Waldron Career Conversation w/ Karen Smith '94 & Abigail Thomas '26
In this episode of the Weinberg in the World podcast, student host Abigail Thomas '26 sits down with Northwestern alum Karen Smith '94 to explore how an early cognitive science degree shaped Karen’s career and life. Karen reflects on discovering cognitive science in its early days, launching into the tech boom to design early digital learning systems, and later channeling her interdisciplinary background into writing, podcasting, and a decade-long positive‑psychology journaling practice. She shares advice for current students—embrace curiosity, explore campus and Chicago, stay open to changing paths, and trust that a Northwestern education provides adaptable, lifelong tools for whatever comes next.
Transcript
Abigail
Welcome to the Weinberg in the World Podcast, where we explore the value of interdisciplinary liberal arts education in today's complex world. My name is Abigail, and I'm your student host of this special episode of the podcast. I'm a senior at Northwestern majoring in cognitive science and minoring in data science, and I'm looking forward to learning more about how your academic experience is connected to your professional journey and how your cognitive science background supports the work you do. Today I'm excited to be speaking with Karen Smith. Thank you, Karen, for taking the time to speak with me today.
Karen
Thank you for having me.
Abigail
To start us off today, I'm wondering if you can tell us more about your time at Northwestern as an undergraduate. What did you study? What were the impactful experiences for you that led you to your current career path?
Karen
I received a cognitive science degree in 1994. The lore or the legend is that we were the second graduating class. I'm not sure; I haven't fact-checked that. But I know that I graduated with just two or three others with our degree. I understand that the cognitive science program has grown, so I think that's fantastic. I found cognitive science because one of those other two or three was a friend of mine, and I was complaining to him about how to choose a path when I found a lot of college classes really interesting, but I kind of had the sense that I couldn't choose just one. There wasn't one thing. I was dabbling with the idea of doing a sociology major. And my father, who was a business consultant, a technology and business consultant, asked me once as I was just exploring this at home on a break, there aren't very many sociologists out in the world. I don't see a lot of people saying, you know, hello, hi, I'm a sociologist. His point just being that if I were to be really interested in that path, I might need to have some idea of what else I wanted to do or to be planning to pursue a career in academia, which had never really occurred to me and wasn't what I found interesting. I thought sociology was interesting because we were studying people and cultures and how people do things in groups. That I found plenty interesting, but it wasn't so interesting that I was sure. And then the friend mentioned, you should think about this new interdisciplinary program because it lets you do a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
So I started looking into cognitive science and realized that the classes I already took were already quite applicable to the required courses for the degree. And then I looked at what else I should take. I think it was first or second quarter sophomore year. So I still had two and a half years plus to look at. And everything in the list was something I wanted to take. Like it was already on my radar screen or it was new on my radar screen. I was like, are you kidding? I could take classes like this. This is perfect. So that interdisciplinary sense is what appealed to me back then. I don't know if it's the same for folks today.
Abigail
Yeah, definitely. I find it — I also chose it because I just loved how interdisciplinary it was and how you could take classes from different fields and still be able to apply that to my major. So that definitely still holds true.
Karen
Yeah, wonderful. Well, what I did with my degree, I graduated into the early, early phases of the technology boom. And you know, we've been in boom and bust cycles. And so part of my career story includes both. But I graduated into an atmosphere where we were beginning to use technology to solve all kinds of problems that previously we had to do manually. We had to do in person with people, very labor and time intensive. And I worked at what is now Accenture, but was then Anderson Consulting. And my job was to build learning systems for corporate clients. So I was teaching adults how to do their job using technology to mediate it instead of having to create a course that was then led by an instructor and conducted in person on site somewhere, which was the old model of training. And that's how all corporate training had been done till then.
So it was a pretty exciting time to launch out into that. But a lot of the technology tools we used were very early days. Like I remember waiting for videos to compress and waiting for hours and hours for videos to compress and then finding that the edit had gone poorly and that we had to do it over. And things that today are kind of comical since we can use our phones to just go out and do an on-the-street interview with someone and have it on the internet in minutes or even live stream. These things were just not even, like we hadn't even imagined where we were going to go with this technology.
So there were inconveniences, but it was also tremendously interesting because there was just so much to consider. And a lot of the times we needed to write new software to do the things we wanted to do. There now are authoring tools and platforms that you can kind of plop your training content into and sort of publish without needing a lot of technology background. Back then, we were doing things with teams of five and six developers, plus I was on the design side, designing the learning experience and then management and content creators and things like that.
I'm sure it's quite different now, but as I mentioned, the boom and bust cycle, or the bust and boom cycle, led to — it was the early 2000s — the technology, the dot-com bubble burst is how history tends to refer to that. And companies like mine did massive layoffs that included me. That time coincided with when my husband and I were starting our family. And so it led me to just kind of reevaluate a lot of things and choose to take a step back for a while, which has been great for myself, but it meant that I wasn't out there doing the things that I had been doing. So I don't have as good a perspective on how we're using those technology tools in these last 20 years. But for a time in the 90s, it was a fascinating and interesting way to apply my degree. And I was one of the only people I knew who did in my work what I studied in my undergrad degree. Everyone else was like a political science major who's now writing code or an anthropology major who was one of my co-designers on my team, things like that.
