Longitude Sound Bytes
Ep 123: Communicating Science (Listen)

Rachel Carlton
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Heather Leighton, Web and Social Media Editor, Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Calling herself a “Jackie-of-all-trades,” Heather Leighton has this advice for aspiring journalists: be nice, and try everything.

Houston-native Heather Leighton is the web and social media editor at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank housed at Rice University. In her role, she maintains the institute’s websites, implements its social media strategy, and produces and posts content to social media platforms. Leighton graduated with a bachelor of arts in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and previously worked as a social media manager for the Houston Chronicle.

During our slightly spotty video call, Leighton walked me through her journey from being a good writer to a versatile journalist, one through which she leveraged her desire to enhance her marketability and value to her employers. In high school, Leighton decided to pursue a degree in journalism based on her foundation as a strong writer. After navigating the college admissions process to find a journalism program that was right for her, she enrolled in UT’s journalism school. There, her professors stressed the importance of not focusing on just one aspect or type of journalism. While some of her peers came in as aspiring magazine editors or photojournalists, Leighton stuck to that advice and aimed for proficiency in all facets of journalism. 

Her breadth of knowledge proved to be key in future professional endeavors. To college students interested in journalism, Leighton suggested bolstering a conventional curriculum with classes in communications, marketing, photography, and other creatively-oriented topics that she has found helpful in her jobs. As someone who has never been able to zone in on a particular field of study, her advice allowed me to shed the self-doubt that I’ve held since the days I dropped my engineering coursework for lectures on languages spoken by fewer than fifty people. For Leighton, who was a yearbook photographer at UT and has always had an eye for design, her versatility is a major selling point, particularly in her line of work. For her career, she cites the ability to create visually-appealing content as second only to writing in importance. As the web and social media editor at the Kinder Institute, Leighton is tasked with the difficult job of translating text-heavy promotional flyers to posts on Instagram; her graphic design and video-editing skills have set her up for social media success.

Writing talent and self-learning skills are necessary but not sufficient in a field as cutthroat as journalism—according to Leighton, the connections she made at UT continue to lead her throughout her career. “One thing I would say to you is connect. Be nice to everyone… because you literally have no clue when you’ll see them again or what position they’ll be in,” Leighton said, adding that being nice is, in and of itself, a generally good life practice. 

Leighton has utilized her network to aid her job search throughout her career. One lunch with an editor from the Houston Chronicle who she knew through a friend garnered her an endorsement that gave her a leg up in the interview process. After landing that job as a social media manager at the Chronicle—a role in which she spearheaded the Chronicle’s presence on Snapchat as the platform was just starting to gain traction—Leighton found her way to the Kinder Institute with the help of another professional connection. Reflecting back to the day I hesitantly created a LinkedIn profile, I am glad that my skepticism of the site has faded, as I now eagerly connect with Leighton and other journalists without batting an eye. 

Towards the end of our call, we got into the day-to-day of her job, at which point I asked her to talk about the intersection between social media and journalism. With the advent of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, traditional news media outlets and their respective journalists have even more pressure to quickly report the news and pull in their audiences in a way that has previously prompted my discomfort with social media. Leighton said that at the Chronicle, that intersection sometimes meant investing only in platforms that provided revenue. Acknowledging the messy side of social media, Leighton emphasized its ability to connect to a broader audience.

“There are some really ugly things about social media but there’s also some really great things,” Leighton said. “One of which [is] how it has the opportunity to connect so many different people from all over the world. I really appreciate that, and I think with a social media team… there’s a potential of just being able to reach so many people in… a positive way.”

And that, she told me, is what excites her and connects to her goal of focusing on places where she could do some good in the world. As an aspiring journalist myself, there’s nothing I’d want more than that. 

Highlights from the interview:

What was your college experience?

I went to the University of Texas. I’m pretty indecisive about choosing where to go, but I felt that this is where I needed to go and I did and it worked out amazingly. I loved my time there. I connected with so many people and those connections still continue to lead me throughout my career. And that’s one thing that I would say to you, is connect. Be nice to everyone who, because you literally have no clue when you’ll see them again or what position they’ll be in again. And then, also just being nice is a good thing to do. Just in general, you know? So, that’s always the aim for me, is just simply to try and help people as much as possible and hopefully my helping is returned, you know, like a good karma kind of thing. So, that’s my number one advice, especially in journalism, because your professors and future colleagues have connections. And picking brains like this is also very helpful. I will always stand by the fact that, which is clear from our time so far speaking together. And if you just ask questions, then they’ll typically just spill the beans and tell you everything. So keep asking questions for everyone. And be nice.

Did you focus on anything in particular in your journalism program?

I focused on, as terrible as it sounds, everything. When I was in school, they told me you can no longer be a journalist who only focuses on photography. Essentially in journalism school, we call it J-school, they told us that you cannot focus on just one aspect of journalism. You have to try and be proficient, you don’t have to master, but just be proficient, in a lot of different things. They told us to know how to take a photo for situations where you need photojournalism skills. They told us to know how to take and edit videos, edit photos, and know how to format and do a design sheet for a magazine, a newspaper, or marketing. So that you can, as I do in my Houston Chronicle bio, identify as a Jackie-of-all-trades. Diversifying your expertise is really, really helpful. Because you can then apply it across multiple different situations. 

The reflection that I’m going to write after this interview is supposed to help people who are in college and still trying to figure out different career options. Do you have any advice for current college students? 

I would say in terms of current college students, I would probably try a lot of different things and take your time. Try random linguistics classes. Try photography classes and video editing classes. Try a random art class, where you’re sculpting. This is the time of your life that you have all of these essentially random things at your fingertips and the world gives you permission to do it. And to try it. And take your time through it. Because I graduated high school with credits, I pretty much came into college as a sophomore. And I took the minimum for full-time, 12 credit hours, every single semester and I could have graduated early. I chose to graduate in May 2015 so that I was with everyone else, but I was taking one class the last semester and it was online. So, I was already applying for jobs before I graduated, and started working for the Chronicle before my graduation ceremony. I had to ask my boss for the day off to attend.  

I would also say to broaden your skillset. I wouldn’t say that I am a master editor or a videographer or anything like that, but just having the skill to put something together can be really helpful. Also, Google and Youtube are your friends. You can learn so much from the internet and the resources that we have right in front of us. And there’s no problem with that. And to me, Googling how to slow a video down because your boss is talking way too fast demonstrates that you ask questions and use the resources at hand to produce something. So that’s another thing, and I think that I’m not the only one that Googles how to do things in their professional career. Hopefully, I’m not. 

How do social media and journalism interact, and in what direction do you think journalism is going with new technology?

Yeah, so one challenge of journalism is that you obviously want to reach your audience in any kind of way that you can. And social media’s a really great tool to do that with. First, you have people already on social media who are sharing information and sharing content. Why couldn’t the Kinder Institute, and before that, the Houston Chronicle, produce these great stories as well? You already have that built-in audience and social media is just another resource for you to use to reach that audience. So why not use it? The tricky thing is that typically, there is the weird intersection of social media and journalism with regards to revenue. A lot of the times at the Houston Chronicle, we would only invest in platforms that provided revenue. I got there way back to when Snapchat first started, and I was like, “My goal is to get the Houston Chronicle on the Snapchat explore or discover pages so that we can share stories that way.” I mean the Washington Post was on there, why couldn’t the Houston Chronicle be on there as well? Houston is bigger than Washington D.C., we don’t have as big of an audience but our population in Houston is bigger and more important. So I was like, “Let’s do it,” and it was difficult because it didn’t provide any revenue. You couldn’t link back to Snapchat like you can a website, which frustrated my bosses in terms of revenue. It was more of a play for branding than for revenue, so that was one of the tricky things about emerging social media platforms. I’m sure the Chronicle is facing the same hiccups with Tik Tok right now, and asking questions like “Do we need to get on Tik Tok, how do you tell stories on Tik Tok? Would that be something worth investing our time in?” I don’t know what the Chronicle is doing, but we started the Kinder Institute’s Instagram page in January. We’re not super hot on all of the social media trends here, but that’s also partially because it’s difficult to take social issues and really text-heavy reports and put them on an image and video focused platform. You have to create graphics.

Who do you like to bounce ideas off of? 

Sometimes I like reaching out to the researchers because they have a very different type of brain, they’re very left-brain focused. And they might have different ideas or different perspectives of what I think might be brilliant, or of what works better for people of different educational backgrounds. And also there’s another team, they’re called the development team, and they do a lot of the fundraising for the institute. And sometimes I bounce ideas off of them from a sponsor’s perspective. So I ask questions like, “If a sponsor was to see this on social media, would this be a problem, or what would they think about it?” So it’s obviously helpful to communicate within your team and with the broader organization.

Do you have some sort of path that you’re following for the next five to ten years, or are you just seeing what happens?

One thing that I have learned is that you really can’t plan it. And you know during interviews sometimes they ask that and of course, there’s the scripted response for what you aim to do. My scripted response is to be a director of communications or a manager of a broader social media group or organization for some company or something along those lines. It’s typically more fleshed out and rehearsed than this, and it sounds a lot better. But, one thing that I have learned is that you can’t over plan things, and sometimes when you look back at what you thought would happen you kind of chuckle to yourself because what’s currently happening is sometimes even better or way different than what you even thought. And either way it goes, it’s OK. We’re all just doing the best that we can. 

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Yi Luo
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Vinita Israni, User Experience Manager, Qantas Airways, Sydney, Australia (33.8° S, 151.2° E)

Vinita Israni earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and studio art at Rice University in 2013. After graduating from Rice, Vinita attended Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to pursue a master’s degree in communication planning and information design and follow her passion of user experience design (UX design). She explored UX design in various industries after CMU, first joining GE as a UX designer, then Ford Innovation Labs as a senior interaction designer on autonomous vehicles and public transit, and then Amazon as a voice UX designer. She started her current position as a UX manager at Qantas Airways in 2019. 

In each of her professional experiences in distinct industries, Vinita found that UX design serves a very essential role, no matter what industry the designer is in. UX design is not just about “user interface and…creating buttons,” Vinita says. It’s more about the way people think about using a product or service or try to complete a task. Although there is always a “user” in UX design, it’s not always a consumer from the general public. Vinita’s example of a project improving the workflow of pilots before takeoff proves that designers are helpful in every context. The design process can occur in many different forms beyond graphic design; during her time at Amazon, her role was oriented more toward auditory design rather than visual design. UX designers can choose to be a generalist or specialist depending on their strengths and the industry. Vinita refers to the theory of the five love languages, saying that UX is “a matter of understanding what…your language” is, and she describes the UX designer as the glue of the team. They work closely with experts with various backgrounds and speak to business, engineering, and product strategy.

Since UX design was not available to study at Rice, Vinita found her way through various activities. She practiced publication design at a student-run, research publication called Catalyst as its design director, compared the visual art education within Houston to the visual art education within Istanbul as part of Global Urban Lab, and developed graphic design skills as an active freelancer in Houston. Vinita conducted several independent studies with professors in and the use around technology, just out of curiosity, and she found that all of these experiences contributed to her later career in UX design quite well. Her advice to students interested in UX design is to experiment and try a lot of different things, to hunt for the opportunities, and to engage in the community.

