Pathfinder Career Narratives is an ongoing series tracking the career choices and experiences of doctoral graduates. You can see all of the posts in the series here. You can find all of the Pathfinder resources and opportunities here. Today’s blog is written by Dr Ryan C. Taylor, Career Strategist at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. You can find Dr Taylor on LinkedIn here.
Name: Ryan Taylor
Doctorate subject area and year of completion: Cognitive Science and Communication, 2013
Role and employer: Career Strategist, UBC Sauder School of Business
Approximate salary bracket for this type of role: 80 – 120,000 CAD
As far back as I can remember, I have been curious to a fault. It’s a strength that gets me in trouble. Every year through elementary school, my mom kept a book where she would interview me about my favourite things and what I wanted to do when I grew up. Year after year it was scientist, and a few times, private detective was thrown in for good measure. What academic doesn’t love a good mystery?
At the same time, at least in my early years, I struggled in school. This was something my parents and I had trouble figuring out. Why was the kid quoting facts and reading like the library was on fire having trouble in school?
The answer was that even for boys, they still weren’t that great at diagnosing and treating ADHD in the 80s and 90s. I limped along barely passing. Even though I could tell my parents were frustrated by the situation, they never, ever gave up on me. They taught me that if I kept working I could do it, through demonstration as much as anything. When I was just entering high school, my mom went back to school to upgrade and completed technical college to become a dental assistant. My dad was a firefighter and continues to be a jack-of-all trades and autodidact. The lesson was clear. If you work hard, you can learn and improve yourself. The real change for me happened when in Grade 9 we addressed the ADHD head on and treated it rather than trying to power through. My school career took off like a lit rocket. My grades spiked, not only because I could actually focus long enough to study, but because I had something to prove.
The year before I started university i read an article about a psycholinguist at the University of Alberta, Gary Libben, in the Edmonton Journal (a local newspaper). I was fascinated: How on earth could you measure and describe something as complex and unwieldy as the human comprehension of language? By my third year I was working in Gary’s lab as a research assistant, running experiments and actually designing my own. I had truly found my kind of people. Folks who were fascinated by the complexity and beauty of the human mind, the human brain, and of course language. I designed scientific studies and published them in a student journal. I travelled to conferences. Following my degree, I travelled to Montreal where I landed a job in a lab and then on to a funded dual master’s degree in Europe, and finally a PhD looking at the cognitive and neural underpinnings of reference. Essentially, what is the brain doing when we are working when someone hears words like he and she? What steps does the mind take to understand who is being referred to?
Following my PhD I worked for a software company in Montreal as a lexicographer. I loved the colleagues, contributed to intellectually challenging projects that drew strongly on my PhD training, but I was starting to feel like something was missing. The highly social environments of undergrad and my Master’s had become largely silent and solitary. And it wasn’t because my colleagues weren’t nice. They were. I was just in roles that were largely for introverts.
I moved to Vancouver for family, and was lucky enough to start working for Bryan Gick, a researcher at the University of British Columbia. Working for Bryan, I was able to participate in a variety of projects, from research to the creation of a new Master’s degree, the Master of Data Science in Computational Linguistics, the first of its kind in Canada.
I came to a realization. It took me a while. In my case, academic success had come because I had learned to sit down and work quietly. But slowly, I had started to find a niche —not in quiet, solitary activities, but engaging in activities a lot of others apparently didn’t like but I did such as attending numerous meetings and talking with multiple stakeholders.
Another suppressed strength slowly surfaced. As the Master’s programme started, I began to act as career coach, and realized I found deep meaning and satisfaction in helping others. I had finally found a role that felt like home.
Entering into UBC’s Certificate of Organizational Coaching I was able to build on these skills. I relished learning to ask just the right question to help students find clarity and to turn that clarity into action. I relished learning to see what is excellent in people and challenging them to see it for themselves.
And so much of my academic training remains relevant. Much of coaching is about helping people to understand what they really mean and what they really want. It’s an intellectual challenge equal to seeing what the data is really saying, or defining a concept accurately, except in the immediate service of another person.
I’m not going to lie, leaving academia was hard. With endless grants and awards to apply for and a never-ending promotional structure, it’s designed to be hard to leave. While I’m lucky that I get to work in a place where I am still constantly learning new things, I honestly can’t think of anything in my academic career that compares with satisfaction of helping a student to make an important realization about themself, or the absolute thrill when a student tells me they’ve landed a job. It really is the best feeling.
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