Abigail
Yeah, that's really interesting. I was just wondering, going based off of having something you learn applied to your work experience, are there other classes or experiences specifically at Northwestern that ended up being more valuable than you realized at the time?
Karen
I certainly appreciate the computer science classes I took, even though my job never required me personally to write code. And I don't today choose that as a way to spend my time either. Even when I'm just like dabbling with my own personal projects, I find some of the code aspects aggravating. And it's one of the places where I'm most comfortable with the AI revolution because frankly, these are things that I feel like I should be able to get my head around, but I can't get my website designed to look the way I want it to. So if an AI bot can do it for me, that would be great. I would love that.
But the underpinning of just understanding some of how technology systems work and a lot of the — I'm not sure I can put this into words very well — but the way when you're trying to write a computer program, you have to think both logically, but also you have to think divergently, right? You have to think in order. This has to happen, then that. This has to happen, then that. You have to do a lot of the dependencies and understanding what needs to come first and what needs to come later. But you also have to be prepared for things that are way outside the realm of what you might have expected. So you have to expect someone's going to use your computer system in a sideways way. And so you have to be prepared and to be able to think about those things differently.
And I for sure wouldn't have had as much facility with that had I not taken — it wasn't a million — but I probably took, I don't know, four or five computer science courses in the course of getting my cognitive science degree. And I feel like each one just contributed to this ability to think in several different flexible ways and to break a problem down out into — even just planning a bake sale or trying to do something completely everyday out in the real world — being able to know, oh, if we don't come up with a language for the flyers first, we won't have anything to put on the flyers. We can't give it to the person to use Canva to go make the flyers for us if we don't have all the wording written, and things like that. I find it's not that these skills don't exist in others, but sometimes they're overlooked. Folks don't maybe think through things in a process-based way. And I believe — it's been some time — but I believe that a lot of that came from some of this more technical work that I did while in undergrad.
Abigail
Yeah, definitely. Thank you. I saw that you worked in different industries after leaving Anderson or Accenture at that time. How has your cognitive science degree prepared you for taking on those different roles?
Karen
So the interdisciplinary aspects, which I found so appealing when first entering cognitive science, I feel like they continue to play in different ways today. So today, my work is a mixture of writing, working on a podcast — although germination stage, not yet launched. I do volunteer work that I came into through parenting, but I continue on through because I so value the importance of the role peer-to-peer support plays in how humans learn, which is something, of course, when studying cognitive science is where I learned that. And so I've found that all of these aspects kind of play together really well.
Writing isn't something I always knew I wanted to do, but it has ended up being something that I'm really passionate about. And what I write about is anything, everything, you know, all kinds of things. And that kind of open mind, you know, kind of curiosity has some of its origins in cognitive science.
Abigail
And can you give an example of what you're writing or what you're working on currently?
Karen
Yeah, the writing that I do — it's a passion project that I'm looking to turn into a book, but the book has to come out of my head and I'm still in the middle of that process. But years ago, at the beginning of 2017, I'm a person who occasionally does some wild and crazy New Year's resolutions. So my 2017 New Year's resolution was to try this writing exercise a friend of mine was doing, where every day she wrote down three good things. So three good things that she's done or experienced or witnessed, participated in, observed.
And so I started on that day and I said, you know, this sounds like a good idea. And she described it as being really positive for her mental health. Said, hey, who doesn't need that? So I began that day and I have not stopped. And it is 2026. So this is my 10th year every day writing about three good things. I call it my best things today. That's the hashtag I use. And I publish it on Substack with my Substack called The Inside of My Brain, which is just a bit of a joke about how I wish I could just like let someone have a peek inside.
So you'd get some sense of like, oh, I'm really curious. I've got a lot of thoughts about many different things. It'd be simpler if you could just get inside and then I wouldn't have to work so hard to express it or figure out how to put it into words.
So later, I learned about the research that supported what I was doing. It wasn't that I went into it knowing about the field of positive psychology and the research out of — mostly it started at University of Pennsylvania and a professor named Martin Seligman. But when I did find out, it was such an interesting connection. His research began out of his desire to not only focus on psychological problems people have, but also the ways positive psychology works. Like what's good about how human minds work and what do we think about and how can we influence how we think and how we feel about the world?
And so as I delved into — I'm particularly in the middle of it with this book project — I'm astonished at how this research seems to almost have been done as though it had me in mind. Like I'm just going to find it all along.
Abigail
Wow, that's really great. Just finding an opportunity that totally matches with you.
Karen
Yeah, yeah. And all because this friend mentioned she did this thing, and I just kind of got the wild idea. And once I began writing like this, it is a really lovely way to write, and it's a really lovely thing. I do it at the end of the day. I'm already a night owl, so it's not a big deal for me to spend 30 minutes at 8 or 9 p.m. writing out three good things from today.
