Career Insights: Social Sciences

Cassie Petoskey:
Welcome to the Weinberg in the World podcast, where we bring you stories of interdisciplinary thinking in today's complex world. This episode is brought to you by the Waldron Student-Alumni Connections Program, a resource in Weinberg College where we help current students explore career options through making connections with alumni.

In today's episode, we're excited to feature a few clips from previous alumni conversations where alumni highlighted their memorable experiences while majoring in a social science and how those experiences helped in their future careers. First are a few selections from our interview with Khoury Cooper where he talks about memorable political science and African-American studies classes. He also speaks on how an arts and sciences background impacts him as a lawyer today.

Khoury Cooper:
Once I got there, I think oddly enough, one of my most impactful courses was my freshman seminar; the first one. I still remember the title. It was Rags to Riches; the Self-Made Man in American History. It was impactful in a few ways. I think one, it was just nice to be in such a small learning environment. Obviously not a ton of folks in the freshman seminars. You got a chance to meet new people from all over the globe. We got a chance to learn and like I mentioned a small environment. But it was also super discussion based, and that was just something I wasn't accustomed to. Like in my high school teachers taught and then students listened for the most part and answered questions, and this was a lot different. There were prompts given at the beginning of class, we had assigned readings, and we just got a chance to discuss among ourselves.

That was just an eye-opening experience and something I grew to appreciate and expect in a lot of my Weinberg courses. And it's funny, I was kind of glancing back at some of the old books I have and the bookshelf here, and definitely still have some of the books from that freshman seminar. So just kind of speaks to what is this 18 years later, how impactful that actually was.

And then other classes I took throughout my four years there, a lot of the African-American Studies courses, mostly because it was something that just wasn't offered at the high school I went to. We had history courses, but not each of them, but some of them had topics or sections on African-American history, but none did a deep dive. So for me, having a chance to do a deep dive for each quarter on a different topic in African-American studies was huge. And just something I grew to appreciate, not only meeting the folks who were in the classes with me, but also just really getting to talks to professors after hours or in office hours and understanding where they were coming from.

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah, absolutely. That's great. And as a lawyer, I'm sure you use a lot of the skills you learned in law school, but what are some of the things, specifics about reading and writing that you learned from your arts and sciences background that you still use today?

Khoury Cooper:
Yeah, I think critical reading. Sometimes you read for pleasure, but you also sometimes need to scrutinize the author, scrutinize the work, and that comes a lot. It comes across a lot when you're viewing someone's revision of a contract. Where are they coming from? What are they really trying to get across? So that definitely comes into play. And then also reviewing your own drafts, frankly, to make sure they're error-free and as crisp and as concise as can be. I think people will think of lawyers, they're super wordy, but that's not what your clients want to hear; want to read. You need to be very concise, use as few words as possible.

So that comes across from, I think my writing and learning at Weinberg as well. Just having really good professors and going to office hours and getting feedback on drafts and getting feedback on essays and not just taking the grading like, "Oh, well, that's unfortunate, I'll do better next time." But just really trying to understand and be critical of myself as well I think was super helpful. And then also just taking advantage of the ability to take a wide array of courses and them still being able to work together so you can graduate with your major, but you just learn so many different perspectives and I think it just helps you as a well-rounded human and professional.

Cassie Petoskey:
Next is a quote from our conversation with Cathy Lynn who shares stories about finding the MMSS major and classes on medical sociology. Cathy goes into detail about how these classes and the professors that taught them helped her support new ways of thinking and find career paths she didn't know of beforehand.

Cathy Lynn:
So I was an MMSS major, and I think that was the first thing that crossed my mind when I got this question was, and I think a lot of MMSS grads maybe relate to this. Before going to college you just didn't know you could think about the world like that. I think I did well in all those sort of hard sciences and math classes, and it was just like, "Oh, but I don't want to be a scientist. I don't want to be a chemist or something like that." And then it was like, "Oh, do you want to be a doctor?" "I don't really want to be a doctor." And then it was like the first week I got on campus, I went to one of those fairs that was at Norris where you could look at all the different departments and meet faculty because I was that first year student and I met Professor Rogerson.

