3.37 Why academics need to think like entrepreneurs

In this episode, I welcome Dr Ilana Horwitz, author of the new book, The Entrepreneurial Scholar. Being entrepreneurial isn’t just about starting a business — it’s about thinking creatively, seizing opportunities, and applying academic skills in innovative ways. We explore how PhD students and academics can develop an entrepreneurial mindset and connect with people outside their field to unlock new possibilities. Plus, we talk about how academic careers can be enriched by embracing flexibility and finding new ways to contribute to society, whether through collaboration, commercialization, or interdisciplinary projects.

Links 

Find out more about Dr Ilana Horwitz here.

The Entrepreneurial Scholar website (Ilana’s book)

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

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Transcript

Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I am really excited to introduce academic and author Professor Ilana Horwitz, who is an assistant professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Tulane University. So welcome, Ilana. It's so wonderful to have you here.

Ilana: Thank you so much for having me, Vikki. No problem.

Vikki: So we are here to talk about your new book, which at the time of us recording this now is not quite out and I believe you are expecting an exciting parcel today.

Ilana: Indeed. I think I'm gonna get a box of books that, uh, when I, when my first book came out, actually, that was probably one of the most exciting moments. You open up that book, it's like giving birth to a child and I'm so excited for that feeling again. 

Vikki: So good. Make sure you record it. Get your,

Ilana: oh, I do plan on it

Vikki: record your unboxing video. Perfect. But by the time you guys are listening to this, it will be out, it is called The Entrepreneurial Scholar and I've just been binge reading it and I've learned so much already. So let's start, before we dive into the book, tell people a little bit more about you.

Ilana: Great. So as you mentioned, I work at Tulane University, which is New Orleans, Louisiana, and I'm a professor of Jewish studies and sociology. But my training is actually from a school of education. I went to the Stanford Graduate School of Education and my PhD is in sociology of Education and also I'm a sociologist of religion.

Ilana: So my work is really at that intersection and I write a lot about the role mostly in the United States about how religious upbringing and social class and gender and race and ethnicity influence people along the life course, particularly in their educational trajectories. 

Vikki: So fascinating. And we ended up having a bit of a chat before this. I got very distracted looking at your first book, which I'll get you to give us the title of in a second on that topic, which just looks fascinating. So I may need to get you back at some point to talk about that stuff.

Ilana: Sure. So my first book is called God Grades and Graduation- Religion's, surprising Impact on Academic Success. And it was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. And that book actually came out of my dissertation. And it is a book primarily about how being religious in the United States is associated with academic outcomes, both at the K 12 level and then in higher education.

Vikki: That's so cool. I'm so glad I asked that because I obviously didn't know it came out of your dissertation. I think for doctoral students, hearing that the work they do doesn't have to just sit in a thesis somewhere and never get read again. That, you know, people do convert and get it out there so that people are reading. I think that's really exciting and fits with this notion of being an entrepreneurial scholar, right? 

Ilana: Yeah, absolutely. When I actually, we'll probably talk about this, but I had no intention to become an academic. Uh, and when I did decide to stay in academia, I really made a commitment to myself that everything that I wrote was going to make it into the public in some way, shape, or form.

Ilana: I really was resistant to the idea that my work would just like sit behind a paywall and collect dust on bookshelves. And so every time I do, I write anything academic, I also write a lot of public opinion pieces about it or engage in public scholarship. And so yeah, the book is one of the ways in which I sort of executed on that commitment to doing work that reaches beyond the ivory tower.

Vikki: Amazing. That leads perfectly into how did you end up writing a book? You said obviously have that sort of mindset that you want to get out and make a difference and have an impact in the world as well as your, within your academic work itself. So how did you end up writing a book about entrepreneurship in scholarly world?

Ilana: Vikki, it was the most unexpected book imaginable. I really had no intention to write this book. It really happened by accident, and it actually kind of happened in a way that I think what entrepreneurship teaches us. And that is, it came out of a moment of failure and of a moment of public scholarship.

Ilana: So here's what happened. At the end of my doctoral program, I was already, beyond having to take classes. I was in my sixth year, but I decided to audit a class taught by Sam Wineburg. He's a historian of education, but he's also very committed to public scholarship. And he was teaching a class about how to do publicly engaged work and not surprising the final assignment for the class was to write an op-ed. So most students in the class decided to write about their research, and at that point I was really spending a lot of time kind of reflecting on my own PhD journey, which was very unusual. I came from a background in the business world and working at some startups and then in research and evaluation.

Ilana: And I didn't start my PhD until I was 30 and I just took a very different approach to it. And I noticed that although I was very stressed out and I didn't have a job and I was sort of experiencing a lot of crises in the way that my classmates were also experiencing, there was something about the nature of academia that I loved in a way that my colleagues found really debilitating.

Ilana: And so I decided to reflect on this in this op-ed. So I submitted it to Sam, and Sam, um, was really encouraging and he was like, this kind of has two threads. You need to pick one or the other and go with it. And I picked a thread and basically like it failed. I won't go into sort of the details of, you know, what I was arguing in that first version, but I submitted it to several public outlets and it failed sort of repeatedly over the course of a few months.

