Tara Schwegler (AB'93, AM'94 MAPSS, PhD'04 Anthropology) joins our hosts to talk about her career path, from higher education teaching to the pivot to private industry.
Tara Schwegler is a corporate anthropologist and consultant specializing in research-driven leadership development. She has held previous positions as a leader and director of user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) at Meta, RedSquared Consulting, USAA, and Bestica, Inc., while also teaching at the University of Texas at San Antonio as a Senior Lecturer. Prior to her shift to private industry, Schwegler was a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Schegler earned her PhD from the Department of Anthropology in 2004, her MA from MAPSS in 1994, and her BA from The College in 1993.
Kelly Therese Pollock:
Hello, and welcome. I am Kelly Therese Pollock, the Dean of Students in the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.
Paul Poast:
And I am Paul Poast, Deputy Dean of Doctoral Education in the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago.
Kelly Therese Pollock:
And this is Dialogo, a podcast where we speak with alumni of the Division of Social Sciences about their time in our graduate programs and their careers since then. We are delighted today to be joined by Tara Schwegler, who is a research leader and leadership consultant who received her BA from the University of Chicago in 1993, her MA from the Master of Arts program in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago in 1994, and her PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2004. Welcome, Tara.
Tara Schwegler:
Thank you so much.
Kelly Therese Pollock:
Yes. I want to ask you now to talk a little bit about your path from the University of Chicago. You were here a long time, so it probably felt like a very ingrained, "This is where I am," and then moving out into the world, your path to where you are today.
Tara Schwegler:
Okay. Well, in fact, the path is even longer than you mentioned because I was a collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago from 2005 to 2009. So upon completing my PhD, I was teaching and doing research and publishing in academic journals, just as the expectation was. That's what you do.
And my husband is also an anthropologist, and he also graduated from the University of Chicago. So we had long been aware that there might be a situation where it would be difficult for us to both get academic positions in the same part of the country. So we had been open to the idea of looking at other career paths early on in our relationship. And in 2009... or it was 2007, he was offered a job at a financial services company in San Antonio, Texas, USAA, which offers insurance and financial products to military families. And so we decided to move to San Antonio.
And if you look at those timelines, you'll see that I moved to San Antonio in 2007 while I was still a collegiate assistant professor. So I was commuting back and forth to Chicago for a couple of years, and I did it the smart way, which was to avoid the winters and come in the fall and the spring to teach.
I loved teaching. I loved being part of the university, being part of undergraduate education. And my initial intent in San Antonio, once my fellowship ended, was to continue to pursue teaching. There aren't quite as many institutions of higher education in San Antonio. I made some wonderful connections and did some adjunct teaching. But a position became available at USAA, where my husband was working, as a qualitative researcher. And I thought, "Well, I might as well try this."
And it was really interesting. And I think I've said this when I was in the alumni and residence program, is it was difficult for me to shift my mindset at first, because I was very much oriented towards, "This is the path. This is the only path." And I made the transition, but at first it was a little bit uncomfortable. It felt like it wasn't what was expected. I was worried what would my faculty members think. But I made the transition and started doing qualitative research in the private sector, really trying to understand customers, trying to understand their needs. I got the opportunity to do a lot of immersive research, like going into people's homes and talking with them about financial products. And it was through that work that I decided that I would form my own company, a research and strategy consultancy, back in... It was 2012.
And in that consultancy, my business partner and I, we worked with clients across the country, mainly big financial service companies, but we also consulted with nonprofits, American Automobile Association, doing really, really exciting projects, connecting what people need with what business goals our organizations and our clients have. So that's what's kind of brought me along.
And in 2022, I became a research leader at Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook. So I got an opportunity to start seeing more of how user experience research works in that particular context. Throughout this period, I've been teaching at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the Honors College, teaching subjects ranging from anthropology to the anthropology of food to design thinking to user experience design. So I've had an opportunity to really, really explore all of the different subjects that I'm working on day to day in the classroom. So it's interesting because I've been able to continue to... I've been able to continue to teach, to write, and research just in a different type of way.