Bill Rogerson of the MMSS, who is at that time was leading I think the MMSS program. He was like, "Oh, here, you can apply analytical skills, and we teach sort of models of social problems." And I was like, "Wait," I have always wanted, I've always been more interested in people, I've always been more interested in the social sciences, but I never thought that I could study it analytically and as empirically as MMSS promised me. And so it was just sort of eye-opening that that was a way of thinking about the world. And then similarly, the reason why I went into sociology, it was two classes, one was my freshman year seminar, and I'll backtrack. The whole reason why I chose Northwestern, and Weinberg in particular, is because I was very indecisive about what I wanted to study.

And so the way I picked my courses in the first year was I went by teacher ratings.

I didn't care about the content, I just cared, I just wanted to make relationships with really smart professors and have them care about growing and developing me and teaching me something. And so I enrolled in a freshman seminar about social movements and cultural politics, which is at that point taught by, I think a grad student, Amin Ghaziani, who is now a professor at UBC in the sociology department. And we studied social movements, but in a very theoretical and analytical way. It was like, "Oh, there are ways of thinking about revolutions. There are ways of thinking about why the civil rights movement happened. There are ways of thinking about pro-life, pro-choice movements that are structured and analytical." And that really opened my mind up because I was like, "Wow, if this is the kind of work that happens in sociology, I can already start to see how that would meld with the MMSS courses that I was taking."

I think in the second year I happened across medical sociology with Professor Carol Heimer, and that blew my mind because I think up till that point, I had been thinking that medicine was only the purview of medical doctors, like people who had medical degrees, who studied biology. And here in comes this way of thinking about medicine that was so much more culturally-oriented that really had theoretical frameworks about how people actually thought about health; how health was a social construct. I mean, yeah, you could get really, really sick, but there's all these, the medicalization of childbirth or the medicalization of specific mental health issues. And that just really opened my brain and I was like, "Wow, if I could keep investing in these types of courses that really opened my brain to thinking about here are some new ways of thinking about the world." That really, really transformed what I wanted to do.

Cassie Petoskey:
Our last clip comes from a conversation with Austin Waldron, who many of you may recognize from the name of our program. Austin talks about how his education in arts and sciences helped him learn to understand people from a variety of different backgrounds and how that understanding helped him become an expert in his work and operations.

Austin Waldron:
It is much more of a case of being exposed to lots of different things and being more well-rounded than a specialized education because dealing with people from all walks of life as a manager. And my organization started branching out and we opened up a bunch of offices in Texas and then New Mexico and Oklahoma. And I mean, if you're born and raised in Chicago, those are different worlds. You really have to learn how to deal with people from a perspective of where they're coming from. A lot more than growing up in Chicago, and everybody I know is from Chicago. I don't know if that answers your question well, but-

Cassie Petoskey:
Yeah, the different perspectives and meeting people where they're at.

Austin Waldron:
Right.

Cassie Petoskey:
No, I think that's great.

Austin Waldron:
And I think that's another thing about Northwestern. I mean, I grew up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood on the south side. All of my friends went to one of two or three Catholic high schools, and huge numbers of them went with their friends and my friends to U of I, or ISU, or one of the state schools. And I mean, you end up with all the same people you grew up with. Well, not at Northwestern because the student body is so varied. You know?

Cassie Petoskey:
Mm-hmm.

Austin Waldron:
So I think that's a real valuable thing that happens at a school like Northwestern, is the mix of the student body.

Cassie Petoskey:
Thanks for listening. If you want to hear more of these conversations, links to the full videos and podcasts are below. For more information about Weinberg College and this podcast, visit Weinberg.northwestern.edu and search for Waldron. As always, we would love to hear your feedback. Please email us with your thoughts on the program. Have a great day, and go Cats.