Ilana: And it was really discouraging and eventually, and I gave up on it to be honest. And then Sam, who I stayed in touch with after I graduated, he was like, you have to put it out there. Like there was really good stuff in there. Don't give up on it. And so for two years, Vikki, I sat on this op-ed, uh, and I, and it was on my to-do list and every, you know, week or so, it would move to do next todo list and I would never do it.

Ilana: And it was the summer of 2021 and I was actually just about to start my position at Tulane. It was like middle of June and I was starting in two weeks and, 'cause I had a postdoc between, finishing my PhD and starting at Tulane and I was about to go home and then I was like, you know what, Ilana, you have childcare right now, you have like an hour. Why don't you take out that op-ed and see what you can do with it? And so I like finally found it in my files online and I read it and I went back to one of the original vision, like the direction that I didn't take. And, and I just sent it off.

Ilana: I sent it to Inside Higher Ed where I already had published something and they replied right away and they said, this is great. We'll take it. Wow. And the title of that piece was called why PhD Students Should Think Like Entrepreneurs. And it came out a few weeks later and I got a few emails, you know, from professors. I got some emails from directors of graduate programs, from some from therapists. And then I got the most unexpected email and it came from an editor at Princeton University Press. Peter and Peter said. I just read your op-ed, this is great. Do you wanna write a book on this topic? And I was like, are you for real?

Ilana: Are you, are you sure? I was like a nobody, I mean, I had like not started my position. My first book hadn't come out. I hadn't been in the New York Times yet. Like nothing that has happened to me since had happened at that moment. But he said, we have been looking for someone to write a book like this, but no one has that kind of background in entrepreneurship and the business world to have the credibility to write it. So we think you're the right person. And that is how this book came to be. 

Vikki: I love that. And what I love most about it is you started by saying that it was kind of luck and those sorts of things. And I just love how there were so many bits of that story that if you had responded differently to them, you wouldn't have ended up where you were. So that final piece, the fact that that guy was looking for that and he know, read your piece that bit. Might be luck, but all the way from what you chose to write about the fact that you tried to submit it. The fact that you coped with that failure, you, the fact that you kept in touch with the professor, that you were memorable enough that the professor reminded you that you really should think about this stuff. You went again there. All that resilience and everything. There's so much that led up to this happening and I just think that's such a useful story of how people create their own luck. 

Ilana: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right and I actually start the book with that story because I think it's an perfect illustration of a key point that I make in the book, and that is to be, to think entrepreneurially.

Ilana: You need to ask yourself, who am I? What do I know and who do I know? And the lesson that I learned in that op-ed is when I tried to write it the first time when I picked a thread, I was writing from a sort of place of something I didn't know a lot about. I was so writing it for a K 12 teacher audience.

Ilana: And when people read it, they were like, it's clear that you've never taught in a K 12 setting. And that's true. I had never been a full-time K 12 teacher. And when I revised it, I really leaned into my own experience working in entrepreneurial settings and in the business world. And that is when it was able to shine because I was speaking from something that I had experience in.

Ilana: And you're right, the fact that I kept in touch with Sam and the fact that I reached out to Inside Higher Ed to publish it where I already knew somebody. Like I leveraged a lot of my own skills and connections, and that is a really big piece of entrepreneurial thinking. And ultimately, like with entrepreneurial thinking, you put stuff out to, into the world and you don't know what's gonna be come of it.

Ilana: And I think this op-ed is the best illustration of that. Like, I had no idea that this would ever, I didn't plan for this. And that's I think how some of the best things happen. 

Vikki: Absolutely. So you've touched on this a little bit already, but just for people who haven't thought about , in this context, what do you mean by entrepreneurial? Because often I think when people think about this, they're thinking about startups, they're thinking about side hustles, all that stuff. How are you applying that to academia? 

Ilana: My definition of entrepreneurial thinking is as follows. It is the ability to generate an idea. So instead of a product, right, you're generating an idea that is the product that scholars put out into the world. It is the ability to generate ideas with very limited resources while navigating an environment of high uncertainty. And that is really the way entrepreneurs go about their work. I think there's this idea that, oh, entrepreneurship, people wanna make money and so they come up with a product. But oftentimes, what ends up happening is someone sees that there's a solution to a problem, and then it becomes an entrepreneurial venture.

Ilana: And I wanna be really clear that when I say and use the term entrepreneurship, I am not talking about trying to monetize our ideas. And I'm not talking about any sort of like academic capitalism because I think that's where I think people get hung up on the word. And I make a distinction in the book about sort of good business practices, which are often around management, but entrepreneurialism isn't about good management, right?

Ilana: That's about efficiency and having good systems in place and that stuff is important. But entrepreneurial thinking is really about, I'll say it again, being able to generate something new like an idea with very limited resources while navigating an environment of high uncertainty. 

Vikki: So good. And I was particularly excited to see your background 'cause one of the things that I see amongst my PhD student and even academic clients is this belief that entrepreneurialism in its sort of more traditional sense is the kind of realm of the engineers and the scientists and things. And often my humanities and social science and arts students a bit like the world doesn't care what I'm doing. I'm doing this little niche thing, nobody cares. I think it's interesting, but that's not always enough to keep me going on a gray Monday afternoon like it is here and to have somebody who comes from the sort of academic background that you come from talking about entrepreneurialism, I thought was just a really, was a really eye-opening.