And of course, cell phone tech has made it so that my camera roll is part of how I process the day, so I'm visually processing it — like, oh, what did I see? What did I — what really struck me? Or how adorable was my cat laying on the cushion back here? Things like that. And then as I write, it will take me in all kinds of directions, which has led me to digging into more research on how we think and learn and why, when we're struggling, what resources are available to us — both inside ourselves, but also in this field of positive psychology. Like what recent research have we seen that can help, and things like that, which are completely unexpected benefits. I had no idea.
Abigail
Yeah, definitely. That sounds really cool. I'll have to look into that.
Karen
Yeah. It's also a practice literally any person can do because it doesn't require any special materials. You don't actually have to write it down. And the research that supports it talks about how just spending time thinking about good things — it's a sort of gratitude-adjacent type of practice. But what you're doing is you're switching your mind from any kind of rumination or, you know, like anxiety spirals would be another way of saying it, into a life review kind of perspective.
So instead of ruminating on the dumb thing you said to someone this morning, you're looking at, more generally like, I had a really interesting conversation with that lady in the line at the pharmacy. One day I did — I had this great conversation about feeding the squirrels with this little old lady who I might otherwise have nothing in common with, but we bonded over this very small thing that we both did. I totally — I put peanuts out for them. And she's like, I do too. I sit and I watch them.
And connecting with other people like that is one of the joys of life. It doesn't have to be forever. Like I don't have to become this lady's best friend or have anything further. But having that point person-to-person connection and that human-to-human interaction is part of where we get meaning. I am convinced.
So this project has helped me put even more of that into context and helped me, a person who's on the introverted side and is maybe more reserved and wouldn't normally have conversations with someone in line at the pharmacy, to be more open to some of those things because I know that they benefit me so much.
Abigail
Yeah, definitely. And it's also great to be able to look back within that 10 years of journaling that you've done and be able to look back and see, oh, that happened today. So that's really great. Hasn't it ever come up in one of your positive three minutes?
Karen
I am sure it has, partly because not only am I a graduate, I married a graduate who I met sometime in that period and our daughter recently graduated. And so I haven't done the search, but I would love to, now that I've got the idea, to try to figure out how many, how frequently. I sometimes use kind of loose language in terms of family members and things — specific things related to their educations and things — in terms, you know, trying to maintain a semblance of this is my writing, not theirs, and to be respectful of boundaries. But I am positive I would regularly mention where I am, and the joy of being with your child who's now in the educational environment that you had so much good result from and so many fulfilling experiences in — that was quite something.
Abigail
Yeah. And I was just wondering, is there anything you'd recommend someone do before graduating? Like what experiences they should have at Northwestern before graduating?
Karen
That is a good question. I think if you haven't hunted down the Shakespeare Garden, every student should. Something I did not take advantage of, but my daughter did when she was at Northwestern, is the open nights at the observatory. So the astronomy department runs, I think once a month, an evening program that's free for students and probably for the community because Northwestern is a college that very much sits inside the city of Evanston and is a community partner in that way.
So the astronomy program is pretty cool. I wish I had. I think I just — we didn't have the internet, as you can imagine. And so I didn't have an easy way to get a list of all the interesting things to do. So those two things on campus, for sure.
I'm not sure that I can say — for someone who's not from the Chicago area and plans to move away from the Chicago area after graduation, by all means, take advantage of being so close to such a unique and interesting city. Chicago is one of the best. And it is not on everyone's list of places to go because it isn't on the coasts or filled with — like Washington, D.C. — with all the monuments and the national treasures. But Chicago is filled with treasures. I particularly recommend doing a Chicago Architectural Foundation river cruise because that's always — it's my favorite activity to take someone who's not from Chicago on. So it doesn't matter that I've done them like eight or ten times. It's always fun. It's always interesting. Each docent does a different talk. They talk about different buildings or historical moments in the city. So that one's high on my list of recommendations.
Abigail
Yeah, definitely. Just taking advantage of the space we're in and also the surrounding city. I've never gone into the free nights of the astronomy observatory building, so I'll definitely check that out.
Karen
Yeah.
Abigail
And to just close us out today, I have one more question for you. What do you wish you could tell yourself when you were in my shoes?
Karen
I wish — I feel like this is a point where I could have wisdom, and I'm not sure I do. What I have is encouragement that your Northwestern undergrad education has given you a phenomenal set of tools, most of which you still don't quite even know what they are. You know, that the things we learn in college aren't always readily apparent.
And while I did do what I studied in college as a profession for some time, it's not a requirement. It doesn't have to be perfectly in line. And frankly, everyone should take advantage of the fact that a Northwestern education is a rounded, well-formed thing and that pivoting around or moving with career goals as they shift for yourself or for reasons beyond you — like, say, for instance, the AI takeover of computer science and the way that that's impacting young software engineers graduating today.
Follow what your instincts are telling you and don't be afraid to make a change, because your education is going to be a resource that you can always lean on. Don't be worried about that.
Abigail
Thank you. Yeah, that's really helpful for me to consider. Thank you for the advice. And thank you for joining us today.
Karen
Well, thank you. I so appreciate being invited.
Abigail
Yeah. Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Weinberg in the World podcast. We hope you have a great day and go Cats.
Karen
Go Cats.