Paul Poast:
I love the way you described that, especially at the end there, that it's... In many ways, the through line throughout this entire career path has been both teaching and research and doing it, as you said, in the traditional university setting and very much so, but then also doing it in the corporate sector consulting for different types of firms.
I guess one question I could ask is, most out of curiosity because of the fact that you do still continue to teach, how do you find your experiences with research informing your teaching? How do you bring those into the classroom to use those examples? Because again, I think that's something that a lot of people could value from hearing about, is the value of having that broad range of research experiences.
Tara Schwegler:
Well, there's so many different dimensions. And I love that question, Paul. The first response I'll give you is that you immediately get street cred with undergrads when you say that you've been working in user experience research at Meta. There is a way in which I view all these different contexts as mutually reinforcing. I think there has been a tendency to think about public sector, corporate sector research and as more applied and think about academic research as more theoretical, but I have been a strong proponent, along with a thought partner of mine, Melissa Cefkin. We've been really thinking about how these different realms complement one another.
And so when I am teaching, I'm always thinking about how can I... I want students to learn the theory, but I want to have them engaged in projects and assignments that get them out into the world. And I think one of the areas where that's most important is working in teams. Nobody likes group projects, but life is a group project. When you get out into the workforce, you find that there's so much of your time is working with others, and so much of your leadership talent comes from your ability to make things happen and to influence others.
So I try to bring in real-world examples from my own work. I try to take students into different settings. And I've actually led a couple of very hands-on undergraduate courses at the University of Texas, San Antonio. So last semester I was leading a team of 10 honors students in a collaborative consulting project with Texas Public Radio. Texas Public Radio wanted to reimagine their workspace, and I took this group of 10 undergraduates, and we did it consultant style where I was the lead, and I was showing them how you go through a project from the beginning to the end. And we had it all set up, and they were the ones who were doing the interviews with the employees at Texas Public Radio. They were the ones putting together the workshops. They were doing all that work, and I was overseeing that. And we got to have these really interesting conversations about, "Well, what do you do when things don't go the way you expect?" So it's been critical.
And I will say the other thing is I think that staying in the academic sector, continuing to teach helps me stay curious. It helps me understand and stay current with what's going on with different generations. And I really think that the teaching and the work are mutually reinforcing.
Kelly Therese Pollock:
You earned your PhD at a time when it was just expected that people would go on into academic jobs. You've written about things that higher education, especially in graduate education, could be doing to better prepare students for not just as like a backup plan that they might need to do something else, but really proactively, here's the range of possibilities. I'd like you to reflect a little bit on what that might look like, the ways that you think all graduate programs should be thinking about this.
Tara Schwegler:
I've touched on it a little bit in my previous answer, but what I envision and what my colleague Melissa Cefkin and I have been talking about is, how can you make careers outside of the academy something more than an afterthought? Because quite honestly, at the time when I was getting my PhD... And I felt this very intensely when I moved into the private sector. It felt like somewhat that was a less-than outcome.
And when I reflect on the classroom and what I would have liked to have known and what I have had many colleagues who are still in the academy invite me to do is to present in classrooms and share my research. Because what is one of the most surprising things being out in the corporate sector is that a lot of faculty members don't know much about what the opportunities are or what a research project looks like in the private sector. There was a learning curve for me as I made that transition.
And so what I think is a really exciting opportunity is instead of saying, "I'll use anthropology because that's the discipline I know the best," instead of saying, "Well, there's this version of anthropology that we perform in the academy, and there's this version of anthropology that gets," and I'm using a hard word on purpose, "corrupted by being out there. What if we put these in dialogue with one another?"
And it's almost to me like a Picasso painting. What he's doing is collapsing a lot of different perspectives into a single plane. What juxtaposing these different types and uses of knowledge does is it allows us to see multiple different perspectives and ask different questions of one another so we can break out of this theory versus application and think about, "Wow. Maybe there are these questions we hadn't even thought of before."
Paul Poast:
So speaking of questions and researching them, I have to ask, because I always like to ask this, what did you actually write your dissertation on? And what was that process like for you?
Tara Schwegler:
So, Paul, this is so funny because I wrote my dissertation on Mexican technocrats, and I'll go into the details in a minute. But I often think to myself that everything that I know about American business and organizations comes from what I learned when I was observing in the Mexican government.