Vikki: And obviously, you say in the book that the people you speak to go across a range of disciplines, but they skew that way because they're the people that you are in your community's. I wonder if you explain a little more about, about that. 

Ilana: Yeah, so this book is based not only on my own experience, but also interviews with about 45 people from a range of backgrounds and institutions, so I would say the vast majority are still in academia, but they were people who I got to, when I put out calls and I said, who do you think of as entrepreneurial in their work? And so some of these people got nominated and some of them are people who I also think of as being entrepreneurial, although they themselves wouldn't necessarily have used that word.

Ilana: And then I also talked to some people who either left academia to pursue some sort of entrepreneurial venture or never were in academia, but are entrepreneurs in other ways, because I wanted to really try to understand some of those mindsets and dispositions that help them do their work but certainly my own background having worked in a couple of startups and then in the business world, and my own lived experience. I immigrated to the United States and my parents were very entrepreneurial , that also helped me inform, uh, this book. 

Vikki: I love it. And honestly just for the, I mean the stuff that you put in it is amazing, but then having all of those interesting people giving their little pearls, I found myself just writing down, look up so-and-so, look up so-and-so look up So andSo as I was reading, 'cause there were so many bits. I did also spot friend of the podcast, Alison Miller, who has been on talking about academic writing before. So I was like, oh, I know her. 

Ilana: Yeah. That's exciting. That's always lot of fun.

Vikki: So I wanna know how this goes down with academics. When you tell academics that they should be more entrepreneurial or that they might benefit, let's avoid the word should, they might benefit from being more entrepreneurial. How is that generally received? Are they excited or does it feel like another thing they've gotta be good at or Yeah, what do people think?

Ilana: Yeah, it's a little too soon to tell 'cause the book hasn't come out. So I don't actually know what kind of reactions it's going to yield. When I did the op-ed you know, I think most people at first don't recognize that they think in entrepreneurial ways and so if they're willing to sort of like go past the idea of, oh, entrepreneurship is icky, entrepreneurship is about making money, entrepreneurship is about, sort of Silicon Valley and all the things we might hate about it, if they're willing to look past it and really, uh, reflect on what I mean by it, they can see how they can embrace that in their own work.

Ilana: And I think one of the key things that I want people to take away from this book is that I want people to reclaim their sense of autonomy and see themselves as having more agency in their work. I know you talk about the idea of being your own boss, and I talk a lot about that too because one of the things that I noticed is like people lose a lot of their sense of agency while they're doctoral students. And I can understand why that happens, right? You come in and you're basically working with your advisor and all these other brilliant people and you're at the bottom of the totem pole and you feel like you have nothing to offer 'cause everybody else has already come up with an next great idea.

Ilana: But there's something about academia, you know, that beats that agency out of you and that excitement out of you and makes you feel completely at the whim of the system. And the system of graduate education is not working particularly well, at least here in the United States. And there's a lot of challenges with it. But like we can't keep bemoaning the system. We gotta work with what we already have. And so I'm trying to get people to reclaim their sense of agency in a system that's broken. And I think if they're willing to hear that, that can feel really empowering. 

Vikki: Yeah. Definitely. My clients are often torn between wanting to be independent and being told they need to be independent but at the same time feeling as though there's a right answer that their advisor or supervisor wants to get them to. And so they find it often very difficult and quite scary to put their ideas out there. And so I think creating an environment where that's exactly what they're doing and what they're intended to be doing is amazing. I loved there was a section you had with, um, Sophie von, am I saying that right? Um. I was a professor of education who was talking about seeing all the things you do as a graduate student or as an academic, as a re, as a opportunity to learn rather than as just another thing to do.

Vikki: So I'm gonna write this in order to learn how to do that, and I'm gonna go to that conference in order to learn this stuff. Rather than that kind of tick box exercise that often people are like, oh, I need one of them to pass. I need one of them to graduate. I need that for my cv. I really like that idea of grabbing autonomy over your career and your learning and grabbing those opportunities.

Ilana: Yeah, absolutely. One of the key things that I try to convey in the book, and this was something I didn't understand going into the PhD program to be honest, there was a lot that I didn't understand about the whole enterprise. I didn't have any family members who had gotten doctorates and I was a little clueless, but one of the most sort of illuminating moments, and I talk a lot about this in throughout the book and including in the introduction, is that during my orientation when I got to Stanford, one of the speakers, Eamonn Callan, who's a philosopher of education, he said, your job is no longer to be a consumer of information. It is now your job to be a producer of knowledge. And I think for me, that very simple advice changed my entire relationship with academia and the educational enterprise because it was true, Mike, my whole life, I'd been asked to be really good at consuming information and regurgitating back what I learned.

Ilana: And I actually, to be honest, was never particularly good at that. And I was not really that intellectually curious. I did all the stuff that you're supposed to do through high school and in college, but it was always about like checking the boxes. And actually after college I said I never wanna like be in an academic setting ever again.

Ilana: It's very ironic that I ended up as a professor, but when I started my doctorate and I realized like, oh, I am no longer actually being evaluated on my ability to regurgitate information. In fact, no one is ever gonna look up my grades again. And now everything that I do is for the purpose of my own curiosity and figuring out the answer to a problem or a puzzle that I have, and I get to determine what that problem or puzzle is, how I wanna solve it, when I wanna work on it, and how I wanna put it out there in the world. And I think that was so liberating for me to view myself in that way. I mean, like, I get to play detective all day long, that's my job.

