his I think dad had like a um, um, maybe like an auto shop or something, and so Landon and his brother noticed that a lot of people were like buying sodas on a regular basis. So they got their own like soda making machine, if I remember, and started making their own soda. That was one of his early entrepreneurial sort of stints. And actually Landon didn't initially plan to become an academic. He went on to, uh, he wanted to be a minister and once he got into uh, that kind of uh um program, he realized that wasn't where his passion lay and uh, and he ended up switching to getting a doctorate in sociology of religion, um.

Speaker 2: 1:32:48

So I think the takeaway like from not just Landon's story, which I'll let people read about in the book, but from my collaboration with Landon, is, like one of the other things that was really helpful, is when I was writing my first book proposal for my first book, I had no sort of mental schema for what it looked like for a graduate student to go and get a book contract. And Landon already had a book contract and he had like two competing offers from two top presses while still a grad student, and so knowing that it was possible gave me the confidence to like to pursue it myself. I was like, ok, I know somebody who's done this and I have like a mental now map of how to do it, because he shared his proposal and exactly kind of how the story played out and so you know, there's probably a land and Schnabel in your network and I've been really grateful for his collaboration over the years.

Speaker 1: 1:33:40

No, that's, that's an engaging story, and really appreciated that you've shared um schnauble's story and your relationship with him. And uh, this is what the phd universe it looks like is building building relationships, networking with anyone, and that will lead to positive outcomes. And so, as you gave, you gave the example, um, and so, as you gave the example, so this would be your advice, then, for PhDs in order to achieve their doctoral success.

Speaker 2: 1:34:17

I mean, a lot of my advice is in the book, so I encourage people to read the book, but you know, I want people to reclaim their sense of autonomy and worth in the academy. This book is really is kind of falls in the genre of like self-help literature for people who are having a hard time finding their way. And right now in particular, like with everything I mean in the United States, we have like a tremendous amount of certainty right now with our administration and it's people's grants are getting cut. Like it's just a time of profound, profound uncertainty, and so I'm hoping that this book helps people think about how to lean into or sort of at least like navigate that uncertainty and take more sort of ownership of their own career by thinking and by asking themselves like who am I, what do I know and who do I know? And thinking about how to leverage that to create opportunities for themselves.

Speaker 1: 1:35:20

Yeah, and I do agree with that. Tuning in to this amazing late night talk Just follow Ilana's advice and think for yourselves that you are a PhD and you have value, and then you can spread your wings. And I ask you now, if you weren't a scholar, what would you do?

Speaker 2: 1:35:46

We were asking about this initially, but I'd like to hear you I would probably um start my own business of some sort, probably something related to research. I'd probably be running like my own research firm. Uh, right uh, earlier in my career I had like a the dream of um uh, either being a national geographic photographer or working for the World Bank, because I really love I had started my career in international development work and really wanted to pursue that, but for many reasons didn't. So either one of those, one of those things?

Speaker 1: 1:36:23

And now I also ask you do you, do you think that the PhD will be the degree of the future?

Speaker 2: 1:36:32

I don't think so. I think the academy in the United States for sure has really changed. There's very few tenure track positions available, and for somebody to invest that much time into a PhD without knowing with a decent amount of certainty that they will get a job out of it, that's just not the reality we're living in. So I don't think it's going to be an essential degree now.

Speaker 1: 1:36:57

Okay, I do think it will be. As you said, it has some highs and lows and will probably affect drastically. It will affect drastically, it will influence much of the decision-making of whether should I take a PhD or should I take or should I not take, and so maybe in a couple of decades ahead it might be an essential degree for many jobs that we don't know at the moment which ones shall exist, but it will probably be. But that would be something for the decades ahead. So final questions for you, ilana, where the listeners can contact you in your social media to follow your current work and where they can buy, where they can buy, the Entrepreneurial Scholar and when will it be released?

Speaker 2: 1:38:02

it's coming out March 11th. It is being published by Princeton University Press. If you go to their website and type in Princeton University Press and the name of the book, the Entrepreneurial Scholar, you can use my author code, which is IMH20, for a 20% discount. I think the book is $20 US dollars and so you get 20% off of that. Obviously also available on Amazon, but no discount code available for that. People can find me at my website. Obviously also available on Amazon, but no discount code available for that. People can find me at my website, wwwalannahorwitzcom. You can also email me at ihorwitz at tulaneedu. Just note that my last name has only one O H-O-R-W-I-T-Z. And I am on LinkedIn. Um, I occasionally check Twitter and I just attempted to start an Instagram, uh, account, although I think I have like one follower, um, because I am just not a social media person. Um, so, and I, yeah, I look forward to hearing from, from listeners.

Speaker 1: 1:39:10

No, certainly I'll add everything to the show notes. Uh, and then I'll have to, I'll have to edit any. I have to edit the whole session so that I can catch the uh, the discount, the discount codes. And do you have any, any other projects in the future? Will you write a new book?

Speaker 2: 1:39:27

Yeah, I actually have two books that I'm working on. One is due this August and I'm actually right now at a writing retreat where I'm working on it, and it's about why two thirds of Americans don't graduate college and why it is not their fault, and that will be out with University of California Press sometime, of California Press sometime. And then I'm working on a book that's right now titled the man in the Pink Gorilla Suit, which is about the end of the Jewish middle class, and so right now I'm shopping that proposal around to different presses.

Speaker 1: 1:39:59

Okay, and that's a wrap up. Ilana, thank you so much for coming to the PhD Lounge, and I don't need to have the physical copy because I have it here already, so thank you. Thank you to the Princeton University Press that sent me a physical copy of your book from their office in Oxford, and also I thank you as well for sending me the electronic copy, where I relied most of it to read everything and doing all the possible questions to make it more engaging with you. And so thank you, thank you very much, and I look forward to hear something about you on the release on the 11th of March.

Speaker 2: 1:40:42

Amazing. Thank you so much, Luis.

Speaker 1: 1:40:44

Thank you so much, ilona. And that's a wrap-up of the fantastic late-night talk I had with Dr Ilana Horwitz about her amazing book, the Entrepreneurial Scholar. What a talk I and Ilana had about her book and I vividly recommend for those who are navigating in their PhDs, postdocs and academics. Ilana's book will be released on the 11th of march and pencil this date down on your notebooks or save it on your tablets and ipads to grab a copy at your nearest bookstore or online at princeton university press, where you'll get a 20 discount off when buying her book on the day of the release by typing the code I am aged 20. I'll add the code and the link on the show notes.

Speaker 1: 1:41:37

A big thank you to all who tuned in to hearing this fantastic late night talk, which will be launched on the same day of Ilana's book and all of her contacts, as well as her website website if you want to reach her. They are on the show notes as well. To hear this and other previous late night talks and solo sessions, check out my website, phdloungecouk, or on your favorite podcast platforms apple podcasts, spotify or other podcast and where you can also leave your review and a five-star rating and help the podcast grow. Feel free also to follow my socials Instagram at PHDLMF and LinkedIn by clicking on the top right corner of my website. Last but not least, if you're a PhD candidate or graduate and you desire to share your story, you can either DM me or on my socials, or email me at luigephdlaunch at gmailcom. Thank you, bye.