So I was really interested as... I majored in economics as an undergrad at University of Chicago. I know, very unusual undergraduate trajectory. But I discovered, as I was thinking about what the next step would be for me, I realized that I was more interested in how economic ideas were used than I was in potentially developing the corpus of economic theory. And so I did what is a classic Chicago move, and I decided to pivot to anthropology and use anthropology to study how economic ideas are incorporated into the policymaking process.
So when I was undergraduate, I met many graduate students in economics who then went on, with their PhDs, to get positions in the Mexican government. And so I worked with a lot of them to start sitting in on policymaking meetings to observe what was going on, having one-on-one interviews with people throughout the Mexican government to really get at this question of, what is the influence of economic ideas on the policymaking process in Mexico?
And at the time, it was an unusual ethnographic setting. Many anthropologists work outside of traditional areas that we associate with anthropology. But at the time, it was a bit of a leap to do an ethnographic study of what essentially were elites, but it was that work that really helped me start to understand the importance of organizational dynamics, which is something that... I'll be honest with you, when students come to me and say, "How can I use anthropology in these different parts of the world?" I think that one of the greatest contributions is understanding organizational dynamics.
In my work, I not only have to do the research, but I have to make sure that the research gets traction in an organization, and I need to understand who the various different stakeholders are, what their interests are, what the culture of the organization is. And so my work in the Mexican government really primed me to be able to detect those things and make sure that the research could move forward in an organization.
Because one of the mindsets that I had to work against in my own work is that this idea that, well, good research will speak for itself. If it's a really well-done study and the conclusions are valid, then everyone in an organization will naturally accept it, and it will be truth. And that never happens. Doesn't happen in the academic sector, and it does not happen in the corporate sector either. And so there's a lot of work that needs to be done to understand how do we get these insights into the hands of the people who are going to move them forward.
Kelly Therese Pollock:
There may be graduate students listening who are thinking, "Well, that's great. I should be thinking about a range of career options, and maybe I have a sense of what that might look like." How would you recommend that they position themselves to be out in, let's say, the corporate world? How can they talk about their experiences as a graduate student, the types of skills they've learned in a way that the corporate world is going to value and understand?
Tara Schwegler:
It is a very, very tricky process. And what I mentioned before is maybe faculty members aren't as familiar with what the requirements and expectations are so it could be difficult for those to be taught. I think that one of the best ways for students who want to have a more holistic preparation is to actively seek out opportunities earlier on in graduate school. One of the things that I've noted, and I imagine that this is true a lot of graduates in Chicago is many students still start with the expectation that they will go into the academy, and so they go down a path and really focus on that particular outcome for the duration of their time at Chicago and then maybe towards the end make the pivot if the academic job market doesn't seem like it's going to be amenable for their particular specialization.
What I would ideally advise students to do is to try to seek out these opportunities earlier. I would advise students who think they don't want to go into the academy to still think about and interact with the academy. And I would advise students who don't necessarily think they're going to go elsewhere to still seek out those opportunities. The best way to learn about that, if you don't have someone who can mentor you, is to look at job openings and see how skills are described and try to make that connection for yourself so that you learn to speak in a particular way.
But I'll be honest with you, I don't think employers are expecting graduate students who've never worked in the corporate sector to know all of the jargon or to be able to speak to all of the methods. I mean, there are methods that I had to pick up pretty quickly. I had never led a focus group when I started at USAA. I had never done a usability test when I started at USAA.
What I love about a graduate school, a PhD education, and especially Chicago education, is that it is very agile and adaptable. So I've never done that before. But if you tell me what is the purpose, what are we trying to get at, and show me some examples, I can figure it out. And so I think that many employers realize that PhD students are pretty agile and adaptable. I think where students need to be careful is in the way that they think about applying their knowledge. I started this with a very literal view of applying my knowledge like, "I should be able to tell business people how Marcel Mauss is relevant to their day-to-day lives." That didn't go so well.