Ilana: And then I get to write about it and tell people what I learned. It's super liberating. But I think you need to really, uh, sort of see yourself as agentic in that process and not do things like just check the boxes. In fact, if I had just checked the boxes, I would've never taken that class on public scholarship and I wouldn't have taken a bunch of, I audited so many classes, I was like, I'm at this university and I just get to do this for free.

Ilana: Like, why not? So I really took advantage. I took classes in improv and in public speaking and things that weren't directly related, but have helped me in so many ways. But you gotta take agency over the journey. 

Vikki: I've written, remember one of the bits you noted that you found that really liberating, but that many of the people around you found it quite scary. So if listeners are thinking, you know, oh yeah, but that sounds exciting, but that sounds terrifying too. What would you say to them? 

Ilana: I think the reason it's terrifying is like, let's think about the person who often ends up in a PhD program. There are people who have been so good at school their entire life, like they've really , figured out how to do what in sociology of education, the three Rs of the hidden curriculum of schooling, the rules, the routines, and the regulation.

Ilana: And they've done it so well and they're like experts in schooling. Those are the people who end up in PhD programs quite often, right? That they're so good at it, that they're like, oh, I should go pro. And actually being a pro at schooling doesn't translate well in academia necessarily because you have to have a lot more agency in the process than you had before.

Ilana: And you have to be willing to chart your own path, to network with other people to ask for help. And another thing, this asking for help piece is really difficult because if you're a person who's been like a pro student and have like figured it out and gotten to the top of the game, it's really hard to ask for help.

Ilana: And it's also really hard to feel like you aren't the expert anymore, right? That you aren't the best in the room. Now there's all these other people who are better at sort of school than you are. They know more than you and it's very humbling. And it's also debilitating. And so I think for a lot of people sort of losing that structure of schooling.

Ilana: And I think in the US because we have these couple of years of coursework and we have the comps or some version of that, there are these couple of years where there is a script. And then the script gets taken away. And that is the moment when I think things fall apart for a lot of people and for me, because I never really liked the script of school, script of schooling I was like, this is awesome. I was just like in a playground. 

Vikki: Yeah. I empathize with that a lot. My mom has a running joke that I've been telling people what they should do since I was a child and that it gets less obnoxious as I actually know stuff. But as a child it was pretty awful when I was telling everyone what to do, now slightly better.

Vikki: Um. So, but what, what do they do? I'm gonna push you back though on Yeah. What do they do? Those, those, so if listeners to this are going, I think that's me. I think I'm a people pleaser. I'm someone who's, I learned how to tick the boxes, how to prepare for exams, how to, you know, hit all the mark schemes and everything. And now I don't know, what if that's me, what do I do? How do I develop these entrepreneurial skills that you talk about? 

Ilana: Yeah. So one thing I think is really important is to view scholarship as a community sport. And I think in the humanities, particularly, this is challenging because a lot of humanities folks do very independent work. They do solo authored monographs. Whereas in the social sciences, at least in sociology, I can co-author a lot of things. And so if you are listening and you're like, oh, well I can't sort of collaborate with people in my actual scholarship, you can actually collaborate with people in things that aren't necessarily your writing.

Ilana: So thinking of scholarship as a community sport means really thinking like ex maximally about who was in your network and trying to grow that network. So I'll give you an example. Like when I got to Stanford, I have an amazing advisor, and I was really grateful for all of his guidance and feedback along the way, but you know, there were things that he was really fantastic at and knew a lot about and could give me direction in a lot of things. But then there were things that he was more limited in. And so I never viewed him as sort of like the sole person who was helping me. And I developed a network of both mentors and collaborators who have been really pivotal.

Ilana: And so one of those people, for example, was Professor Lee Schulman, who just recently passed away, but he had been at Stanford for a long time. He was an emeritus professor, but he came to campus on a regular basis and I happened to meet him, actually through synagogue, and I was really interested in his work and he was very invested in the doctoral students at Stanford who were interested in the intersection of education and Jewish studies because it was something he was personally interested in.

Ilana: And he was like, you know, I'm happy to meet with you. And most people would be like, oh, that's so nice that he said that. I'm not actually gonna take him up on that. And I totally took him up on that. You're like, I'm, I was like, here. I'm like, and we started having coffee. He loved when people would come to his office and he had this espresso machine and he would make, you know, me a cute little coffee and we would sit and really like my dissertation idea and the data that I have all came out as a result of one of the meetings that I had. What happened was we were just chatting and he would tell me a lot of stories and he happened to mention that he was going to a meeting at a local foundation to talk about some research. And I said, wow, I'd love to be a fly on the wall at that meeting. And he was like, oh, lemme see what I can do. And two days later, you know, he emails me and he's like, I got you a seat at the table. Come 

Vikki: amazing. 

Ilana: And so I show up and it's this amazing room of scholars and some funders. And one of the people who I ended up meeting was this guy at Notre Dame, professor Chris Smith, who was talking about this data set called the National Study of Youth and Religion.

Ilana: I had never heard about this data set and he mentioned, he was like, oh, he's like, we did this big study, we followed a nationally representative sample of teens in the United States for a 10 year period. And we have this over sample of Jews. And we hired, um, as sort of someone to do something with those data.

