Dr. Larry McGrath, PhD in Humanities Center | Senior Researcher at Amazon Prime Video

In this episode, we discuss what led Larry to pivot from pursuing a career in academia to exploring opportunities in business, how he was able to translate his formal skills as a humanist and social scientist into roles in consulting, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon, and his advice for preparing yourself for the possibility of a career in industry by being intentional about how you pursue your doctoral training.

Hosted by special guest host Rachel Waxman

To connect with Larry and to learn more about his story, visit his page on the PHutures #100AlumniVoices Project website.

Transcript

Rachel Waxman

Hi I'm cohost Doctor Rachel Waxman and this is the 100 Alumni Voices Podcast, stories that inspire, where we explore the personal and professional journeys of a diverse group of 100 doctoral alumni from Johns Hopkins University. Today we're joined by Doctor Larry McGrath, PhD in the humanities and current senior researcher at Amazon. All right, well. Larry, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I really appreciate it.

Larry McGrath

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Waxman

So, I want to go back in time a little bit to the beginning of Graduate School. And can you just tell me about your professional plans when you first entered Graduate School? What did you think you were going to do with your PhD?

Larry McGrath

I thought I was going to get a PhD in intellectual history and revolutionize the field from a position at a premier university such as Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley or something comparable and that I would enjoy the delights of being in the ivory tower, writing many books, hosting seminars, having disciples, incorporate the historical methods that I had developed in order to reexamine the way that history and society interact overtime, that is of course, the nature of intellectual history. And that I would enjoy above all the three reasons why anybody would ever become a professor, namely, June, July and August. That's what I wanted to do when I embarked on my doctorate in the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins in 2008, or, as it's called now, so I've been told, the Department for Comparative Thought and literature, and needless to say, a lot changed along the way. And subsequently, as I now find myself in 2022 as the leader of the research division for Prime Video Sports at Amazon and as different as that role might seem as an academic professor there's in fact a lot of overlap, especially in the humanistic and qualitative social scientific methods that we use both to run a research division and conduct research studies and the skills that we had developed.

Rachel Waxman

I'm really looking forward to to digging into those similarities. Great. So, can you tell me about you know how you went from having your sights set on an academic position at a top institution to finding yourself, you know, working outside of the Academy? Was there some kind of inciting moment that made you start thinking about other opportunities and how how did this unfold for you?

Larry McGrath

I completed my doctorate in 2014 and took on a series of comfortable, competitive postdoctoral fellowships, first at Johns Hopkins and then at Wesleyan University, which allowed me to teach small seminars to clever students who did most of the reading and called me professor. That felt quite nice. I also had the opportunity to enjoy one of the premier labor rights, oftentimes withheld to people, which is the right to shut my door and be left alone. And with that freedom, I could work on my book manuscript, which I ultimately published. It's called Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France. That came out a few years ago with University of Chicago press. And the inciting series of moments which made me come to realize that that life was no longer one that I wanted took place through comparison with my friends who, like me, were also clever humanities and social science undergraduates, but had gone different routes. I was the black sheep to take the path of Graduate School. They went to law school. They went into business. And they were enjoying by this point really nice things in their lives. They're enjoying nice meals and apartments in cities that were not the middle of nowhere in Connecticut, as Wesleyan University was. And they were skiing with their free time and all of those activities require money. And academics aren't paid a lot of that of that. In exchange for the qualitative benefits of academia, namely the autonomy to mold one’s own research agenda, to teach courses that we want, that academic freedom, especially over the summer, what we go forgo are the quantitative benefits that a lot of our colleagues outside of academia enjoy. And what I came to realize is that the picture of a life that I had once painted in high school and then fleshed out in college, a picture of a history professor ceased to compel as much conviction as it once had when I was younger. Things outside of that picture, like my economic security, my financial well-being, the means to raise a family and enjoy my life, the freedom to shut my computer at 6:00 PM and no longer care about my work and disassociate from my job were things that I came to want more so during my post doctorate and so it was around 2017 that I reached out to about 50 people online primarily on LinkedIn, which is I think the best vehicle for a job search, offered to buy those fifty people coffees, pick their brains and learn about where they had applied their humanistic and social science skills in jobs outside of academia. And that was the first step I took on a non-academic career path, which I've been following ever since.