So there were frameworks that I thought would be useful, but I couldn't quite figure out how to make the connection. And I think it was because I was so self-consciously trying to objectify my knowledge and say, "Here, look. This knowledge that I have for my PhD is valuable." As I've gotten older and had more of a chance to reflect, I realized that the value of my knowledge is not that I know X, Y, and Z about these writers, but that I understand what research looks like. I understand how to ask the right questions. I know how to make sure that I've looked into all the other possibilities. So those are the techniques and the sensibilities that I have that I bring to the table.
I'll be honest with you, I don't know if it's still true, but one of the hesitations that had been in the job market about hiring PhD students is just that they don't work very quickly. And this is not a knock on PhD students, but it's just the timeframe for the projects that I work on in the corporate sector is much, much shorter. So I could be asked to turn something around in a couple of weeks.
And what employers are sometimes concerned about is that a PhD student might say, "But we need to know this, and we need to know this, and we need to know this, so we couldn't possibly actually have this for you for another six months." And that just doesn't jive with the kinds of timelines that exist in a corporate setting. So I think that might be an area where students should think about, "Okay, I need to understand a little bit more about the timeline for projects and understand that I might not be able to do it in exactly the way that I would want to."
Paul Poast:
This is terrific because I think it gets into a broader question that Kelly and I have, that I'm sure our listeners have, particularly in the current context of challenges to scientific funding, shrinking PhD programs, et cetera. And again, your previous answer already starts to go into this, but I'd love to hear your further thoughts on what is the value of doctoral education producing PhDs for society? And again, you already started to go into this with the examples you were giving in your previous answer, but I'd love to hear your perspective on this.
Tara Schwegler:
I think that the value of doctoral education of society... And there's a big drum roll here because there's so many books about this and this is such a hot topic right now. But I have thought a lot about what it means to me and what I think it means to society, and I'd like to see it get out of this... I think there's a binary or what's presented as a binary opposition between the intrinsic value of knowledge, so knowledge for knowledge's sake, being pitted against an instrumental view of knowledge, as knowledge is valuable as it helps me accomplish other aims. I think that that is overly simplistic.
I think that we live in a society where science has developed. Obviously, science changes. It shifts our mindsets and whatever as well shift. But if we value the enterprise of science, then we need to value the continuation of doctoral education. Because what doctoral education does is it prepares scientists. It helps.
So if I think about my field of anthropology, when I started my program, doing original research in anthropology, the goal was for me to learn how do you produce an original piece of research? How do you see what else has been produced on this topic? How do you develop a viable research question, not only viable but relevant, that moves the field forward? How do you interact with your peers? How do you review the results and findings that other people have put forward?
And so I feel that the value... It's not all reducible to this. I think there are many ways in which it's... But for me, the essential component is if we value science, then we must value doctoral education because there's something that you get out of that level of scientific inquiry that it's hard to get through other degrees. I think all degrees have their value. So it's not that I'm saying a PhD is more value. But for that particular goal, I think that the PhD is critically important.
Kelly Therese Pollock:
What originally brought you to U Chicago? I know this was a while ago now and started in the college, but I want to hear a little bit about what got you started on thinking, "Yes, this is the school for me," for a very long time.
Tara Schwegler:
Yes, for a very long time. So I can tell you that I have a strong family connection. My father went to the University of Chicago. So my family, even though I didn't grow up in Chicago, I do have a strong family connection to Chicago. But I was, from the very beginning, attracted to the reputation of Chicago as being a place of prodigious thinkers and bold thinkers. And I always felt that I wanted to be in a place where I could rigorously read and debate and discuss and be with people who also wanted to do those things.
It's interesting. When I used to interview technocrats that work in Mexico, the ones who were trained at the University of Chicago would tell me that they had to learn to moderate their approach a little bit because in rooms and in conversations where they were collaborating with colleagues who hadn't had that style of education, they were coming across as aggressive. And they weren't intending to be aggressive. They said, "This is just the way things are in a Chicago workshop." But they had to learn that they needed to moderate that.