Ilana: And nothing ca really came of it. So if anyone in the room knows of any doctoral students who need a good underutilized data set, they should reach out to me. And I was like, uh, hello me. And so right away I reach out to Chris and I was like, I really would love to have that data. And this, this fundamentally changed the entire trajectory of my PhD.

Ilana: I then got access to those data. They were incredibly willing to share it. And I ended up doing a dissertation that I hadn't even sort of thought about, all because I put out a lot of ideas and sort of questions out into the world, and a lot of like, relationships out into the world.

Ilana: And one of the things about being entrepreneurial is like, you never know what's gonna stick and what it's gonna yield. And I think one of my biggest pieces of advice for people is like, you can think of yourself as like, you're, you're in charge of making dinner tonight, right?

Ilana: And so you might pull out a recipe and say like, here's X, Y, Z ingredients and I'm going to make this particular recipe. And some of us view our research in that way. I'm gonna follow x, y, Z steps and I'm gonna get to something. And I view it differently. I view research as a, a much more sort of uncertain enterprise. And so I'll say, oh, I need to make dinner tonight. Here's X, Y, Z ingredients in my pantry. Let's see what I can make out of this. And I actually don't know what the final product is gonna be. And I encourage people to sort of think of the work that they're doing as having this uncertainty and leaning into that uncertainty because there are sort of surprises that come along in that process that yield really, really, um, unexpected and often great things.

Ilana: And if we plan too much and then there's failure or something goes awry, we kind of fall apart. But if you know that there's gonna be failure, like, and you know, there things are gonna fall apart, and then you can sort of work with the surprises that come along the way, you're probably gonna be more successful because you'll have less of a crisis when things do fall apart.

Vikki: Yeah, and that was one of my the favorite parts of my book actually. So for the listeners, the book's kind of divided into four big chunks, isn't it? I think of different kind of qualities and one of the areas was navigating uncertainty. And it's something that I really see my clients struggle with a lot.

Vikki: The kind of, I don't want to waste time doing things that don't work out. There's this real sort of false sense of efficiency that if you know what you need to read in advance, then you know how long it's going to take. You'll be able to work your way through that. If you know what you are writing, you'll only read the things you need to read in order to write that. And I really en enjoyed that section, how it sort of turned on its head, that actually uncertainty is what's gonna lead us to something interesting. 

Ilana: Right. Um, absolutely. And I think another thing listeners can ask themselves is, is to navigate this uncertainty, you need to really ask yourself, okay, who am I? What do I know and who do I know? And what I mean by that is like sometimes. We have, um, we can lean into sort of skills that we have and look to other people to help us with skills we don't have. So let me give you an example. When I ask myself, like, okay, well who am I? What do I know and who do I know? Let me focus on the, what do I know? So for example, I am a mixed methods researcher. I do both quantitative and qualitative analysis. I can work with big surveys, data sets, as well as with qualitative interviews. But I am not the best quantitative social scientist out there by far. I can certainly understand all this stuff. I can do a lot of the basics, but it's not it's not something that is my strongest suit. And so I collaborate with people for whom that is their strong suit. And as a result, I'm able to put out publications and put out ideas into the world that I couldn't have generated myself. And it would take me, I'm like pretty strategic in thinking about like, well, it would take me x amount of time to figure this out on my own and maybe that's a good use of my time right now.

Ilana: Or maybe I collaborate with such and such person who really has a strength in that. And then together, right, we can put out something into the world that's faster and better than either one of us could do alone. Right. 'cause you also have to think about like, who do I know, who are the people who might have this area of expertise? Um, I'll give one other example of sort of how to think about that question of like, who am I? What do I know and who do I know? You might, have an idea that you wanna put out into the world. And I talk a lot in the book about the importance of putting our ideas out there early and often, and not waiting until like we're into it six years and then feel so good about it that we feel like we can share. And I know that is advice that some people disagree with because I think the earlier you put ideas out there, the more feedback you can get from people and it helps you clarify in your own mind what's interesting and what's not , but eventually, let's say you wanna share it, and let's say you're a doctoral student right now, and you're like, well, I'm not gonna get into, you know, the Guardian or the New York Times or whatever publication, right?

Ilana: And that's totally legit. Like you probably won't, but maybe you could get into your local newspaper or maybe your graduate school can cover your research. So it's helpful to think about like, okay, well who do I know sort of within my domain, who might be interested in putting this research out?

Ilana: Maybe they put it out on their blog or like early on when I was in grad school, I was talking with someone at the sort of Stanford communications office and I was telling them about my research and they were like, oh, that sounds so interesting. Like, we'd love to write something about it. And that was actually like the first piece of media coverage I ever got.

Ilana: And you have to be willing to be a little bit wrong and to put yourself out there, like you have to know that if you put something out there, you have to be willing to have people critique it and engage with your ideas. And you have to be willing to say like, oh, actually I was a little bit wrong on that. Because no scholarship is perfect and sort of being, being willing to change your ideas is a very important part of this mindset. 