Rachel Waxman

Interesting. So, it sounds like you know you're going along and you have, you know, two sets of values that at a certain point, were coming into conflict. And one value that financial security is is starting to take over, you know, the the value of autonomy. Would you say you know, you mentioned comparison, you're able to see what your friends are doing and the lives that they're having would you say that it was that if you, let's say that you had just been, you only knew people in academia, you didn't see anyone else, and you had sort of, no, nothing else compared it to. Do you think you would have still had this mindset shift? So, do you attribute it to just change, you know, things change in life. You want different things over time? Or to this comparison? Or a little bit of both?

Larry McGrath

Let let let me approach this from 2 angles. The first the first angle, let's take a thought experiment of a university on an island. From the second angle, we'll look at the economic status of universities. If we were to just like, teach on an island where there's no social comparison, and I'm writing books for the elite audience of readers, which would be equivalent to the actual state of academia. We don't write for a mass public, at least for the most part. And all my needs were taken care of, I could, you know, enjoy all the coconut water every day that I want and the family that is, you know, well nurtured and, yead, that would be great. As I mentioned qualitatively, academia is the best job out there that I can think of, if it were isolated from the economy in which we compensate our labor, time, and skill-sets in exchange for financial security. Yes, qualitatively, it's great. Now from the second angle, we gotta move back to reality. And what I realized when coming to see that financial security and a choice over my geographic mobility were more important than the academic autonomy. And let's face it, in academia we only have a negative choice over our geographic mobility in the form of where we choose not to apply for jobs. Very few of us get to pick on a map where we want to live. What I came to realize was not that this was new or that the clash of values in my head had shifted terms, but instead that the economic reality of academia had been hidden from me in the first place. And that's really one of the travesties is that too many departments in the humanities and social sciences don't inform their graduate cohorts about the economic conditions of the academic industry, and so as a result, graduate students aren't able to make informed, which is to say, comparative decisions about their career paths early enough. And that's not simply the decision over whether to become an academic. But more so decisions over how to develop one's methodological toolkit, what sort of projects to pursue as a graduate student so that they might serve dual uses both within academia and beyond, and it's in that sense, I think more so that I came to realize that I had the wool over my eyes and thought that academia was free from economic constraints when it was in fact all the time, perhaps even more dependent on economic conditions than the businesses outside of it.

Rachel Waxman

Kind of moving to the post-academic life after your postdocs, can you tell me about the transition from this academic life that you have this flexible life to working professional and and what your first job was after your postdoc?

Larry McGrath

The first job after my postdoc was as a consultant at a boutique consultancy called Design Science that catered to the medical industry and our clients were primarily neurological medical device makers. As a historian and anthropologist of science as I was, I had the rare advantage of using my content knowledge in my job and in this job, it was as a research consultant who helped medical device makers understand the cultural context in which their devices were used. So, for example, I would do field work at neurology clinics in Germany or in hospitals in Japan and shadow medical teams who would treat patients presenting with strokes or who would conduct spine surgeries. And we wanted to understand where our drugs and devices stored in the hospital? What is the hierarchy of authority in medical teams such that certain roles such as nurses, generalists or specialists might be able to make decisions about how to administer a drug or use a device, collect that information, and bring it back to the neurology company. Most PhD holders transitioning to industry, however, don't have the advantage of using their content knowledge. Instead, they rely on their formal knowledge. That is the methodological skills to collect multivariate forms of data, whether it's through publications, through interviews, through archives to interpret that data with the multiple lenses that are taught to us in our theoretical development to synthesize it into arguments where there is something at stake in order for us then to make recommendations, and that is the role of a a researcher generally, and a consultant specifically. And I continued to pursue that role in house transitioning to Facebook or Meta, where it's now called. I spent a little over 2 years there doing work across privacy, the ethics of artificial intelligence, and communications on platforms such as WhatsApp and I now started a little research team for Prime Video sports at Amazon, where we do much the same, collect multivariate forms of data in order to interpret them critically, situate our products in a social context, and make recommendations about how to deliver sports experiences that delight people.

Rachel Waxman

Interesting, but this is an interesting point you make about the content knowledge versus you called the the formal knowledge because yeah, you know, talking with people, especially in the humanities, you know that content knowledge is often kind of put to the side when they take on a non-academic role. So, were you specifically looking to use your content knowledge? Did it just happen? And have you continued to use it in your current work or was that a one-time thing in that consulting role, were you able to tap into that content knowledge?

