What do you do with a Ph.D.? Marilyn Garcia Part 2

One of the biggest concerns of grad students is what to do after grad school. This is especially true of Ph.D. students who know they don’t want to continue in academia, don’t want to be professors or post-docs, but aren’t sure what other options are out there.  This post is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts interviewing people that have gotten their Ph.D. and done something unexpected with it.

Here we continue with Part 2 of my conversation with Marilyn Garcia.

Read Part 1 here.

How She Made the Switch

Of course, the next question is: How do you make that switch when you’re busy being a professor? As it turns out, “I bought a house and basically never stopped looking at houses, never stopped following the market, it became a hobby. So the idea of being able to make this hobby my profession was just…an immediate shift, and I was excited about it.”

When I asked her about the concrete steps she took to become a realtor, she noted that “the barriers to entry in real estate are not that high.” She took some classes, took a test to get a license, and looked for a well established company that would be able to help her get started. She also saved up some money to make the transition, and jumped in during the summer between the fall and spring semesters.

What’s interesting, though, is how much time passed between real estate being a hobby of hers, to her profession. “It was my hobby for…approaching 5 years…but I didn’t even think of it as that. It was just something that I did and enjoyed and it never even crossed my mind to do it for a living.” Five years is a while. Note she didn’t first decide that she wanted a change and then start looking at real estate as a hobby, it was the other way around. It took time in fact, and a some discontent with her current job, to see her hobby as a possible future profession, “When I was thinking about it I was in a massive panic. Until I thought of something that I would love to do,” she recalls, “I was freaking out, and then I thought: oh my god, I could do real estate for a living.”

Marilyn’s entry into real estate came from realizing her hobby, which she had cultivated for five years, could become her profession.

Although she discovered real estate as her hobby and, later, passion when she was a professor, the initial spark of wanting to venture away from academia came much earlier in grad school. She told me a story of her best friend in grad school that left the economics program and became a landscape architect. When Marilyn recalls that episode, one word comes to mind: “Jealous.” Specifically, she was jealous that her friend was doing something creative. Which, in the end, is the underlying theme behind Marilyn’s switch.She has a passion for creativity, and as she says, something “visually creative.”

Economics simply doesn’t cut it, but being a realtor, for her, does.

So Was the Ph.D. Useful At All?

“I absolutely won’t say that I’m using it to the fullest,” Marilyn says about her Ph.D. “But it’s absolutely a benefit in my profession, even though, it’s in most senses completely unrelated. I feel like it absolutely gives me a leg up in what I’m doing.” Interesting, of course, because most realtors do not have a Ph.D. I asked her whether it was the Ph.D. aspect or the economics aspect that gives her the leg up. She feels it’s both. The economics part has more obvious benefits in terms of being able to analyze the market and find trends. In fact, Marilyn puts out a quarterly newsletter with her market analysis based on data she’s compiled.

But there are also some more subtle benefits. For example, getting a Ph.D. demands self-motivation, which being a realtor also requires. Also, Marilyn cites one of the most valuable skills of being a good academic: “figuring out projects that are worthwhile, and then getting myself to do them.”

Lastly, there is the often-mentioned benefit that having the Ph.D. “opens doors.” That is, it gives you some sort of status or stamp of approval. Personally, I’ve heard this benefit mentioned several times, and I have my doubts as to how useful simply having a Ph.D. to show you have a Ph.D. is, and even if the Ph.D. stamp does carry some weight, whether it’s enough weight to be worth it. Why not spend that time gaining an extra 5 years experience in whatever industry you’re interested in?

Nonetheless, Marilyn is certainly glad she finished her Ph.D.

Her Advice to Me and You

How do you know if a life of academia is for you? Simple, “you have to really want to do it” is how Marilyn sees it, and I agree. I imagine most would. For example, Marilyn recalled a friend of hers that loved geography as a grad student, got a faculty position and swore “I’m gonna get tenure and then I’m gonna kick back” but now that he does have tenure, he hasn’t kicked back. From what I’ve seen, that’s not uncommon, and in fact, it means that her friend really likes doing his job.

But even more importantly, it’s Marilyn’s belief that this enjoyment of doing what you do carries over to a greater likelihood of being good at what you do. “I think that most people, if they’re doing something that they really enjoy and really care about and really feel passionate about…I think there are very few people who are doing something like that that don’t do well at it.” This is not an uncommon idea.

We agreed that a big reason for this is because a lot of the stresses of your job and, consequently, a lot of the advice out there (this blog included) on how to do your job with the least stress, how to manage your time, and “hack” your way through this and that, become unnecessary when you truly like what you’re doing.

Of course, that doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be great at what you love — I love playing basketball, but I knew in high school it was not gonna put bread on my table. But it does mean honing your skills and pushing your boundaries will feel less like work. That is, I’m sure Michael Jordan wasn’t staring at the clock during practice and thinking “Okay, I’ll shoot ten more jumpers and call it a day.” And if you think the sports example is too easy since sports are naturally fun, we can also be sure that Albert Einstein wasn’t thinking “Damn, I gotta work for the man at the patent office all day and moonlight as a physicist all night…” Of course, most of us are not as good at anything as they were at basketball and physics, but we can still take something away from the examples.

For grad students, Marilyn suggests asking yourself what you’re jealous of when you see other folks your age and feel jealous. Am I jealous of their specific job, their independence, their salary, their time off, the prestige of their job, the creativity? Armed with that information, you can more carefully discern what it is about your current situation that needs tweaking: I love this part of my job, but I hate that part. Perhaps I can find a way to make it work, or find a related profession (or hobby) that has less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff.

For grad students feeling the itch of changing gears right now, Marilyn suggests finishing. “I was jealous, but I still don’t regret finishing,” she recalls about being jealous of her friends that left. This is great practical advice for someone who doesn’t see themselves making a big leap into something totally different, as she did. “[Go] the traditional route” and “see if there’s something modifiable and interesting” to turn a mediocre job into one you enjoy. And at the same time “think about where else you could go and how else you could use your skills and what other possibilities there could be.” That’s manageable.

And if that doesn’t workout? Well then just save up some cash, take the jump, and do what you love.