Vikki: Yeah, definitely. And I think one of the things we often talk about with my clients is what you make particular things that happen to you mean about you. And one of the things that I loved in the book was you talked about how if your intention is to look smart, then you are gonna delay putting stuff out there. You're gonna delay until you are absolutely sure, you are definitely right. But if your goal is to move an idea forward and find out interesting things, then if someone's got a reason your idea's bad, let's find it out now and move on and change it and tweak it and get it to something that's actually gonna work rather than this kind of trying to protect your sense of self, I guess your, the sense of your own ability, 

Ilana: right? You have to sort of figure out what is the, the moment at which you feel like your idea is solid enough and you have enough evidence to back up your idea that you can put it out there. Like, I certainly wouldn't suggest doing this, you know, in the very nascent stages. At the very nascent stages, you should be work shopping your idea within circles within your institution, who you really trust and with people you really trust.

Ilana: But once you have enough out there, it may not be a perfect story. And only you can sort of figure out for yourself whether it's ready to go out in the world. But there's this children's book, I don't know if you guys have it in the uk. It's called Like, what do You Do With An Idea? It's the same author who wrote, what do you Do With a Problem? It's this great children's book where basically like this little kid, this is the one that's, what do you do with an idea? He has an idea and at first it's like really, really small, but it's like he feels this like emotion about it.

Ilana: Like he's excited about it, but he's also a little nervous about it. He doesn't know if he should share his idea with other people because he doesn't wanna get critiqued or he doesn't want other people to say it's bad. And over time, this book, this idea kind of grows and he's nurturing it and he feeds it.

Ilana: The book says, and he plays with it. And I love this sort of analogy, this idea of like feeding your idea and playing with your idea. Because eventually the character in that book puts is, that feels good enough about their, that they've nurtured their ideas so much that they're ready and confident enough to put it out in the world and know that they're gonna be willing to withstand the critique that it might, or the reactions that it might yield. Um, but yeah, you have to nurture your idea. You have to play with your idea. You have to sort of marinate on your idea. And, um, and I think with that then there's, this comes this moment which you're like, okay, I'm ready. I'm ready to put this out into the world in some maybe even very small way. Yeah. 

Vikki: And I'm not sure whether this episode will have come out by the time yours comes out. I think it will. I talked recently with Tony Stubblebine who is the CEO of Medium, and he was talking about academics writing for Medium , and that blogging site being an outlet for these sorts of things. So if you are interested in this, listeners, then make sure you check out that episode too.

Ilana: And I would say that the process of writing is actually really important. Mm-hmm. Because even if you're like, well, no one's gonna read it, it's fine. It's okay if nobody reads it because you have gone through the exercise of actually articulating your ideas in a way that is accessible to a public audience.

Ilana: And that is one of the key skills like. One of the things that I learned from Sam Wineburg, one of the first exercises he had us do in that public writing class, he said, write a letter to a family friend or a family member , who's not an expert in your field, but you know, has a sort of a, a college degree, right?

Ilana: And explain your idea and your research to them. And it was remarkable how difficult this was for people to not use the academic jargon to sort of start from a place where everybody can understand what you're doing and so just the like actual simple act of explaining something can be incredibly clarifying in your own mind.

Vikki: Yeah, absolutely. So going back a few years now, but when I was still an academic, there's a scheme in the UK run by the British Association, which is for academics to be media fellows. So you spend a month or six weeks working with a media organization as a science journalist. Mm-hmm. So you full on leave behind your university.

Vikki: I went to Dublin in Ireland, to work for the Irish Times for a month as a, as a science journalist, writing on everything. So a few bits to do with my topic, but mostly everything else I was writing ridiculous amounts. And that that skill of being able to take something complex that until you spoke to that scientist you didn't even know anything about, and now you've gotta turn it into something that's digestible and interesting for readers of a newspaper is fascinating. I was taking so many notes when I read this book, the one one bit that was in the disseminating your ideas section that was just so fascinating.

Vikki: You are gonna be able to correct me on pronunciation again. But David Labaree, I believe was his name. Uhhuh. Yeah. He was talking about how, now I'm actually gonna quote this 'cause I loved it so much. One way to keep your neurotic self-doubt under control is to bear in mind an important guiding principle for good writing. You are under no obligation to provide a perfectly uncontestable story. And then I believe he went on to say, the confidence to write isn't the same thing as the confidence that your analysis is completely rock solid. And I just. I thought that was so freeing. 'cause so many of the people that I work with are desperately trying to make sure that everything they write is completely unrefutable so that their supervisors don't criticize them, so their examiners don't criticize 'em, so that the academic world at large don't, and I thought that notion that it needs to be defensible, but doesn't have to be irrefutable, I thought was just so freeing. 

Ilana: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, uh, David Labaree is one of my mentors and certainly my own mentality is very much shaped by his attitude. And, look, there's so much self doubt, and it's really hard to take that advice, I encourage people to find really small ways of being able to do that. And when I say like, you never know what, what you put out and what it's gonna yield in the world, like, here's another example of something that was totally unexpected that happened to me.

Ilana: I had been running a multi-year study at Stanford about, um, looking at students who identify as racial, ethnic, and religious, uh, minority students. And at some point I felt like I had enough data. We weren't finished with data collection, but I felt like I had enough data to make an argument, about the way in which an elite university, might be contributing to religious polarization in this country.

Ilana: And I wrote this op-ed and I, it's, I think it's an inside higher ed. I think it's called, like how universities contribute to religious polarization or something like that. And I put it out there, it got published, and then I ended up being asked to be a speaker for the Heterodox Academy.