Larry McGrath

Yet the relationship between form and content is a dialectic that plays out through one's career, and it is worth reflecting on what value an individual gives to either pole in that dialectic. Coming fresh out of academia, I placed much more emphasis on my content knowledge. I really wanted to continue working in the cultural interfaces of the human sciences. As time persisted, I came to see that my formal knowledge brought me more satisfaction, especially because doing research for businesses is product dependent. We're doing research that is by putting our company generally and our team specifically product in front of people and understanding how they engage with it. And I wanted to do that with a product that makes people happy, that has levity to it. And that's what sports is. And sports was not at all content that was part of my doctoral training. But it is a domain of human scientific research, that is highly informed by the social science methods that we developed. And so, formal knowledge is what I'm trying to promote by doing podcasts such as this one to encourage more people with PhDs in the humanities and social sciences to translate their methodological skill sets beyond their domain expertise into resources that bring value to companies and ultimately, I think there is a wider value available to companies thanks to our formal methodological skill sets.

Rachel Waxman

So, can you talk a bit more about these connections between the doctoral training and your work and how has the doctoral training been valuable in your current role in past roles?

Larry McGrath

Sure, there are three areas where I think that doctoral training is highly applicable to business work. The first is project management. Designing and writing a dissertation takes place over the course of multiple years, usually two to four years. It incorporates stakeholders beyond just one's advisor. It includes the workshops at which one might present chapters, the outside readers who are critical, perhaps for the interdisciplinary dimension of the project. This is a key skill in business, and in fact writing a dissertation is a more complex intensive endeavor than almost anything in business. And so, in that respect the project management skill set is highly applicable to a business setting. The second is the data collection that is taught in graduate training, especially as a historian or an anthropologist who fields where I developed my methodological toolkit it's incumbent upon us not just to collect published data, but also to go into the world and cultivate data that take many forms. Perhaps it's the form of interviews as we're doing right now, or as I spent a lot of my time in archives. Data such as the margin notes written by scientists and philosophers in France, their library records, unpublished manuscripts, and letters. It's also observational data that we glean through field work as an ethnographer was. In my case, that was going to neurology clinics, observing neurologists and nurses to see how the practice of interpreting brain imagery is done, and then how specialists translate their interpretations to lay audiences, namely, the patients whose brain is being operated on. All of these are multivariate forms of data. Let's call them thick data, which are important to complement the big data, by which I mean numbers collected more and more by institutions today, and the larger the compendia of big data that are collected from us, the more it's necessary to set those data in a interpretive context provided to us by the thick data that a humanist or a social scientist would collect, and that was the 2nd skill developed in Graduate School. The 3rd and final is argumentative and presentation skills. Let's call those broadly our synthetic skills. It's incumbent upon us as academics to synthesize our research and advance a crisp narrative that is not only persuasive, that not only compels people’s sensibilities and wants them to read what we do. But it's also pointed, and that is if no position is wrong as a result of your research, then that's to say that your research lacks stakes, and I think one of the best skills inculcated in me during my graduate years was to identify the stakes of our arguments. That is what turns on our research to understand the impact that it has in a field and that is a skill that is absolutely pivotal to the success of anybody in business.

Rachel Waxman

Well, you know, we're getting towards the end of our conversation here. So, I have a signature closing question from the PHutures office for you and that is what inspires you right now?

Larry McGrath

Good art. I just went to an Edward Hopper exhibition at the Whitney and I felt really inspired by, not only the investigation of interiority in these ghost-like figures looking out the window, as you might think of in Nighthawk, but also the way that he really bucked the trend of art in his era when others were going for purely formal considerations in art like, you know, abstraction and expressionism, and he was still invested in figuration. I think that there's so much more to interpreting good art than you could ever find in some, you know, book about 10 steps to getting rich quick. I just finished the White Lotus. I thought that was incredible art. You have an investigation of people’s motivations, their limitations, and that's absolutely critical to understanding markets, what makes people tick and the value that companies products bring to them. So, I think that that's all the more reason why somebody coming from the liberal arts is in a far better position than others whose business knowledge is based simply on some guide book. Reading good literature, philosophy, watching good movies, seeing good theater. I think those provide incredible motivation into our human needs and desires, and that's where I take inspiration, especially as someone who does research in the human sciences for the sake of business.

Rachel Waxman

Thanks for sharing and thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

Larry McGrath

It is an absolute pleasure. I love these opportunities. Take care, Rachel.