But it's the essence of that really spirited debate and well-informed debate that brought me to Chicago. And if you even just think about my own trajectory moving from economics to anthropology, there are certain places I'm sure where they would've said, "Well, that makes no sense." But everyone who worked with me at Chicago was like, "This is definitely something that hasn't been done. Let's support it. Let's make sure that we can make this connection and help support you in connecting these two departments." And it's that spirit of inquiry and that willingness to... Not to throw out orthodoxy just for the heck of it, but to not let orthodoxy become overwhelming.
And I have to say, I'm a huge fan of the core curriculum. And I know that that is... Maybe it's declining in popularity generally, but I'm a fervent supporter. I believe it's critically important. I think it's so essential to the way that I see myself in the world.
Paul Poast:
That's a great question, or that leads to a question I have, which is, can you elaborate on that? What is it about the core curriculum, the great books, this common experience that undergraduates who come here have these courses? Because that is a model that, as you say, on the one hand, it's very much part of the Chicago identity at the undergraduate level. It has also been duplicated at other institutions because of its success, but it's also facing challenges.
Tara Schwegler:
Yes.
Paul Poast:
And I think that it's extremely relevant to what we're talking about today because, in some respects, it was intended to bring that type of intellectual rigor that we've been talking about, and you mentioned at the graduate level of the intense seminar to bring it to the undergraduate level and to make sure that our undergraduates are kind of steeped in that life of the mind, where fun goes to die-
Tara Schwegler:
Yes.
Paul Poast:
... experience of U Chicago. So could you go ahead and elaborate on your case for this?
Tara Schwegler:
So one thing I have to tell you though is that where fun goes to die assumes that fun is a certain way, right? And the kids who are at Chicago debating these things, that is fun. But, no. I get asked this a lot by parents, "I have kids who are college age. What's the value of doing this?" And there's the value to the individual in terms of being exposed to ideas that they otherwise would not have been exposed to. We're in a world where there's increasing specialization. And as we get more specialized, our horizons get narrower. And there's really good evidence to suggest that having experiences to keep your horizons broad are important.
But even more than that, what I think is critical about the core curriculum... There are two aspects of it, right? There's the core curriculum as being something that all students have to take, and then there's the specific content of the core curriculum. The core curriculum is being something that all students take means that students are learning not just from their professors in the classrooms, they are able to constantly dialogue with one another in different settings. They're able to go into a science class and bring in a humanities text. And other people in the room won't be saying, "Oh, what is that? I haven't heard that." So by creating this environment... Not everybody's reading exactly the same books, but they are being exposed to the same ideas and the same historical trends, and so they can have these wide-ranging debates and discussions with one another.
As an alum, it also creates this sense of community. Like, I might not know anything about a fellow alum. But if I know that they were an undergrad at the U of Chicago, I know they've read Karl Marx. I mean, right? And so there's that unifying aspect of it.
But in terms of the specific content of the core curriculum, as I mentioned before, I taught in the core for many years both as a graduate student and then as a collegiate assistant professor. And what I loved about it is that, in our faculty meetings, we would always have discussions about which books do we want to be reading, and those would be spirited. Those would be engaged debates about what is relevant to students. We're not going to totally shift books just because times are changing, but we... It's not that we don't respond to what students are thinking about or what's going on in the world. And so I'm a firm believer in the value, as you can tell.
Kelly Therese Pollock:
I want to go back to the question of fun and hear a little bit about what you did for fun when you were at U Chicago.
Tara Schwegler:
I was a debater in high school. And so one of the things that I really enjoyed... And again, I don't know if this qualifies as fun, but I used to... There are a lot of high school debate tournaments in Chicago. So I remember when I was an undergraduate, I used to be a judge. I used to go do that on the weekends and judge high school debate rounds.
But more seriously, I think that one of my favorite things about the University of Chicago is just the wealth of cultural institutions that the city of Chicago offers. And so I lived on campus for my entire stay at U Chicago. So I am a Hyde Parker, but I loved taking advantage of the museums. When I was a graduate student, I had two kids, and we would be at the Shedd Aquarium. We would be at the Field Museum pretty much every weekend, just enjoying those resources.
Paul Poast:
I imagine the Museum of Science and Industry as well.
Tara Schwegler:
Absolutely. I'm so glad you said that, Paul. Of course the Museum of Science and Industry. In fact, the Museum of Science and Industry, I mean, for the parents in Hyde Park, that was the afterschool hang.