Ilana: And then a foundation contacted me and asked me to review a bunch of like, grants. Like all sorts of stuff ended up coming out of this and the thing about thinking entrepreneurially is like, you, you just don't know what something is gonna yield. And I think that there's an excitement to that, that I hope people can embrace.

Vikki: Yeah, definitely. Now I have a, the flip side of that to ask though, because there will be some people listening for whom this all sounds exciting and interesting, but a little bit terrifying. A little bit like they, we've talked about them a little bit, but I also know partly 'cause I was one, but partly because I've supervised them, partly because I work with some now, there are the students who want to do everything and so this is like music their ears, right?

Vikki: They wanna write for this and write for that and be involved in all the, you know, have the side hustles that you talk about in one of the sections, have all of that stuff. How do you strike the balance between what is the kind of, I'm gonna say right amount, obviously there's no, yeah. What is an appropriate amount of throwing stuff out there versus taking on too much?

Vikki: 'cause I've certainly had students in the past where they were doing so many other things, I was a little bit in the background kind of going, um, you you have got a thesis. Yeah, we a thesis there. We should do that too. So how do you help people to kind of find, if they're at the kind of, I don't wanna say too entrepreneurial, but if they're at that end of things, how do you help people find that balance?

Ilana: That's a really great question, and you're right, a very valid point that sometimes it's easy to go off in so many directions. And I remember when I was writing op-ed, some of my, um, friends were like, oh my God, you've spent like 20 hours on this. Is this really good use of your time? And at first I was like, yes, this is a good use of my time.

Ilana: And I think I got to a point, I don't remember how many hours I had sort of poured into it, but I could tell in my mind that like it needed a break. So you do have to be really strategic about how you use your time and it's hard to give very specific guidance on it, but you have to be able to calibrate like when the stuff that you're doing is actually advancing your networks and advancing your scholarship and advancing sort of your teaching. Like is it advancing your work or are you stuck and sort of spinning your wheels? And maybe it just needs a pause, and maybe you come back to it. Like, I think a thing to know is, you can always come back to something.

Ilana: Um, but like, I'll give you an example. Okay. I, of how I, I thought about sort of how do I strategically go about things when I was a doctoral student so that I wasn't spreading myself too thin, but I also was gaining different kinds of experience. So, , at one point I was probably in like my fourth or fifth year, uh, and I realized that I didn't really have any teaching experience because it, the way my doctoral program was structured was that we got funding, but it was to do a research assistantship, not a teaching assistantship. And I was like trying to get ready to go on the job market and I had no teaching background, which was ironic 'cause I went to a school of education and I learned by going to some workshop that like you have to be an instructor of record for it to be taken seriously, especially at more teaching focused and liberal arts universities.

Ilana: And I was like, okay, got it. How do I make that happen? The first thing I did was like, I became a TA but that didn't feel satisfactory to me 'cause I wasn't their instructor of record. So then I was kind of like talking with people about this and I didn't really know what to do about it.

Ilana: And then one day I got an email from a classmate of mine who had gone to church and struck up a conversation with a department chair at a local community college in a sociology department. And he was, he asked her, he was like, do you know anybody who could teach a sociology class? And she was like, oh, say that.

Ilana: And she thought me. And so she emails me, she's like, do you have any interest in teaching a sociology class at the community college down the street? And I was like, oh my gosh, this could be a way to get that teaching experience that I want. But I also, first of all, when I told a couple of faculty members that I was thinking about this, they were like that's a terrible idea. Whatever you do, do not do that because it will take you away from the actual research that you are supposed to be doing. And so I sat with that information and then I also knew it was gonna be a lot of time. And so ultimately what I decided to do was like I was gonna teach this class despite what my, some of my advisors were saying, and the reason I wanted to do it was not just like so I could have this teaching experience, but because I wanted to be able to actually practice saying out loud the concepts of sociology that I was writing about and learning about because I knew it would help cement them and sort of clarify them in my own head.

Ilana: And also I was, training as a sociologist of education and the kinds of students who actually go to this community college are precisely the kinds of students who I write about, right? They're first gen, low income students who are often like parents and working multiple jobs. And I was like, if I really wanna write about this population, I should actually interact with them because most of them are not hanging out on the Stanford campus.

Ilana: But the way in which I thought about doing it strategically was like. I found a colleague who wanted to also get the same kind of experience and we basically came up with the idea that we were gonna pitch to the community college and we were gonna split the class. Meaning that I would teach half of it and she would teach half of it and we would split the pay.

Ilana: But that way we both became the professors of record and we only had half of the work. And so, and in that way, and also a lot of that teaching that I did was at night. Um, and so at night I wasn't gonna be working on my research anyway 'cause I had kids and that like wasn't how I was gonna spend my nights.

Ilana: And so luckily my, you know, my husband was willing to take on the extra childcare, um, for me to be able to do this. And it was a great decision. I learned a ton in the process. One of them became my letter writers for when I went on the job market, which was really helpful. And so there was this strategic thinking about like, mm-hmm, okay, you have to think about the cost benefit analysis, right? Like, how much am I time am I putting into this? What am, what is, what is it detracting from? What could I get out of it? How might I be able to think creatively about how to minimize the work, or make the work strategic? And that's the kind of thinking I would encourage for your listeners as well.