Vinita highlights the unchanging necessity of the role of the designer in this everchanging society. Design, especially user experience design, is a very human-centered process. Although the title of UX designer has only been around for several years, this design process has existed for much longer and will continue to exist in the future. New technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality may reshape the challenges designers face, but the actual work will remain the same. Some people argue that automation will eventually replace designers, yet the need for human touch will always exist, and that is what designers provide. The advancements of digital and physical tools are now empowering current designers, and it’s very important to understand what new tools are emerging, what the current trends are, and how designers place themselves in today’s society. As an architecture student interested in UX design, I am very inspired by Vinita’s strong motivation and her story about finding her passion. Her story sheds light on the broad possibilities of a career in UX design.

Highlights from the interview:

When did you first envision yourself as a UX designer?

To give a little bit of background, I graduated Rice in 2013 with a bachelor’s in studio art and psychology. When I first entered Rice, I actually wanted to do pre-med, so I came in as a biochemistry major, changed majors to cognitive sciences, settled on psychology, and then added studio art. I had actually finished all of the pre-med requirements when I decided I didn’t want to do it. I had grown up drawing and being pretty creative but never had really taken a real art class until I got to Rice. I was also really fortunate—my freshman year there was a graphic design course offered, that was the last year that it was being offered ever on campus, and I somehow got into that class and that started my curiosity and just fascination with more digital means of art. At Rice, the studio art major is pretty traditional fine arts. By my junior year I also wanted to just get better at more digital stuff, and so I started freelancing for graphic design, and I did a lot of publication design. I worked for the art department, and I also worked for the recreation center, but then I also found a lot of people within Houston to work for, so I built on a whole community there, which is really cool.

When l left Rice, I was looking at going to grad school—for me it was either medical illustration, because I had obviously finished all of this medical-like coursework and then marrying that with art or doing something that was more traditionally graphic design. I got into Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design program. I did my master’s there, and I graduated in 2015. That was where my eyes were really opened to what design could be. I use the term design because it is very general, and it depends on what flavor of design that you’re looking for…there’s things like graphic design, which now I call visual design, which is things that may be more paper based but can wander into packaging design…Then there’s obviously design of buildings and public spaces, which is more along the lines of architecture. And then there’s this whole new side of things which is software related, which is where user experience and user interfaces come in…again, just a different flavor of design. 

My eyes opened to user experience and the general meaning of design and what that really meant when I went to grad school. The way that the Carnegie Mellon curriculum was set up was that, for grad school, it was much more thinking oriented, so it was more about philosophy and understanding how design can fit into society, versus—for their specific undergrad curriculum—it was much more making oriented and creating things and putting it out there. It was interesting coming from a studio art background that was very much maker heavy.

Do you think there’s any misconceptions about UX design?

Yeah, there’s a lot. It’s interesting…I think everyone thinks UX is just software…just design to make things look pretty, to make things look pretty on an app, and to make it more—I’m using air quotes—”user friendly” and easier on the eyes, but it’s so much more than that. That is one way of one implementation of user experience, but it’s not just user interface and just creating buttons—it’s actually about the way people think about using or trying to carry out a task that they have, potentially, whether that means getting into a vehicle that they can’t drive and getting from point A to point B or…I worked on a project at GE where we were talking to nuclear engineers that power nuclear power plants, and how their workflow was, how they would be checking all these things and what colors meant to them and things like that. It’s understanding what the user needs are at a deeper level, not just the artifacts that you need to create for it. One of the misconceptions is definitely that it’s just to be pretty and all that stuff.

I think there’s definitely another misconception within tech, I think, that the UX designers are the creative people. I don’t necessarily think that. I think engineers are also very creative, everyone can be creative. I think it’s a matter of understanding what is your language. There’s this concept called love languages that is prevalent in psychology…there’s five love languages—for example, physical touch, acts of devotion, quality time, things like that—so there’s five of those. For you, understanding love may mean acts of devotion and for me it might be quality time. Because I know that it’s acts of devotion for you, I will do that to make you feel loved, and vice versa, even though that may not be the way that you understand love. And so I bring up this concept because I think that it’s actually applied to creativity very strongly. Everyone is creative, but it’s the language that they speak that they understand may be different. UX designers end up speaking a lot of different languages, and that’s why they end up being the glue. They can speak to the business side of things because they can understand their perspective—“Okay, this is how this could be marketed, this is how this would be actually be adopted.” They can speak to the engineering side of things because they have some amount technical knowledge to understand, “Hey, this is how this would be implemented, this would take this much time, so maybe we should do it some other way.” They also speak to the product and strategy side of things…“Okay, how will this evolve over time?” In my perspective, it’s a role that speaks a lot of different languages to a lot of people, but I think everyone understands it in their own language, so it sometimes gets pigeonholed into different things.

I think there’s also this misconception that the designers work on consumer products—like they work on Facebook, and they work on Microsoft Suite, or Google and things like that—whereas, actually, designers are pretty useful and can be helpful in every context, right? So I work in aviation…and I don’t work on anything that is actually public facing. I don’t work on the website, I don’t work on the apps, I work on something that’s internal but also very critical to pilots being able to take the planes off the ground and fly them.

For the non-digital UX designer, is it more about the entire design, the experience’s flow, or…?

Yeah, it depends on the context again, what kind of domain that you’re actually working in, but it’s about understanding what that flow is, but what are the touch points, too. Who are the people involved, how are they working together, what are those touch points, what are the things that you could actually help make better, where are things getting stuck, or where are things getting slowed down, and how can we make that a more seamless transition?

There was a project, really long time ago, where it was also around pilot workflow and how do we get the pilots to go faster, in terms of being able to turn around the plane quickly—you land and then the next flight is in maybe an hour, so how do you get them all the things they need to prep and get the plane, get everyone boarded, and off the ground again? And the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind is like, “Oh, iPad, right?” There’s this additional tool; they can just have a checklist, and you go, “Bam, bam, bam!” An iPad is actually really irritating to navigate when you’re in a really high pressure environment, because everything lives in a different app. Depending on what the fuel load is, what’s going on the plane, what’s in the cargo, you’re checking up to 10-15 different apps, and it’s not really all tied together, and it’s different for each flight. The research shows that it was actually easier to have a physical list. Pilots actually use a lot of paper, even within the cockpit, and it was easier for them to take a pen to paper and write all the thing out that they needed to do than it was to actually go through the iPad…when that’s the case, then how can we help whatever’s on the paper? Instead of just giving them a blank piece of paper, can we have some kind of template for them to start with to make it easier so they’re not rewriting and redrawing things? They can just start with this and then run with it. So, again, you’re not replacing anything…

It’s taking a step back, understanding how it’s done, and then how can we make it better from their perspective, not how you personally think it should be…Whenever someone says, “Let’s make it digital,” I always give that example—paper, because it’s literally faster. The efficiency improved significantly by allowing them to continue using  paper that was just templated to their mental model so they could go faster.

How do you think science and technology development are currently reshaping the work you do? What changes do you foresee in your specific UX design area?

There’s lots. Another thing to think about is that user experience as a field, or as an industry, has only come to light in the last, I would say, maybe 7 years. User experience has been done forever; it’s been around for years. It has never been called that, but it has been around forever…

There’s a lot of things in terms of tech on the emerging horizon, so obviously AI, voice design, definitely virtual assistants…VR, AR, all along that side, that whole realm of things, is also emerging. There’s a lot more automation that is coming to light…there’s some people that believe that designers will no longer exist because of automation, but I don’t think that’s true. I think there will always be a need for a human touch to things and that’s what designers provide, so it’s not going away anytime soon; it’s just that the title will change and the things we work on will change…

I think for designers, tools can still constantly change all the time…New tools come up all the time to make it easier to be able to create things, which I think is great, so you’re always on your tippy toes learning new things…I think the tools are changing. I think, for the most part, they are empowering. I think as a designer, you also have to figure out what are maybe two or three things in your toolkit that you just know really well, and can whip out whenever you need to, versus—learning all the different tools.  There has to be a balance—otherwise I think you could spend all of your free time just learning all of the different tools.

What advice would you give to a student that’s interested in UX design?

There’s a lot…in my time at Rice, I just tried so many different things. I was part of the Urban Policy Lab, where…[Ipek] led a group of students to Istanbul, and we were comparing public policies and researching different things, depending on our interests. I compared the visual art education within Houston to the visual art education within Istanbul. I worked for a student-run research publication called Catalyst, where I was the design director, and so I was able to fine tune my pixel-pushing skills a bit. I freelanced a lot, quite a lot, in Houston, which is awesome…Even though UX wasn’t offered in a formal way [at Rice], I learned how to find the experiences I wanted to have and pursue those, which I think is really important. That’s one piece of advice I would give—there might not be all these formal things, but just go and experiment and, at the end of the day, you’ll be surprised that it all actually comes together. It may not make all the sense when you’re at school, but I can definitely say that after the fact, I’m like, “Oh, I studied this in psychology, and then this is how you know this relates to this in design!” And things like that, so I thought that it was really incredible.

It was funny, when I went to Carnegie Mellon, and I was like, “Oh yeah, I majored in psychology and art,” and then they’re like, “Oh, that is the perfect combination for design!” But I didn’t know that at that time, so I highly encourage you to take classes in just a variety of majors. I mean psychology and art are obviously really good towards design, but just wander and see. I took an amazing creative writing course my senior year, and I regret that I took it senior year, because it was so amazing. I would’ve loved to be writing all four years and actually doing that creative writing. When I started at Amazon, and I was working on voice design stuff, it involved a lot of writing, obviously, because there’s no visuals. And I was actually thinking back to that creative writing class that I took at Rice…it’s funny how it all comes together.

So my advice would be to experiment, try a lot of different things, create opportunities if you feel like there aren’topportunities. I did a couple of independent studies with professors that I found, where I was just really curious. It’s funny in retrospect because I did an independent study around how iPads were used in hospitals and medical situations— which is totally relevant to you as a UXer—but at the time, I was like, “I just have this question, and I want to answer it.” And the professor was super supportive and helped guide me through the semester. So if you don’t find the opportunity, go hunt for it. I did that—I mean, independent studies are great, but also when I was freelancing, that was a lot of me just trying to find different things and experiment.