Paul Poast:
Yes. Yes. 100%. You get the family membership and just go in there, especially on a cold February, middle of the week, and just be like, "Okay, you're just going to run around in here because it's [inaudible 00:31:21]."
Tara Schwegler:
You need to take those kids someplace to run that's not outside, you go to Museum of Science and Industry.
Kelly Therese Pollock:
I think my kids basically learned to walk there.
Paul Poast:
Yeah.
Tara Schwegler:
Okay. Okay. So we're all in the same boat.
Paul Poast:
Yep. Yes, yes. No, that's exactly why I mentioned it. That's where I go for fun. No, this has been fantastic. Is there anything that we haven't asked you about that you would want to talk about?
Tara Schwegler:
That's a really good question. I think one of the things... You did sort of ask me about this in terms of the value of the PhD and of doctoral education. And you did also ask me a little bit about skills. And I wasn't able to give you the names of specific skills, but there are things that I think... I think graduate students sometimes, if they look at themselves, because they've been so embedded in research and whatnot, they don't necessarily recognize some of the skills that they have and the value of those skills.
What was interesting to me is when I was working at USAA, I got exposed to design thinking. And design thinking is a framework for dealing with complex problems, and it was developed first by designers. And the basic premise of it is to solve any problem, you start by trying to understand the needs and wants of the end user, and then you work backwards from that. So instead of saying, "Well, I have this great idea, and I'm going to design it, and then I'm going to try to foist it onto users and tell them how much they actually need this," I'm going to start with them."
And I started working... I've done a lot of work in design thinking since, and I've realized that the sensibility of design thinking is very similar to what I as an anthropologist do all the time, which is try to understand other perspectives, try to put myself in other people's shoes and see what the world looks like from that perspective. I had never heard of design thinking when I was in graduate school, but I found a natural affinity to that way of seeing the world.
And so I would encourage graduate students to look for those windows of opportunity where certain frameworks or ways of doing things actually align pretty closely to what they study or what they're interested in but might not be advertised as such. So for instance, if I'm thinking about jobs, an anthropologist would be a really good fit for a job that's advertising for a design researcher, but that doesn't scream anthropologist. And so it is helpful to do your research and kind of figure out what those connections are.
Paul Poast:
I mean, I'll just say, from listening to you, I had never really made the connection until now of... So often we hear corporate culture, teen culture. And we talk about this, but it's like, what does that even mean? An anthropologist would be best situated, a research anthropologist would be best situated to both answer that question and also determine if it actually exists at a given corporation, institution, et cetera. So that to me was something that this conversation made me think about in a different way and how that skill can absolutely be transferable.
Tara Schwegler:
Oh yeah. Well, and also in terms of leadership development is something that I never imagined when I was working on my PhD, but now I work with executive leaders individually and in groups to use social scientific approaches to help them become more effective leaders.
And again, doing the coaching is very similar to kind of ethnographic field work. You're going in. You're observing. You're listening. Active listening is something anthropologists do very well. And you are trying to interact with someone and help them grow and develop, but you're not trying to actively influence them, which also fits very well with participant observation.
And so there are ways in which... And I'll be honest with you both. In the beginning, I fought against it a little bit. I fought against making those connections because I felt like, "No, no, no. I need to be an anthropologist. An anthropologist does X, Y, and Z." And it was once I let go of that restrictive mindset of what that profession looks like that I was able to see all these other exciting connections.
Kelly Therese Pollock:
If our listeners would like to follow what you do or hire you as a consultant, how can they do that?
Tara Schwegler:
Yes. So they could visit my profile on LinkedIn, Tara Schwegler. And they could go to my website, taraschwegler.com.
Kelly Therese Pollock:
Excellent. Tara, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really fun conversation, and I think will be really valuable for people as they're thinking about what is a PhD and why do we do it and what are all the ways that it can be useful.
Tara Schwegler:
Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed this as well. So thank you so much, Paul and Kelly. You've given me a lot to think about, which is what I expect from Chicago.
Paul Poast:
Great. Thank you again.