Vikki: Yeah, I love that. And I love how if you are clear about why you're doing something and what you're trying to get out of it, you can then make those decisions in that strategic way. Because like I could imagine students who, if their supervisors say, no, you shouldn't do this, going, okay, you are right. I'll stick to researching. But I can equally imagine people who say, well, I want to, so I'm going to, but then do it, do the whole thing, do it as fast as possible because I mustn't spend too much time on this. Do it in a kind of stressed way because my supervisor doesn't think I should be doing this really.

Vikki: So I just need to get it done and dah, dah, dah, and then not get out of it any of the things that you talk about, like the, the benefits of doing these things. So I loved the way you were really clear on you partly wanted it so that you had that thing on your cv. I'm instructor of record, but also so that you were developing those skills as well, but also recognizing you didn't need the whole thing in order to do either of those things.

Vikki: So I think being really clear on why you are doing it and what your, what skills, not what outcomes necessarily. 'cause we don't always know the outcomes, but what skills you're trying to get out of it can really help you to plan that strategically. 

Ilana: Right, absolutely. And um, first of all, also I got paid to do that, which was also very helpful for me at the time , but it is true, and I've seen this happen a lot, where people spread themselves too thin and then they don't get their, their actual research done. So my biggest piece of advice, is like the motivation to write comes from feeling like you have something important to say. And if you don't feel like you have something important to say, you're never gonna get that research finished ever.

Ilana: It doesn't matter how many p Pomodoro writers, uh, timers you set and how early you wake up, like there's a lot of the technical skills that you really need in place, but you also fundamentally, and this is like an existential problem, you need to think that what you have to say is important. And so when you're thinking about like, well, how do I sort of do all these things while also maintaining my research?

Ilana: Like, you need to think that your research is really important and all those other things are helping you, but you gotta stay focused on the research as well. Um, but I, there's also a point at which, like, if you spend several hours on your research a day, there's a point at which there's diminishing point of returns and it's better for you to do something else.

Ilana: So like I remember, one of the best things I ever did was like, there was a happy hour happening when I was a grad student and I wasn't gonna go because I was like, I should sit in my office and fi, you know, it was five o'clock. I was like, I should sit and try to like bang out another hour of data analysis.

Ilana: And then I was like, you know what? There's free food upstairs. I should just go. And, you know what happened at that meeting? I ended up meeting another faculty member who I had never met. There was no strategic intention there at all. It just was like happening. I happened to tell her about my research and I said I was on the job market and that I was having a hard time. It was like a very friendly conversation. And then about six months later, I, it was graduation and I didn't have a job. Like I had no job lined up when I was graduating. I had cobbled together because I'm a pretty entrepreneurial, a consulting gig and some other, and I finagled away to like, stay on Stanford's campus enrolled as a student, but I did not have like a postdoc or a faculty position.

Ilana: And, after I, you know, did my walk across the stage and then it was like the, the CE celebration, she comes up to me, her name was Denise Pope, and she said, Hey, Ilana, she's like. Do I recall that you're still looking for a job? And I was like, yes. And she's like, oh. She's like, I think I just found you a postdoc on campus.

Ilana: And I was like, you're kidding. And lo and behold, um, the Stanford Center on Longevity was looking for a postdoc of somebody who studied education and did work across the life course. And three days later, Vikki, I had a very amazing postdoc that basically like fell into my lap because I took that time to go to this happy hour to talk to other people.

Ilana: And like in retrospect, thank God I didn't spend that extra hour doing my data analysis. So there are times when, and it's, again, it's hard to predict which things will have payoff and which ones won't. But you just like have to put yourself and your ideas and everything out into the world and see what happens.

Vikki: I love that and what an amazing place to finish. I would say thank you so much for coming on, Ilana. I really appreciate it. I'm so inspired. I've got all my notes. There are various things that I want to look up to read that you reference and things in the book that, so I've got so much outta this book, so if people are interested, as I'm sure they will be, remind people of the name of the book, where they can find it, where they can find out more about you.

Ilana: Absolutely. So the name of the book is The Entrepreneurial Scholar, and the subtitle is A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond. It's intentional that this book is not just about people who are trying to stay in academia, but are recognizing the reality that most people, given the job market right now, aren't gonna stay in academia and it's published by Princeton University Press in their Skills for Scholars series. And this is a really great series. If your listeners don't know about it, this is a series of books that are really related to kind of like professional development. And they're very short. They're like 40 to 50,000 words.

Ilana: You could read them in a couple of hours. And there's great books about creating a syllabus and writing a book proposal and leaving academia and sort of the hidden curriculum of graduate school. So I really encourage people to look at all those books in that series. Skills for Scholars. And if you wanna learn more about me, you can go to my website.

Ilana: It's www.Ilanahorowitz.com. My last name has just one "O", so it's Ilana I-L-A-N-A-H-O-R-W-I-T z.com. Or you can just Google Ilana Horowitz Tulane. And I will share a coupon code with you for this book, um, so that your listeners can get, I think it's 30% off and feel free to reach out to me anytime. I love to hear from listeners.

Vikki: Amazing. Thank you so much. And listeners, keep a ear out 'cause it is possible I might be interviewing some of the other authors from this series as well. I'm super excited. It's an amazing series. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you everyone for listening, and I will see you next week.