Get involved in the community as well. Houston has a growing design community, so the more you engage with them and understand and get connected and see different perspectives and different things, I think it helps shape your vision, too. And, also…for the longest time, I was really afraid of calling myself a graphic designer…but just own it. I had a really good friend who just really pushed me and was like, “Nope, you’re a graphic designer now!” It, oddly enough, helped me develop the confidence to just own it and then start really finding opportunities that were in line with what I was looking for. A little bit of fake it until you make it, as well.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Callum Parks
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Mitchell Massey, Senior Interactive Producer and Creative Strategist, 900lbs of Creative, Dallas (32.7° N, 96.7° W)

Mitchell Massey is the senior interactive producer and creative strategist at 900lbs of Creative, a Dallas-based experiential marketing and design studio founded in 2009. After earning his bachelor’s degree in cognitive science from Rice University, Mitchell worked in user experience before earning a master’s degree in video game development from Southern Methodist University. As creative strategist at 900lbs of Creative, Mitchell works to understand the needs of different clients to provide personalized solutions. As senior interactive producer, he leads teams in project execution. Mitchell has worked with various companies, including Amazon Web Services, Boy Scouts of America, DXC Technology, Gatorade, NCR, Red Bull, Resideo, Royal Caribbean International, and Visit Seattle.

For the first part of the interview, Mitchell and I talked over the phone. I was presented with a wide array of new ideas and got a peek into an industry I knew nothing about. I live in the Dallas area, so Mitchell was kind enough to set aside some time to give me a tour of the design studio so I could better understand what his job entails. To quote Mitchell, “900lbs is a future-focused interactive design agency with a mission to serve and empower their clients and industry trailblazers.” 900lbs of Creative creates user experiences, and Mitchell let me experience some of these, such as a virtual reality project developed for an airline company’s Christmas party. It was exciting to see so many new technologies under one roof, all being integrated to communicate clients’ messages. Mitchell said the ability to use and integrate so many technologies makes 900lbs of Creative unique, because “it’s not just about the technology, it’s about the story and the messaging.” 

Just as 900lbs of Creative’s services are unique, Mitchell’s path from cognitive science to design is also unique. With a passion for math and technology, Mitchell had an original goal of engineering. While researching companies, though, Mitchell discovered the field of user experience design and loved the blend of psychology and computer science. Our discussion about user experience made me realize what I’ve taken for granted. I always expect there to be a drop-down menu, a search bar on a web page, and readable font. Maybe the effectiveness of user-centered design is why I’ve never thought about something I interact with daily. 

Talking to Mitchell made me appreciate the importance of visual communication. Virtual reality, interactive maps, and animated menus made me think about how communication is enhanced with technology we now have for the first time. Mitchell explained the history of the studio, how it began as a video development company but changed as technology changed. With the pace of technological advancement increasing, I can only wonder how time will change the ways we communicate our ideas.

Highlights from the interview:

What is your current position?

I’m a producer and strategist, and that means that I lead teams of interactive developers and artists to execute projects, and I also help understand the needs of different clients and different industries to create interactive visions before a concept is locked in for development.

When did you envision yourself in your current position?

Well, I knew when I was applying for the master’s program for gaming during my senior year at Rice. So I knew before I graduated from Rice that I wanted to be a game producer or at least a project manager for interactive teams in emerging technologies at that point. But it wasn’t until I got to 900lbs that I knew all the different branches of where my career could go. Right now, I’m onto a path of more into the strategist realm and managing teams of producers. 

Was there someone who acted as your mentor? At Rice or in graduate school?

I had several different mentors at Rice and at grad school. I remember at Rice there was a leadership lab [Leadership Rice] that would do career counseling and profiling. I got to do some great personality assessments and strength finders [with David Peterson, previous Associate Director]. I learned about my strengths through them rather than just ideas about jobs. That was the first step of my journey as a freshman, just identifying my strengths. That was a really big step. Then I majored in cognitive sciences with a focus in human factors and human-computer interaction, and I had some great professors [Phil Kortum, Mike Byrne] in that field. In my job, user experience is really important, so really understanding that empathy for users—how do you make sure the design and experience is meeting everyone’s needs—that was important as well. Then in grad school I had video game production professors. Even here, at my job, I have great mentors [in agency strategy and creative direction]. Right now I’m focusing on learning a lot of the business side of the company, not just the production side, so I’m working with the account management team to look at the business side of projects.

I’m also a cognitive science major. It’s good to meet another, someone who has a career in it.

I originally applied to Rice because I knew I wanted to go to an engineering school. While in high school I originally thought I would be pre-med, and I realized I didn’t want to do that, and I also realized I loved technology. I was shopping for a laptop before I went to Rice, and I was just obsessed with that research and learning about products. I was looking at CES, videos, and all that stuff. I was just really excited about consumer electronics, and I was good at math, so I was like, okay, I’ll do this engineering thing. But then I started researching companies. Google and Facebook were getting pretty big into user experience design at that point. I didn’t even know you could blend psychology and computer science in that way, so when I was looking at schools, I saw that Rice had a human-computer interaction program. That appeared to be the best undergrad track for me. I did one semester of computer science, and then the programming side got a little bit complicated, so I wanted to focus more holistically on experiences.

That’s really cool. What skills do you find yourself utilizing the most in your position?

There’s a lot of analytical thinking. So not just math but, for example, organizing a six-month schedule. Managing of all the different groups. Formulating estimates. There’s a lot of project management skill sets—Gantt charts, estimating worksheets, different software sets. That’s part of it. Another part of it is just communication, understanding different needs of different people. I talk to programmers differently than the way I talk to artists, and that’s all different from the way that I talk to clients. Psychology and communication skills are huge. And then there’s technical skills, too. Understanding how our software engines work, understanding how things are made, and being able to identify issues and anticipate the errors that we might…the risks that we might face and knowing how to mitigate against those.

What kind of projects do you work on?

So, me personally, I work mostly on different interactive experiences using different emerging technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, interactive touch displays, and even just traditional PC and mobile app[s]. I’ve also worked on traditional video, 360 film, all kinds of interactive media. For example, right now, I have a project working on a customer experience center for an IT company. We’re doing some touchscreen experiences for them as a marketing tool for the customers that go into their center. I’m also working on a safety command tool for a major cruise line that wants to visualize their ship and all the safety systems in it so that they can monitor scenarios. I’m also working on other major visualization tools. I’ve worked on some small virtual reality games as well. We worked with a tourism group in Seattle to visualize a new convention center that was being built there, so I worked on an augmented reality tool for that. So just within the last six months to a year, I’ve worked on ten different projects, and they’re always a little bit different.

How much of what you do is the management aspect, and how much is the hands-on development aspect?

I would say probably sixty percent, more like seventy percent, is more overseeing teams hitting deadlines and lining things up for success. I wouldn’t really call it a management…I’m not micromanaging people but just creating a vision for how the project can be delivered on time and helping lead the production. And then I would say another thirty percent is actually looking over the shoulder of an artist and critiquing a design for a certain functionality that it has to have. It really depends on the project and the needs of the project. Some projects are more sixty percent engaged with developers and artists and only forty percent on the management side. So it changes, but I’m not an account manager. Those people are like ninety percent or ninety-five percent client-facing and management or business-oriented. And I’m here to make sure that the art and programming teams reach success on their milestones and deliver the project on time, so I’m very involved with them.

What’s the favorite project that you’ve worked on so far?

That’s a great question. Can I give you three favorites instead?

One was my first project. It was a nature education game for a nature museum here in Arlington called River Legacy, and we created twelve animal-themed minigames for the Microsoft Connect. And just watching huge groups of kids play and learn is really fun. My other favorites would be our cruise line and safety project, and we actually did a leadership training experience for Boy Scouts at a new leadership lab in Minnesota, which was a full cinematic theater experience. We had a touch table where eight kids could play different minigames together and then four projectors covering all the walls to make it feel like a panoramic theater experience with different cinematic and stories.

That’s really cool. It seems like the projects you work on just combine so many things. 

We call ourselves a special forces unit because we can do so many things, and we’re all about different clients in industries. We try to meet them where they’re at. We don’t call ourselves a VR house or an AR house because it’s not just about the technology, it’s about the story and the messaging, so we’re kind of a futuristic marketing agency that focuses on technology but, you know, we used to only do small one-off projects that would maybe be three months, and then they’re done, but now we’re doing multi-year, multi-phased enterprise apps and tools.

What do you feel about the impact of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), and how do you see it going—where do you see it going from here?

That’s something we’re constantly talking about. Virtual reality is proving to be more successful in industry than enterprise settings such as training. There’s a pretty big consumer base, but we’re seeing that location-based entertainment, things like the VOID or a virtual reality arcade are more likely to appeal to a wider group of adopters than just owning an expensive rig at your home. Whereas augmented reality can be powered by a mobile phone, so everyone can eventually have access to that kind of experience. So I think augmented reality is going to be bigger in the consumer market; that’s where a lot of the research is showing it trends recently.

And where do you see the development of mixed reality going?

You know, it’s funny, I think eventually the industry is going to head towards combining VR and AR into one form factor. We’re already seeing the newest HTC Vives [Virtual Reality Headsets] have augmented reality cameras; we’re also seeing AR-powered devices try to embrace VR more. So mixed reality isn’t just blending your real world with virtual things; it’s also going to culminate in one device that accomplishes everything, I believe. Everybody has this vision of the augmented reality glasses, you know, but that could actually be a form factor that could allow both VR and AR. So the best answer I can give you—I think mixed reality will simplify devices. I think it will use multiple senses. I think it will be used in a lot of different ways for different people, and I think it’s coming faster than we think, but there’s a lot of technology hurdles and development hurdles to get through before it’s everyday for millions of people.

I got to try out a mixed reality headset called the Magic Leap. That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I totally see so much potential in that.

It’s really cool to see companies like Magic Leap take a ton of energy and investment and ideas and really work on a next gen device. I think that’s huge; they’re embracing developers, they’re embracing creators. You know, from our experience, too, there’s still always going to be the challenge of fidelity and basically that viewing area. How do you make the viewing area on one of those devices as large as possible? So, you know, we’re still a little bit worried about the field of view on that device, but they’ve shown some really cool demos.

What do you think makes your company stand out as a great place?

I think what makes us stand out is that we have certain specific values [passion, empathy, quality, curiosity, adaptability] that really get us trust and results for our clients. We’ve also identified a high growth section in the market [creative visuals for enterprise communication]. We’ve seen other video game studios, or even virtual reality studios, fizzle or have a hard time retaining team members because of the way that they approach business, certain investments that they make, or even just, you know, the marketplace. But I think what we’re doing by serving enterprises’ needs and telling different stories with different tools is a unique combination of things that will continue to evolve and that we’ll be able to scale with it. It’s funny, I actually have a whole “who we are” deck here, so I can talk about who our clients are, what makes us different, all that stuff, but, you know, I think we’re trying to just be very responsive to innovation rather than getting pigeonholed in one area. 

How do you feel like the development of technologies in these recent years, with how fast it’s been, how do you think it’s reshaped the way the company functions and the work you do?

900lbs is ten years old. We originally started as a video development company with two people, and we’ve scaled up to about twenty-five people, and we’ve used game technology for the last four years. So already, even just in the last four years that we’ve even been working with game technology, we’ve seen a lot of changes with game technology. We’ve seen everybody being interested in virtual reality for their marketing, kind of feeling almost less exciting now, because everybody has it at their marketing experiences. So we’re seeing industries really ask powerful questions about what’s going to be useful long-term. Just as an example, I was on a project where we had scoped out a full room to be using Microsoft Kinect and then Microsoft kills support for the Kinect. So even that fast, technology can shut down or stop being in use. So it’s changed a lot since I’ve been here, but we are seeing some clear trends and directions we can continue to work off of. 

What are some of those big changes that you see happening in the next five years?

The next five years? The things that get us excited are 5G technologies. 5G is going to help with location-based experiences because GPS will be powerful enough to track people indoor[s] at a very high fidelity. We’re also seeing improvements in projection technology. It used to be very expensive to have high lumen small form factor projects, but we’re actually seeing really cool transparent LEDs. There’s technology like the Lightform, which is using depth sensing to do custom projection on different surfaces at different layers. There’s some really cool visual display technology coming out at enterprises. We’ve seen even just the ubiquity of AR enabled devices: the iPhone bringing AR to so many people, that’s only going to continue to grow.

I want to give you some other answers, too, like I think people are starting to focus a lot on multiple senses. VR’s finally allowing things like haptics. 

Bose, for example, is finally coming out with an augmented reality SDK for audio-only experiences.

So, you can still be on the go, hands-free, and receive information about the world around you. There are things like that that we’re excited about. Blending artificial intelligence, Internet of things, that have been buzzwords for a while are finally combining in the ways that we want that are accessible to developers.

How do you feel, in your industry, you support your own professional growth?

That’s an awesome question. There’s a lot of ways. One way is…I’m insanely curious. So I’m constantly learning, I’m constantly doing my own research and finding inspiration, whether it’s reading technology news, whether it’s looking through design blogs and portfolios, you know, finding inspiration in peers in the industry, that’s one way. Another way that I sustain my own career growth is by actively seeking mentorship. I’m trying to learn more [of] the business side of the industry, so I’ve been working with some of our directors here to understand how we stay profitable on projects, how we meet our clients needs, all those things. I also think another great way is just knowing what a roadmap looks like for you. If you can think three to five years into the future about all the things that you’d like to accomplish, you can create that roadmap for your own learning as well. So you have to aim your sights at something. There are things like meetups; there are industry groups that can support your learning. You can also do the opposite, which is to gather as much related experience as possible that will not necessarily be directly related. As a creator, we draw inspiration from nature. We draw inspiration from video games, movies. So kind of having a range of broad experiences can only bolster your ability to do more dynamic, interesting work.

I am a student who is a cognitive science major, who loves design and those sorts of things. I’m minoring in engineering design. What advice would you give someone who is working in a field like yours?

The thing that I would say first is get your ideas in a visual form. Visual communication is very different from verbal communication in some ways. Sharing a language with artists with visual medium is its own skill set. When I was in cognitive sciences, I was writing psychology research papers and learning statistics or critiquing designs based on usability research. But then if you’re interested in design, I would also add, you know, teach yourself Photoshop, After Effects; seek free resources online that will enhance your learning of those visual mediums. The other thing I would say is identify the kinds of companies that interest you and look at the styles that those people are using. Like really understand their portfolio. I think it’s really easy to get fixated on a brand or the kind of work they do, not really how they do it. So understand how these companies work, what their people do day-to-day, and learn what software and toolsets they’re using. Most people, most studios, will find tools that help them work quickly and effectively, and you can learn to use those same tools as well.

What was your most memorable experience in your career that helped develop you as a person?

Memorable experiences are very trialing times that made me grow. In grad school, I had a project that was getting behind schedule that was having creative challenges, and the way that we responded to that ended up in a better product, so we went through the challenge of getting a team that was off course back on track. And that taught me a lot. Even on the job here, we had one project that, like I said, we had to totally change the technology of the project halfway through; we had to quickly come up with new designs to stay on track with our schedule. Sometimes the hardest times and challenges are actually the most memorable times.

Well, that concludes all the questions I have. Is there anything you want to add?

There’s a lot I could say. The cognitive science program at Rice is really awesome. Really take advantage of the flexibility that it gives you as an interdisciplinary program. At least when I was there, you could really use it to create your own path and find things that you want to blend together. It’s easy to focus on a double major but don’t forget the opportunity to explore a lot of things that are interesting to you. I was always told it’s better to be a specialist and not to be a jack of all trades, but depending on where you want to go, sometimes being a jack of all trades gives you a lot of broad experience you can culminate all together. 

That’s what I’ve been trying to do here at Rice. Just with engineering design and cognitive science. It’s a nice blend.

Like my brother. He’s torn between being in IT and going to law school. And then he found out there are companies that use machine learning to help lawyers win cases [Example Reference: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/23/how-ai-and-machine-learning-are-transforming-law-firms-and-the-legal-sector/].

So he was a looking at unique intersections like that that blend his skills together, and it was the same for me. I didn’t want to be in academia, and I wanted to do interesting technologies but not be in entertainment. But then what was cool was usability research really trained me in processes—using processes to drive results—and so being a project manager was like a natural fit for me that I never expected. Things like that—knowing your strengths, knowing not just what inspires you but what’s the work, every day, that you enjoy doing that you can do hours and hours and hours of?

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Callum Parks
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Marcum Reagan, Mission Director, NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO), Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Marc Reagan is an aerospace engineer, working mission director, and project manager of NEEMO (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations), a NASA project using an undersea environment as an analog for human spaceflight. After graduating from Texas A&M University with a BS in aerospace engineering and the University of Colorado with an MS in aerospace engineering sciences, Marc’s NASA career began with responsibility of flight controller training for the International Space Station (ISS). He also worked as a Capcom (spacecraft communicator) in Mission Control. Marc has been working on his current project, NEEMO, since its inception in 2001. In our interview, Marc discussed what led to his position on the NEEMO project, the importance of training, and the future of spaceflight.

Marc’s experiences with the NEEMO project have led to his role as mission director. Marc volunteered to be a backup aquanaut for the first NEEMO mission in 2001, participated as an aquanaut on the NEEMO 2 mission, and has served as surface support, mission lead, and now as the mission director. I was struck by how little we talked about the engineering aspects of Marc’s position; it seems that in an environment where every team member already has extensive technical knowledge, the chief challenge is efficiently working together. As NEEMO’s mission director, Marc stated communication and coordination are the most important aspects of his job. He explained that his undergraduate experiences taught him communication and his experience in NASA taught him coordination. Marc uses this knowledge of communication and coordination to teach skills to future astronauts.

Similar to how Marc learned many of his coordination and leadership skills on the job, astronauts are learning coordination, communication, and leadership through ‘expeditionary training’ programs like NEEMO. Before the NEEMO project, astronauts would train on simulators; after training, they would go home with all mistakes forgiven and forgotten. NEEMO missions, which take place in the extreme subsea environment, carry very real consequences. I never considered the psychological aspects of going to space: staying sane while isolated, being part of a long-term functional team, and the possibility of spending a long time with someone you don’t want to spend a long time with. Having an environment where today’s failures are still broken tomorrow can communicate the weighty nature of being on a space station significantly more than training on a simulator. Astronauts have told Marc that NEEMO ranks as the best preparation for spaceflight they’ve received.

As the NEEMO project prepares astronauts for space exploration, a new commercial space industry is also preparing to send astronauts into space. The emergence of companies such as SpaceX in the private space sector has pressured NASA to change its model of business. Operating on taxpayer money, NASA cannot take the same risks as the private sector. It is a 60-year-old agency with 60 years’ worth of protocols, processes, and safety rules. With Vice President Mike Pence announcing a return to the moon by 2024, however, aggressive deadlines require an aggressive march forward. Marc said that many members of NASA leadership view this as a unique and rare opportunity allowing forward progress. As we look to the future of space exploration, I now understand the importance of Marc’s work; missions couldn’t be crewed if it weren’t for the invaluable type of training Marc directs with NEEMO.

Highlights from the interview:

When did you first see yourself in your mission director role in the NEEMO project, NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations?

The NEEMO project started basically with us saying, “Hey, we’ve got this wild idea of using the subsea environment as an analog and training ground for spaceflight.”

My friend Bill Todd and I both worked in spaceflight training in leadership positions and would conduct simulations during the day with astronauts, to train them. But then they would go home, and any mistakes or long-term consequences were forgiven and forgotten. We were looking for something a little bit more consequential, something a little more real that you didn’t just get to step away from. Something where your actions had consequences; what failed today was still broken tomorrow, that kind of thing.

NEEMO 1 was a feasibility mission for this idea of using subsea as an analog to human spaceflight. Then NEEMO 2 was a mission I was on. I wasn’t the mission director; I was a crewmember for that one. Then we just kept developing it and started making it more and more realistic as a spaceflight analog. So I guess by the time we reached NEEMO mission 3, I started taking the Mission Director role, and Bill started doing more of the logistics coordination with people that own the Aquarius habitat. I kind of just grew into the position because that’s where my expertise lay. I also worked as a Capcom in the control center for the International Space Station, and so that experience is what helped me take more of the mission director leadership role, being more involved in real time flight ops.

What are the skills you find yourself utilizing the most?

Communication and coordination. It always comes down to that. Any leadership role, and certainly this is true of an execution field operation like we run, is all about getting the members of your team to do their part: know where they need to be, when they need to be there, what they need to do, and pulling all of that together. And so it’s coordinating a lot amongst a lot of different people—many of whom are not even at Johnson Space Center. We’ve got international partners as well. So coordinating and communicating clearly amongst all of those partners is a skill that is almost all day, every day.

How much technical work do you do?

That’s a good question. I’m not sure how you tease our work apart, because what we’re doing is very technical. It’s all based on technical work. A NEEMO timeline is full of activities that are either testing out tools or ops concepts for spaceflight; we’re testing out experiments that are preparing to go to the space station, as flight experiments. So the technical is laced throughout everything I do or, at least, most of what I do. I’ve got budgetary responsibilities and stuff like that, but I would guess that there’s a technical overtone to 80 percent of the work I do. Eighty percent of it is in service of technical objectives and requires a technical background to fully understand what it’s all about.

In regards to the communication and coordination, how do you feel like your undergraduate and other college time helped you prepare for that?

I think college certainly helps prepare you to communicate. In my case, I had some professors that were very good at preparing us to communicate in written form. Concisely, clearly—so I definitely, came out of my undergraduate experience a much better communicator, and certainly in a written form, than I was going in. And I came out with a very strong technical baseline, which is the enabler for understanding everything we do at NASA. I think the coordination and the leadership skills were more developed on the job at NASA. We have a good pipeline for training people and giving successively more responsibility and opportunity to demonstrate leadership skills.

In regards to college, what should students do to prepare themselves for a position like yours?

Let’s say 50 percent of the position we’re talking about (mine) came from standard preparation. Learning the physics, learning the mechanics, learning how things work so I could be successful as a Space Shuttle Systems Instructor and then as a Space Station Training Lead and as a Space Station Capcom. All of those are things that just standard school stuff prepared me for.

But 50 percent of what I’m doing now came from being opportunistic along the way, too. It was following a pull that I had to go do things that were interesting to me and recognizing opportunities that were possible because I had managers that were open to these kinds of crazy ideas, like taking astronauts to live under the sea and making spaceflight analogs under the sea. The sea is not NASA’s domain, and this is something we had never done before at NASA, so there was quite a bit of institutional inertia getting past the inertia of the idea that, that’s not what we do here at NASA. So we had a rare alignment of leadership that was open to that and people who were willing to support it in the astronaut office. We had a good plan that we executed well and communicated well. And so, skill-wise it wouldn’t be accurate to say, “I’m the guy who had all the skill to be in this place at this time.” I can show you lots of people with similar or greater skills than I have, technically and in communicating and coordinating. I wouldn’t present myself as the guy with the corner on any of this. A big chunk of why I’m doing this is because I was opportunistic along the way, too, and recognized where the opportunities were to try something new and to grow that into something more. And keep it alive all these years. We’re now in our 19th year of NEEMO operations.

What sort of impact do you feel NEEMO project has on the astronauts?

We started this from the perspective of crew training specialists, and the idea was—very simply at first—to present a really good crew training experience. At that time, we were starting to work closely with the Russians on the Shuttle-Mir Program and going into the International Space Station Program. There became some awareness that the Russians do things very differently than we do on a number of fronts, including crew training. One of those things they did was survival training. There were variations of winter, mountain, desert and sea survival training. For example, they would take a Soyuz capsule crew and put them in the forest in the dead of winter for three days to try to survive, to prepare them for the case where they had to abort, or had to come back suddenly from space and landed in the middle of the Arctic, so that they could survive until help came.

And so in our astronaut office, there became this awareness that we’ve done space shuttle 10-day missions for so long, and we know how to do that, but we don’t have a whole lot of experience doing six-month missions where it just might be more important how you get along with people and how you keep yourself sane for six months than it is how technically excellent you are at some thing astronauts do. Also, we’re flying with people who aren’t Americans, that NASA didn’t select. We don’t have the same insight into their backgrounds. How do we come to trust and work closely together with them? I’m trying to paint the picture that the astronaut office was starting to become independently interested in what they call “expeditionary training.” These training exercises that bring people together that aren’t necessarily friends before, but they’re forced together into some kind of intense training experience where they learn leadership and followership and taking care of one another and getting the mission done. We originally conceived of NEEMO as mostly a crew training opportunity, but it became something more than that, more than just a simulation that had real consequences. It became an intense expeditionary training opportunity for the astronaut office. So that’s the background.

The astronaut office since the very first mission has come back and said, “That’s the best preparation we had for spaceflight. There’s nothing we did that was closer or more valuable for flying in space than those NEEMO missions.” We’ve added other objectives along the way, but as far as crew training and preparing crewmembers for spaceflight goes, I think NEEMO kills it for their objectives. And that also explains why our international partners have started participating regularly as well—the Canadian Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and the European Space Agency.

Do they all send over astronauts to your facility?

Most of them have astronauts that live and train in Houston all year round. But yes, they all have sent numerous astronauts to participate in NEEMO missions, both as commanders and as rookie crewmembers, along the way.

Do you have an interesting fact or something about the whole flight analog project and NEEMO that most people don’t know but would really take someone off guard?

We have had 57 “aquastronauts” in human history, and 56 of those were created by the NEEMO project. We define an aquastronaut as someone who has both been an aquanaut and who has flown in space as an astronaut. The first one, the one we didn’t create, was Scott Carpenter who took a leave of absence from NASA to join a Navy team as a SEALAB II crewmember.

I’ve seen videos of this big pool, and they have the simulations in there, but I heard you mention the sea earlier. Do these exercises take place in an enclosed facility or in the ocean?

You are referring to what we call the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and that is a gigantic pool we have here in Houston which is used for zero gravity spacewalk training. So it is extremely high fidelity for that purpose. We’ve got a big chunk of the space station mocked up inside that pool. We put on real spacesuits that are pressurized with real restrictions in reach and visibility and that kind of thing, and we practice doing microgravity spacewalks.

NEEMO happens under the ocean. The crew lives in the Aquarius habitat, which is the only remaining undersea research laboratory in the world today. It’s off the coast of Florida Keys and sits in about 60 feet of water. Our crewmembers live there for the entire duration of their mission, and they go outside to do simulated spacewalks in the ocean. We put on enough weight to make them partially buoyant—to simulate partial gravity environments like the moon. A big chunk of what we’re looking at on NEEMO missions is operations concepts for lunar exploration.

Would you say the most important part is the technical experience gained or more so just the psychological experience gained of being underwater for that duration of time for the astronauts?

The astronaut offices see this as a dress rehearsal for upcoming spaceflight. Not every astronaut gets to do this, but, basically, they try to send people that they plan to assign to be commanders on their next space station mission to be a NEEMO commander. And they assign rookies that will be assigned soon to a space station flight to get a rookie mission experience. So whichever of those two positions you will have as an astronaut, it’s a chance to go into a very stressful, high-intensity mission—experience and practice doing your part.

For a commander, there’s a lot to think about that has nothing to do with performing the mission. You have to think about things like, are we going to have a mission shirt? Are we going to design a mission patch? Are we going to have outreach events to schools or…is it going to include my kid’s school? Because it would sure be nice to do that with my kid’s school if so…So there are lots and lots of things that are considerations for a spaceflight that have nothing to do with your training and your actual execution off the timeline that day that are great experiences that come out of this. And, in addition, you’re assigned with a bunch of people you didn’t choose to be there with. You didn’t get any input on who they are. And whether you previously liked them or not, guess what? You’re going to be living very closely together and sleeping about 2 or 3 feet away from them for 10 days or so. And so you learn to be a functional part of the team in an extreme environment. In fact, you can say it’s something you learn, but it’s also something you practice. You can talk about it until you’re blue in the face, and you can learn about it over and over, but it’s also something you practice doing while being a good citizen during a stressful mission.

And then finally, there’s the mission itself with a timeline. On our spaceflight timelines, you have a red line that’s constantly marching across that timeline, and you’ve got little blocks—associated with your name—of all the activities you need to do today. And that red line is like a demon chasing you all day long, reminding you that you don’t have a moment to rest because there’s just that next thing coming up, and if you start now maybe you can get a little bit ahead on it. Or you’re currently behind on a task, and you better hurry up and try to catch up without making mistakes. So operating in an environment off of a timeline, off of procedures, all day long, day after day, is just something you can’t really practice except in an environment like this. So, to give you context, that’s what you get out of a mission like this that’s different than the training you got in a four-hour simulation in a simulator, followed by going home and picking up your kids from school and forgetting all about it by evening.

What is the team structure inside the Aquarius NEEMO lab, and what is the team structure outside—the supporting team structure?

Good questions. We lease the Aquarius habitat and the operations support from Florida International University. They operate it. So when we do a mission, there are six crewmembers that live inside Aquarius for the duration of the mission and two of them are professional staff members from FIU, professional aquanauts that do this kind of thing for a living. Their job is to keep the habitat running and keep it safe and basically allow everything to be in place to accomplish NASA spaceflight analog objectives.

Then NASA brings four crewmembers, and those crewmembers are some combination of astronauts—occasionally an engineer or a scientist from NASA and occasionally somebody from the outside world, say a researcher from a university that’s participating. So those are the four crewmembers that are part of the spaceflight analog. But all six of them are living together and are a cohesive crew.

Then you have what we call the topside team, which includes the rest of the FIU staff who man a watch desk 24/7 during the mission. Think of this as a small mission control, looking over monitors and making sure everyone’s safe and complying with diving regulations and CO2 levels and all of that kind of stuff inside the habitat. They’re also running boat support for logistics and for topside dive support everyday.

We also have a Mission Control Center we set up on shore that’s running everyday doing the types of things one expects of a NASA MCC. So we have probably another eight FIU staff members on shore running topside, boat, and dive, and watch desk operations throughout a mission, and we have 10 to 30 topside NASA-related folks running MCC, supporting experiments, ops and assisting with dive support ops every day.

So there are about 40 to 50 people total—which fluctuates, depending on what kind of experiments we have going on. So to summarize: there are 40 to 50 people back at the Aquarius Reef Base in Tavernier, comprised of FIU staff, mission managers, MCC operators, experiment Principal Investigators, and support divers to support the six crewmembers under the water for the duration of the mission. Many of us wear multiple hats.

That just sounds like so many people just involved in one project.

Yes, and a lot of them have one experiment, and they are the expert of that experiment, and it’s coming up once on the timeline every day, or maybe it’s coming up today and not again for two more days. So they may come and go as required, supporting their experiment and timeline reviews for upcoming days. So not all of those people are huddled around in a space all day everyday. But we have about that many people onsite at some point during a mission. Some fraction of them live there and are FIU staff, but a good chunk of them come from our different principal investigators with experiments and our core team that’s responsible for executing the missions.

How do you like the culture at NASA and your team?

NASA’s got a great culture. It’s very supportive. It’s very family friendly. There’s a lot of trust in the workers to do what they are tasked with doing without constant looking over the shoulder. Just a lot of work-life balance and flexibility of schedule. But we also have a really interesting mission, and we also have times and positions where, no kidding, you better be there, and you better have [your] game face on. And you better be well-trained, and you better be ready to face the fact that today your performance could have the ultimate consequences. And you need to be ready to do your part to make sure that today goes well. And so for all of those reasons, NASA is a great place to work. I’ve had a great career, and I can’t think of anything I’ve seen that seems like it would have been more rewarding to me.

On my team, on our NEEMO project, take all of that and distill it to a really small group of people (our core execution team) that have a yearly mission with a very well-defined focus. NEEMO is something that a lot of people think is cool and would do anything to be part of, so we can afford to be very selective of the team members that we allow to join our team. So we have a very, very high-performing team that works well together, that’s been together—for the most part—for a number of years, and is very cohesive. We have a very discrete goal, and when a mission is successful, we have something we can walk away and feel good about. So for all of those reasons, it is kind of a microcosm of all the best things about NASA to me.

That sounds like a dream place to work.

It really is a good work environment.

How do you feel like, in the past 19 years, technology has changed the project?

That’s a good question. The Aquarius habitat was built several decades ago, and it was not built for wireless. Thirty wireless devices being connected at once, and high-speed internet connections didn’t even exist in those days. So a lot of modifications to the facility have happened along the way, just to try to allow us to keep up with current technologies, and they’ve done a good job of that. We are able to make a high bandwidth data connection between the shore and the habitat. We are able to design a mission with the kind of data-transferring integrity and quality that we see on the space station today.

What I mean by that is clear voice, clear video, file transfers, all of that kind of stuff we can support to the same quality or better than we see on the Space Station. So what I would say is that we have been able to effortlessly keep up with the kind of technology demands that are capability enablers in human spaceflight right now. But I wouldn’t say that we’ve gone out and set the pace on that, for the most part. Occasionally we have experiments that come along that are pressing the boundaries of technology at the time. Like a few years ago, we were looking at a receiver that could make a solid Bluetooth connection with multiple discrete Bluetooth devices at once and interweave those data streams. That’s something that is not typical of Bluetooth. Bluetooth is usually a point-to-point, device-to-device, kind of solution. So occasionally, we are looking at new technologies and using it as a place to experiment with those in a high-intensity setting. But for the most part, I would say that we’ve just kept abreast of human spaceflight technology.

What do you think the biggest issue facing NASA right now is? Or the entire space industry?

Let me give you two issues. The first one is we have a lot of commercial space activity going on right now. The poster child of that is probably SpaceX, but that’s certainly not the only example. But we have companies led by billionaires that are doing really creative, innovative, and aggressive things in human spaceflight right now. It may be premature to say where all of that goes, and how successful all of that will be, but it’s definitely applying a lot of pressure to NASA’s model of business as we’ve developed it over the last 60 years.

And so I think one challenge that we’re struggling with is, how do we learn to be light on our feet again? How do we learn how to be more creative and innovating and more responsive to the kind of things that these commercial companies are able to do, while not losing sight of the fact that a lot of the processes and approaches that we use, that slow us down, are direct results of the fact that we’ve lost people in human spaceflight before? When people die, we implement more strict safety rules, and we implement more rigorous processes. Over 60 years, we’ve lost a number of crewmembers in the service of duty, and what you can rightly call our bureaucracy, to some degree, is a direct result of trying to learn from those lessons and be more rigorous in taking care of our hardware and our people that the taxpayers entrust us with. But throwing hardware out there, and testing it quickly, and turning it around quickly…that’s fundamentally opposed to more rigorous process-driven approaches. It’s hard to strike that balance. And just globally, that’s one of the challenges NASA has today.

The other one is that a couple of weeks ago the Vice President [Mike Pence] addressed the National Space Council and announced that not only is NASA going back to the moon, but we’re going back to the moon by 2024. Boots on the moon in 2024. And that is a very aggressive schedule based on the readiness of hardware today. And, moreover, that’s a very aggressive schedule based on the budget we see today. So layered on top of this challenge of just learning how to responsibly become more nimble and more agile and more light on our feet like some of our commercial partners appear to be, we suddenly have a very, very demanding challenge to meet laid upon us, and figuring out how to do that with no new budget is, I’m sure, keeping a lot of people up at night.

How is NASA facing these issues?

What I’ve seen from our leadership is very much, “Look, this is an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often. We may not know exactly how we’re going to make this happen, but while we have the support of the administration, and presuming we get equal support from Congress, we would be crazy not to run for the cliff and do everything we can to make this happen.” So it’s being addressed with the kind of seriousness, from the Administrator down, that I think people would expect us to address it with. It’s an enormous challenge, no doubt about it. I wouldn’t want to minimize the challenge, because at the end of the day, you and everyone reading your article expects us to bring those people back safely too. We only say “get people to the moon in five years” but implied is the rest of that, which is even harder—ensuring we get them back safely. We also take that as a personal challenge. And so, we’re doing the best we can to figure out the schedules and the budgets and the technical projects that will enable us to go do that. It’ll be a wonderful thing to watch.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Claire Wang
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Adam Benaroya, Senior Manager of Global Media, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, New York  (40.7° N, 74.0° W)

Adam Benaroya is the senior manager of global media at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in New York City. He earned his degree in mathematical economic analysis at Rice University in 2009 and then completed his MBA, with specializations in strategy and marketing, at the NYU Stern School of Business.

Prior to his position at HPE, Adam led the media analytics practice for the New York and Atlanta offices at Mindshare, a global media and marketing services company. In his current role at HPE, he still leads a media analytics practice, but, more broadly, he also leads the core digital media practices globally, translating global strategy into executable, market-level campaigns and making decisions on investments across different media channels.

Something that really interested me during my conversation with Adam is the challenges and rewards of working in a rapidly changing industry. Whether it’s digital capabilities and data analytics, which have advanced so much in the past decade and are continuing to evolve, or the recent buzz around data and consumer privacy, there is always something new to learn and keep up with, on both the technical and regulatory sides. For some people, a fast-changing landscape provides excitement and motivation, while for others, it might be the exact opposite. Before talking to Adam, I had always thought of marketing as a job only for super creative people, such as the designers behind the flashy advertisements on the giant screens in Times Square. Learning about the advancements in technology that permeate the field, as well as the strategic side of marketing, has opened doors to possibilities in this industry that I’m excited to explore.

An important lesson that I learned from our conversation is not to be afraid to explore a field that you’re passionate about, even if it is outside of your major. When Adam was searching for jobs, he didn’t even really know that this particular marketing space existed, but he had a general vision for what he was trying to do: find a way to combine his interests in media with his quantitative background. Through interviewing and getting to know people in the field, he was eventually able to land a role that fit what he was looking for. While it may be scary to venture into an industry with an unrelated degree, you may be surprised at the opportunities that could arise.

Highlights from the interview

How did you come into working in digital media analytics and strategy? I saw from your bio that you majored in math econ and managerial studies, so what influenced you to make the switch?

I’ve always had a quantitative background. I explored the computational and applied mathematics major and statistics. I loved math in high school. I was looking for something a bit more applied than just theoretical mathematics. I eventually settled on the combined math/economics major, which was great.

Even though I am not using pure economics in my day-to-day job now, the quantitative and the general problem-solving background that I got from that was something that certainly benefitted me.

In addition to my educational background, I was always interested in television and media in general. During my summers in college, I started looking for internships I could do outside of the economics field. One summer I was at a small marketing research firm; a couple summers I spent at Viacom and MTV. One summer was programming and scheduling; the second summer was in production, so very outside of the economics and math background. Between the major and some of the summer internships, I was looking for some way I could combine those two sides together. As I was graduating, looking for jobs, I looked at a number of different media companies, broader marketing companies, and finally got in touch with the agency that I eventually joined. Based on my conversations with them and my background, they encouraged me to look at their media analytics department, which ultimately was a really good marriage of the two sides of what I was interested in. Then from there, I continued the analytics front but also some broader areas within media strategy as well.

Now you are the senior manager global head of performance media. It’s a pretty big title. What do you do day to day?

This is my second job out of school. I was at the agency group for about six years, and I’ve been at this company for almost four years at this point. The whole time I was at the agency, I was part of the analytics groups. When I left, I was leading out their media analytics practice for both of their east coast offices in New York and Atlanta. One of the things I was looking for in a new job—I loved the analytics space, but I was also looking for my own personal development to expand out into the broader media and marketing space. So, to answer your question of what I do now, I still lead our media analytics practice for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, but I’m also leading our broader part of our media practice.

So performance media, there are all sort of loose ways to refer to some of the digital media programs that we do, it’s not just performance. It stands from awareness all the way through to, more truly, performance types of programs. I lead globally our core digital media practices, whether that’s programmatic media, which is more like the data-driven side of buying audiences and targeting campaigns to audiences. Our paid service campaigns with Google and Bing, as well as our paid social practice across…all the different social platforms that we’re operating on. So what that means, as far as what I am actually doing, is we have an agency group that we partner with to execute all the campaigns that we’re doing for the organization. A big part of the role is the strategy and the planning, leading up to each of our starts where we get input on how much media budget we’re going to have, how we make decisions on what is the most effective way to allocate our investments across different media channels and campaigns that we know are important for our business. So a lot of that is upfront planning, and from there it starts to break out into more practical-level decisions on “All right, we’re going to execute these search campaigns…or these display and video campaigns. What partners do we want to work with? What types of media formats or channels or creative decisions do we want to incorporate into our campaigns?” 

Given that my focus is on these digital programs, there’s a lot of data and analytics that comes in through there. It involves making regular optimization decisions, like how do we incorporate new business parities or challengers into the plan itself. So it’s a regular cycle of planning these campaigns, but it’s very real time in making decisions. It’s a global role as well. A lot of that means…translating the global strategy into ones that are relevant or feasible at the market level.

What do you wish someone would have told you before you started this career? 

That’s a great question. When I was at Rice and looking for jobs, I didn’t even know that this space existed. I knew I had some of those media internships like I said, but it was a bit more on the traditional side. Most of my time was with MTV. I got a good sense of different types of roles that sat in that space, but until I started interviewing and hearing from the teams directly, I didn’t necessarily know exactly what I was getting myself into. I just wish I had more awareness of the different ways I could be looking for that first job out of school.

What’s the biggest reward of your job, and what are the downsides?

I’ll give you two. One is the industry itself is changing very rapidly. When I started in this industry 10 years ago, it was so different from what it is now. The digital capabilities, the data and targeting capabilities, have advanced so much. Programmatic advertisement, which is more of the automated ways of buying advertising—that didn’t even exist 10 years ago. So even now I expect in 10, 20, years into the future, there’s always something new to learn, so many different partners to talk to. Whether it’s on the platform side or the publisher side or the data side, there’s dozens and dozens of different companies that I get to talk to on a regular basis. I get to continually learn different points of view on the industry and how that’s changing. And how the most topical example of that is around privacy and data privacy and consumer privacy and how that’s impacted marketing and advertising businesses substantially. So it’s a very agile and educational experience on a regular basis. It’s very fluid. And then the second one—on a more personal level, I manage a team at HPE. I did it at the agency as well. So bringing on people who are new to the industry or new to the company and getting to participate in their own development from more than just a people-management standpoint—I find that very rewarding as well.

Regarding the challenges, I think one of my challenges is that the space does change so quickly. Something that I personally enjoy, but it’s not something that everyone does. I think there are some people who do want a bit more consistent experience over time. But for those people who are looking for a more rapid experience, something that does change, this definitely is an industry that speaks to that. But the challenge upon that is that you really need to be dedicated, so making sure that your background, your understanding of the different concepts across industries or partnerships across different companies—you need to make sure that it stays fresh. Otherwise, you could very quickly become a bit out of date. So that’s definitely a challenge.

Working within a large organization, the process to get through all the different teams that you need to influence and the people that you need to sell your ideas to…it can be challenging. Even though the industry itself is very fast-moving, from an internal organization standpoint, it can still take a lot of effort and time to actually make change and see the impact of what you’re doing. But it does happen. It just takes more time than if I was working at a startup environment.

Could you elaborate a little bit more on how technology in particular affects the work you do?

I can give one example to start. So one project that we’ve been working [on], almost since I’ve started, has been thinking about our own internal data. We’re a business-to-business organization. We’re selling to other organizations. Compared to some other marketing industries, we actually do have a very rich internal data set of who our customers are, what companies are we selling to, what individuals are we talking to in those accounts, and different levels of engagement that we’re having with those customers known and unknown over time. But it’s not a one unified data platform. There’s dozens of different internal data sets that we have access to, not to mention any third-party data that we might work with, that could help complement what we know about our customers indirectly. So one of the big initiatives was to unify that data foundation together and then start to use some newer methodologies around machine learning and AI. Once we have that data foundation, how can we start to use machine learning or broader AI methodologies to actually use our own data to determine who is the best audience for us to be reaching with our campaign activity. So we work with a number of different data science teams, internal, external, that are part of this initiative where we’ve taken this combined data foundation across media data, website data, sales data, and other third-party data, and then start to build look-alike models on top on that to use AI truly to determine who we should be talking to, what message should we be delivering to them. So that more automated way of putting advertising into the market but also using AI to actually get better informed [about] what advertising we’re giving. That’s something that just hasn’t existed until recently because these digital platforms, technologies, haven’t been built to maturity until very recently.

So I’d say that’s one really clear area where technology is influencing [my work]. But on any part of the media program that my team is responsible for, whether it’s search or social, those technologies themselves are continually adapting as well, whether it’s on some of the privacy topics, say with Facebook and Google…and, really, any new technology companies are top of the mind of how many regulations in Europe and the US in the upcoming years…that’s kind of a niche topic within the tech space. Those privacy regulations very much change the fundamentals of what we do from a digital advertising standpoint. We have to start thinking about what data are we sourcing to target individuals—do we have their consent to target them with advertising? Not to say that privacy hasn’t been a relevant sphere within the tech space until now, but with GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] and Europe a couple of years ago, and with California and other states launching their own regulation in the US, that kind of lens on technology will fundamentally change how we need to approach our jobs, and that’s very much not solved yet. It’s coming in pieces as that regulation is coming out, so that’s going to be a big part of the industry conversation in the next 5 to 10 years.

Going back a little bit to your background, I also saw that you earned an MBA at NYU. What made you decide to pursue an MBA, and how did that affect your career?

It was something that I had been thinking of when I was at Rice. I had considered taking my GMAT right out of school, but I wasn’t convinced right away. I loved my experience at Rice, but similar to what I was saying, I wanted to do something that was applied [rather] than theoretical. I wanted to really experience the industry firsthand with having a job…and doing it was definitely what I was focused on. I started to rethink it when I wanted to go back to school. I guess it was around two to three years after graduating, and my supervisor at the time, at the agency, she had her masters in statistics. She was very supportive and just talked to me about my future, and via conversations with her, I was convinced that I should be rethinking going back to school. I knew that if I wanted to go back to school, I’d probably pursue an MBA versus a degree in statistics or something that might be a bit more theoretical. I decided on doing my MBA part-time. I didn’t want to leave the work place entirely, so I found a program where I could do my MBA part-time at Stern and still continue with my full-time job, which is time-consuming but ultimately something that I think worked well for me.

I think for an MBA, in particular working in the media and marketing space, there are some areas in the marketing industry where having an MBA truly is required…There are certain companies that require their brand management teams to have an MBA, but then there are other parts of the industry where it’s not a requirement at all, and so that’s what I was going back and forth with. Do I truly need this? Do I want to do something unnecessarily? So given that uncertainty, I decided that if I was going to go back to school, I was going to go back to learn something new, and I wasn’t just going to do it because I felt like it was a requirement for my job. So based on that, I did something slightly different than the math/economics background. I wanted to do something that I hadn’t explored at Rice, so I delved further into marketing specialization, strategy specialization. Not to say that they weren’t quantitative, but it was definitely a different line of learning than what I was doing in the math and economics space at Rice. I wanted to make sure that I personally got something out of it. It’s hard to say whether, when I applied to my current job, if that was a decision point on them hiring me. There’s plenty of people at this company who don’t have their MBAs, so it’s something I did more so for myself and for my personal education and development versus knowing for sure the industry was going to require me to have something like that.

Could you tell me about why HPE in particular? What makes it stand out as a good company to work at?

I think from a business standpoint, we’re doing some very exciting things. Kind of at the forefront of the enterprise tech space. We have our own AI products. There’s the product innovation of what HPE’s been doing…has been really interesting to learn. It’s not something that I knew as much about before I started here. When I was at the agency, I was working more on consumer brands versus business-to-business brands, which is what HPE is. But from a marketing standpoint, the one thing that stood out…I don’t know how familiar you are with HPE’s history, but when I joined roughly three and a half years ago, HP was actually splitting into two companies. So there’s the consumer side, which is more of what you associate HP with—printers, laptop computers. And then the group that I joined, which is the enterprise tech side. So the company was literally divided into two, two different publicly traded companies. From a marketing standpoint, we had the legacy of Hewlett Packard, but it was a new company itself, launching its new brands. So it was an exciting time to join the company, to have that marketing challenge of how do you launch a new brand that’s in this very unique position of splitting from this large company that everyone knows…building new websites, building new media tech platforms. There’s just a lot of different challenges that I was able to join into and experience that with the team.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I love what I’m doing right now. I definitely see myself staying in the marketing and media space. I think whether this happens in the short term or long term, I’ve had experiences now on the agency side and the marketer side; the one part of the trio that I haven’t experienced is more on the publisher and platform side. Like say, a Google or Facebook or someone who is a tech company that’s offering up their platform for advertisers to partake in. I still have that in my mind. I would love to experience the industry from as many new viewpoints as possible before I completely settle in and decide where I might want to spend the rest of my career at. I’m still in that mindset of just wanting to learn as much as possible, so I think I can see myself doing that, whether it’s at Google or Facebook or more of a smaller company. Maybe more of a startup environment that I also haven’t experienced as much yet.

What advice would you give a student who is interested in marketing? What would help them stand out?

I think what would help them stand out is some demonstrated interest in the area, but it’s not only marketing or communication backgrounds that are going to get roles in this area. I came from an economics/math background. A broad spectrum of background truly can be applicable and find a role in marketing. But I do think it’s important—whether it’s in your educational experience or your internship experience or even just extracurricular experience in general—have something that you can talk to that makes it understood why you’re looking to get into marketing versus someone who’s just looking for any job out of school. I think that’s important, to have some vision of what you’re trying to get into. Like I was telling you earlier, I don’t feel like I had as much knowledge of the different parts of the marketing industry that I could be applying for, so I was coming into parts of it a little blind.

I think I felt starting at an agency group…I feel like it was the right place to start for me. The benefit of an agency is you’re going to have so much broad exposure across different marketers that you might be working on within the agency. Obviously you’ll be talking to all the different publishers and tech companies that sit in this space. So, from an educational standpoint, I think it’s probably the fastest way to learn a lot. Versus if you go to a marketer directly, entry-level out of school, you might be a bit more narrowly focused on what one marketer is thinking of and—not to say you won’t learn a lot. You’ll have a great platform to do that on a marketer side, too. It just might be a bit narrower; it might take a little bit more time to see everything that is happening in the space. But with that said, definitely…looking at what I consider the trifecta of the different parts of the media marketing space—agency, marketer, advertiser—and then the publisher and tech space…I think even just having conversations and interviews, potentially across a broader spectrum of opportunities, you’ll learn a lot just within that regardless of where you might end up within your first job. I think similar to what you and your program is doing, I really welcome students to look on LinkedIn, find people who work in the space, and have some of your conversations to learn a bit more before you even start to go for a first interview.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Callum Parks
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Thomas Burnett, Assistant Director of Public Engagement, John Templeton Foundation, Philadelphia (39.9° N, 75.1° W)

Thomas Burnett is the assistant director of public engagement at the John Templeton Foundation. Mr. Burnett graduated from Rice University in 2000 with a BA in philosophy. Upon graduation he attended UC-Berkeley and did doctoral studies in the history of science. Mr. Burnett has worked in a variety of roles. He has been a high school teacher, a science writer, editor, and a communications associate. These experiences led him to his current position at the John Templeton Foundation. In his job, he helps translate the complicated “science-speak” into publicly understandable information. He describes his job as “identifying thought-provoking, underappreciated, and potentially beneficial findings from recent research in order to enhance public engagement with science and the Big Questions.”

During my interview with Mr. Burnett, we discussed his current position, including how his education and skills fit with it, how the media we consume is created, and the impact technology has on our lives. Mr. Burnett has a tendency to turn basic interview questions into something more, building on his ideas and at times surprising himself. His philosophy background stands out; his thought process is unique.

Mr. Burnett’s views on technology’s current impact resonate with me the most. He believes we currently possess the most powerful tools for investigation in history, but with this there are consequences. He mentions how we constantly bombard ourselves with distractions, and that this endless cycle of “being busy” could be preventing us from necessary introspection and asking the questions that need to be asked. Mr. Burnett believes true boredom could be the catalyst of philosophical revolution. This fascinates me. When I told Mr. Burnett that I had never seen things that way, he responded, “Neither have I actually. I just made that up right now.” I laughed.

The second point that resonates with me is the function of the science journalism industry. Growing up with interests in STEM, I read article after article but never considered the origination of the article. I always assumed a journalist read a scientific paper and then wrote about it. I know now that this is typically not the case. Individuals like Mr. Burnett read published papers, pick out what is important, and pass this information to news outlets who cover the story. Understanding the creation process behind the media I consume helps me better appreciate the effort put into it and I can better understand the information presented.

Highlights from the Interview

When did you envision yourself as the assistant director of public engagement at the John Templeton Foundation?

Honestly not until I saw the job posting, because I didn’t think a job like that actually existed. Essentially, my position draws from basically all areas of my interest that I had cultivated over the last twenty years, which is what made the position so surprising. I have a degree in philosophy from Rice; it drew on that. I did graduate studies in history of science; it drew on that. I’ve done a lot of studies in natural sciences; it drew from that. There’s theology—I drew on that. And then also communications, more generally speaking. So all those different threads tied together was this job description. It’s pretty interesting that there’s a job in which I didn’t have to make up anything about how I could see myself fit into the job because pretty much everything I had done for the past two decades fit. It was a very unusual opportunity and that’s the reason why I was willing to move from Washington, D.C. to Philly to take the job. Otherwise it would have taken a lot to get me out of that city. Pretty much only this job could have done that.

What does your position entail?

The Templeton Foundation funds a lot of research in different academic areas—the natural sciences, social sciences, philosophy, and theology. So you can imagine how much research you can do with around eighty or ninety million dollars a year. A lot of research gets done. It’s a lot of publications, a lot of books, a lot of articles—a huge volume of scholarly material. Some of it’s good, some of it’s so-so, some of it’s spectacular. But if you don’t have someone who looks at it all to assess whether it’s interesting or not, then it just kind of sits there in scholarly communities kicking around in journals and various things that are behind a paywall that nobody else knows about. So something the Templeton Foundation wants is not just to invest in scholarship, but for these new discoveries to be shared more broadly so normal humans can appreciate the kinds of things that we learn about. My role is to investigate what’s going on in the research world and then to help unearth the kinds of stories that would be of interest to people that read the Washington Post or the Atlantic or many other different media outlets in which they’re looking for good stories, for good information, or for insights. To be able to bring those kinds of stories to where they are, serving as that bridge between the academic world and the media world—that’s a very tenuous and long, long bridge, and so you need intermediaries, and I play an intermediary role.

Do you think there are any misconceptions about this job?

Most people are surprised that this job exists because what tends to happen is that you can find a job in academia or you can find a job in media space, but there aren’t as many opportunities for someone to be tasked to engage in content as much. I guess there are people in communications departments or communications offices, but what’s interesting about them is that for folks that just work in straight communications, they don’t engage with the content so much. What it winds up being is when you describe press releases or things that are formulaic, you don’t really tell the story if you don’t know the content well enough. So I guess part of my job is to engage with the content on a deeper level so that I can identify the more human, some of the more dramatic gripping elements of it that go beyond what you would be able to say in a press release. There’s something so different from a story compared to information. That storytelling role that has to get out of the technical jargon and into plain English, that’s the space in which I work.

What skills do you find yourself utilizing the most when you’re doing these interpretations or going about your job?

It is very reading intensive. There’s a lot of analysis, a lot of writing. I write a lot of emails, and that sounds boring…but if you think of it more as a nineteenth century style and the Republic of Letters and the European Enlightenment, I identify people who are either really talented scientists or really talented journalists or editors—like big names, people you’d recognize. Usually when you email people, you never get a reply. Like if you were in PR and you email a bunch of people with your press release, your response rate approaches to zero. But if you really know your subject that you are contacting, and you communicate with them about something that they’re interested in, and you can clearly demonstrate that you have something of value, then you’re more likely to get a response. The boring way is to say that I sit around, and I write a lot of emails to people that I don’t know; the more exciting way is that I reach out to people who are themselves outstanding storytellers through this sort of professional networking to create these channels of communication where we’re swapping story ideas. It’s kind of like going fishing. You’re throwing out bait all the time, and you can’t control how consistently you catch your fish. So my job is sort of inherently risky in the sense that on any given week, I have no idea whether my effort will amount for anything. Over the course of a year, I have noticed that things do work out, but all that can be said is that I’ve probably written to two hundred people this year, and there’s maybe fifteen or sixteen really interesting articles or podcast episodes or stories that come out. I’d call my job media relations. That’s a big part of it. I’m actively commissioning literature reviews and digging into academic research. What’s unusual about this job is that I can do both.

How did your college years prepare you for what you’re doing now?

It prepared me in the sense that I gave myself a liberal arts education. I actually went to Rice University to be a physics major, and I wound up with a degree in philosophy. The way that that happened was that when I was there, I recognized that a lot of the questions I had—well a lot of questions I have—were not technical questions. Technical questions are interesting, but there are other fundamental human questions or existential questions that are really bothering me. So I flipped my major from physics to philosophy. If you get a degree in philosophy, they spend all of your time trying to teach you how to think more clearly, to analyze arguments, to read and dissect what other people are thinking and saying. So philosophy taught me how to think. I also took courses in history and English that taught me how to write. I took a fair number of biology classes. My physics…I regret to this day that I didn’t take quantum mechanics. It’s a handicap, honestly, for me in my job that I haven’t taken quantum mechanics. So that, I guess, is my biggest regret in college, which regrets being what they are is not so bad. I got an all-around education so that I learned broadly enough that I could ask questions about things I was ignorant about. And that I think is key to my job—no one that I work with knows all the stuff, but if you have enough of a foundation and you can ask good question to people who are experts, then they can teach you lots of stuff really quickly.

Learning how to learn is the most important thing. The knowledge itself can build but you need a foundation. Graduate school is where you figure out how to teach yourself, and teaching yourself is really hard. That’s the difference between undergrad and grad school. In undergrad, you’re the student, and then in grad school you have to figure out how to go your own way.

What kind of projects do you work on? What’s a brief example of one of the projects you’re working on right now?

The Templeton Foundation made a series of grants related to a biology topic on the evolution of cooperation. There are probably about five different grants with total funding of, I don’t know, twelve million dollars. And those different project leaders conducted their research, and they published things, and then there you have it. Their grants were done, they move on, and they do other things. So my project was to then look at what got published and discern, is there interesting material in here? If the answer is yes, I’ll go out and hire someone to read all the publications. This is somebody who has expertise, so that all those publications at least make more or less sense to them. It’s their kind of language and subculture. So someone will write a review of that literature. That might be eight books and a hundred and twenty articles. They’ll write me, I guess, a fifty or sixty page report of the synthesis—what is this all about, what’s interesting here—and they’ll organize it. The structure of the report is super-duper important, and then there’s the details. So I will then read that and look at that and from that think, is there anything interesting that a journalist or an editor would like here? So I read it through the lens of media space, and I might find three or four different story ideas that they might like. And then I pitch those story ideas. Imagine several levels of distillation—from a large number of academic scholarly publications distilled into a technical report, and from that turned into story pitches, and the story pitches then might turn into articles at some point. I identify the best three or four people to email first, but then I might email another twenty or twenty-five people just to get as much as I can out of the material that I have. And then I find another topic and I do the same thing. So it’s a cycle starting with a big base of literature on a given topic and then you turn the wheel that turns into a report, report turns into story ideas, and the story ideas might turn into a story. If I do that about eight times per year, then that’s considered to be successful.

That’s awesome. That’s so cool actually.

Yeah, it’s neat. Each time it’s completely starting over because it’s a topic that is utterly different than the one before so it’s very mentally exhausting because I don’t build any momentum. I mean, I do over the course of one thing, but one thing ends, and I have to just scrub my brain empty and gear up a bunch of energy and then launch the next one.

What would be your favorite topic?

I like the evolution of cooperation. I also really like the psychology of intellectual humility. It is a fascinating topic.

Can you describe it?

The idea behind intellectual humility is this: as humans we have a skill for learning and understanding the world around us, whether it’s through language or sensory perception or logic. Humans are like learning machines. At least we have the potential to learn. But at the same time we have to recognize that we’re limited as well. Each person has one brain. That brain has many abilities, but it can only do so much. 

If you run into conflict with somebody that disagrees with you, if you are more aware of your own limitations, you have the potential for self-correction better than if you think, wow, anyone who disagrees with me is stupid. That would be the opposite of humility. It’s a neat topic. I think it applies to many spheres of life. It for sure applies to academia, it applies to politics, it applies to religion, it applies to relationships—like in marriages and friendships—it applies in office environments. It has wide applicability, but it’s a topic that is not highly valued.

In today’s space, self-promotion is the thing. And humility is the opposite of that. So there’s a tension between what might be best for us in a sense of character or wisdom and what might be best for us in terms of short-term financial gains or winning arguments and that sort of thing. I think it’s an undervalued and underappreciated concept, so that’s a reason that I’ve worked hard on it on my job.

What do you think makes the John Templeton Foundation a great place to work?

Its mission. Ultimately, the Templeton Foundation is interested in advancing human knowledge in every direction, to the degree that it can. What that involves is funding across a wide variety of areas that don’t look like they necessarily have much in common.

We do a really broad spectrum of things, with the recognition that the really big questions of life, the things that are really, really special, just cannot be answered by a single discipline. While single disciplines are extremely important, and you need a type of expertise, you’ve got to be able to work across disciplines to get a sort of vantage point, and almost a…like a community skill set to really go after the big fish.

The Templeton Foundation is committed to bringing together people from different traditions, whether it’s science or humanities or theology, and getting people talk to each other. Really interesting insights happen in those cases, and the hardest questions that humans can ask require that kind of community.

How do you think science and technology are reshaping this work? Do you think it’s making it easier or harder?

There’s greater specialization than ever, there’s more powerful tools than ever. And so when you bring good questions to the table—I think we live in an age in which when you have well-formulated questions, you have more tools than ever at your disposal to try to answer them. But I don’t know if the age that we live in helps us in terms of formulating questions or in terms of deciding which questions to explore or to privilege over other kinds of questions. I’m not so sure if we have an advantage…perhaps we’re at a disadvantage if we’re so busy and consumed with all our activities. What if boredom is essential to coming up with the most creative questions or perplexing topics to study? In that case, we’re in trouble because no one’s ever bored because we have many different ways to distract ourselves. I think we have better tools than ever, so in that sense, science and technology really help us, but perhaps we’re not in the context where we’re bringing new questions or a sense of urgency of exploring certain kinds of questions because we don’t give ourselves the time or the stimulation that we need in order to ask questions.

I never thought about it that way.

Neither have I actually. I just made that up right now.

That was actually really insightful.

That kind of thinking—where going to graduate school for eight years or whatever, gives you these technical skills, but you’re going to have to draw from somewhere else. Where do your questions come from? Why do you get bothered? Why do some questions interest you and other ones just leave you kind of flat? I don’t entirely know, but in my study of the long intellectual tradition of humanity, there’s always been people who are good question askers. That has not changed. What has changed is that the tools that we have to investigate them, but the tools themselves don’t ask questions. You have to supply those yourself, that’s kind of where creativity comes in.

What do you think the biggest issue facing your industry is?

That’s a very good question. I guess there is an industry called private philanthropy, and I am not a good person to address that, because I have not worked in philanthropy at all until this job. So there are people who kind of know these larger trends…Well, let me just give you some hearsay. So there’s a whole lot of money going into philanthropy now from a small number of people in the tech world. Who the philanthropists are changes and is reflective of the days in which you live. Back in the days of Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mallon, there’s railroad and oil titans that built their empires and subsequent foundations. And there’s people that work in totally different fields—they are software developers, and they have billions of dollars. I think who has the money is really going to affect where this money gets spent. So I think that’s going to make a difference. Our founder, John Templeton, was more like Warren Buffett. He broadly knew business across many, many sectors, but somebody who developed a company in San Jose and then sold it for three billion dollars is going to have a very different vantage point than Sir John who is looking across dozens of different industries for where good investments were. The people who found the foundations are going to have their imprint on what philanthropy looks like. So that’s certainly going to change as the way that our economy works, and the way that money gets made, it makes philanthropy look different. That’s about as specific as I can be, because I’m way new to the area and quite ignorant. 

What advice would you give a student interested in your field?

Here’s how I’m going to answer it. I’m going to say that my field is the liberal arts, because that it is the liberal arts that got me to where I am. And I would tell liberal arts students that liberal arts is not about trying to get a particular job after college. It’s about building a foundation and a skill set that would be valuable to jobs you’ve never considered before, probably even jobs that don’t exist right now.

Many people who go to college are generally curious people that want to learn. They are fascinated by humans, they’re fascinated by nature, they’re fascinated by space. For those people, it really does not matter what job you get right out of college. What matters is during the four years you’re there that you learn how to read well, to write well, to think well, to network, to be comfortable in strange places. It’s a combination of building your intellect and building your social skills and building your character. You are developing assets that would be valuable in a number of different venues that you can’t envision at all while you’re doing it or in the world we live in. The world changes too fast. There are notable exceptions. There are professions like medicine, law, engineering, architecture, music that require a training regimen. But anything in the business world, anything in the nonprofit world, those things require—if you’ve developed your intellect, your social skills, and your character, that’s the way to prepare for those jobs.

So that’s my advice. I was a liberal arts person in undergrad, and I have a lot of liberal arts friends who just were beside themselves with not knowing what to do. There are not clear paths for liberal arts students, but if you’re okay with not clear paths, there are very interesting paths that you can explore if you develop your intellect, social skills, and character during your college years. 

(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)