Growing up in Southern California, Mai-Ling Garcia acted like a teenager without any direction. Her grades were ragged; her long-term plans nonexistent. After marrying early, she moved to her in-laws’ residence in San Jacinto, California, a working-class community halfway between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert, where one-fifth of the population lives below the poverty line. In San Jacinto, the biggest private-sector employer is the Soboba tribal casino. Crime rates are high, and even legal forms of entertainment are not for the squeamish. Some years ago, the Soboba casino gave birth to King of the Cage martial-arts battles, in which combatants step into a pen surrounded by chain-link fencing. Something close to a prison brawl breaks out, with punches and kicks raging until one of the fighters gives up.
If you want a better life in this town, progress starts with community college. The two-year program at Mount San Jacinto College accepts anyone with a high-school diploma (and some people without). Popular classes include auto repair and English as a second language; a few strivers try Shakespeare and Veblen. Tuition is free and annual fees are minimal. Going back to school didn’t interest Garcia until the Marines sent her husband to the Middle East for an extended tour of duty. Out of cash and tired of subsistence jobs, she was ready to try something new.
On a whim, Garcia enrolled at MSJC, signing up for psychology and sociology classes. At first, nobody pegged her for greatness. “She didn’t sit in the front row,” psychology professor Maria Lopez-Moreno recalled. “She would be in the middle of the lecture hall. I remember she had this cream-colored scarf with purple trim. She would play with the edges of it during lectures, or she would throw it back over her shoulder. She wasn’t really focused.”
Then something started to catch. The scarf-twirling student began asking insightful questions about the basis for hopelessness and criminal behavior. Intrigued, Professor Lopez-Moreno took this new student aside after class and asked: “Why are you here?” Garcia blurted out everything: marrying a Marine right after high school, moving to this desert town to be near his military base, seeing him head off to Iraq—and not knowing what to do next. Lopez-Moreno couldn’t walk away. “I said to myself: ‘Uh-oh. I’ve got to suggest something to her.’”
Apply for a place in Mount San Jacinto’s honors program, the professor advised. Garcia did so, won admission—and began to thrive in a new environment of smaller classes and more motivated peers. During faculty office hours, Garcia and Lopez-Moreno had regular chats about classes, ideas, and life. The psychology professor pointed Garcia toward essays about ethics, morality, and crime. For the first time in her life, Garcia became a straight-A student, eager to master her course work. Drawing on her own multicultural heritage (Filipino and Irish), Garcia became a leader in campus diversity initiatives. She emerged as a confident, polite communicator with a knack for building coalitions.
Before long, the head of Mount San Jacinto’s honors program, sociology professor Denise Dalaimo, emerged as a second mentor. “You should think about transferring to Berkeley or UCLA after you’re finished here,” Dalaimo said. “Me?” Garcia asked. “Yes,” Dalaimo replied. It wasn’t easy to leap from a community college to one of California’s top universities, but it could be done. During Garcia’s sophomore year, Professors Dalaimo and Lopez-Moreno coached their protégée on how to put together a winning application. Berkeley offered her admission and substantial aid. A brighter future awaited.
Today, Garcia is a leading digital strategist for the City of Oakland, California. She has made it to the big time. From her spacious ninth-floor office in Oakland’s city hall, she enjoys a stunning view of a lush green plaza below. Her annual salary, benefits, and bonus top $130,000 a year. Best of all, she makes her living doing something she loves: cutting through procedural red tape to make city government more relevant and helpful for Oakland’s four hundred thousand residents. “I like to think of myself as a bureaucratic ninja,” Garcia told me over coffee at an upscale Oakland café.
Garcia’s drawn-out, stormy journey to success isn’t a disadvantage that she tries to hide; it’s a valuable asset, even today. In city meetings, she’s the voice of disadvantaged residents who don’t own iPhones but still want to get on the Internet. “I know what it’s like to be too poor to own a computer,” Garcia told me. “I’m the one in meetings who asks, ‘Never mind how well this new app works on an iPhone; will it run on an old, public-library computer? Because that’s the only way some of our residents will get to use it.’” She knows firsthand what it’s like to struggle with household bills while waiting for government agencies to send benefit checks. She has testified before the state legislature on inequities in veterans’ benefits programs, sharing the results of her sociological research on military families from the San Jacinto area.
Take a close look at how liberal arts graduates make their way toward winning careers, and you will see that such gritty paths are common. Success isn’t a straight line. Getting a bachelor’s degree in English, psychology, history, anthropology, or other liberal arts disciplines doesn’t guarantee you a predictable job at Amalgamated History Industries for the next forty years. You will need to keep improvising your future—and that’s all right. You may switch cities two or three times in your twenties. You may switch employers five or six times. Each cycle of change expands your skills, your horizons, and your intuition for what should come next. You become both student and teacher, able to define opportunities that others can’t see.
Even the Dartmouth classics majors cited in the previous chapter keep improvising their careers to an extent that would flabbergast their counterparts in engineering, business, or premed programs. Alex Maceda, the Greek-temple guide who won a postcollege job at Bain, stayed at that company for three years and then headed off to a San Francisco start-up, where she specialized in retail innovation and product management. She eventually left that job in favor of graduate school. Joe Indvik, the environmental consultant in Washington, briefly tried his luck as a venture capitalist. Ally Begly, the education innovator, spent eight months as a data analyst for the National Park Service before walking away from what had become a “soul-crushing” job.
Traditionally, our society admires people who go exploring with or without a coherent plan. We celebrate their journeys in movies, novels, and memoirs (such as Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit). Everything usually works out in these well-known stories, even if the tiger eats the goat—or the first pair of hiking boots ends up at the bottom of a ravine. Yet when it comes to the college-to-career pathway, well-meaning advisers refuse to see the advantages of improvisation or the rewards of being prepared for the challenges of a turbulent world. Instead, all they talk about are starting salaries, starting salaries, and starting salaries.
What’s so baffling about this new pessimism is that it’s out of step with what broad economic data tells us. Taking the explorer’s path still works out well. In fact, the benefits may be increasing.
In 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published data on the number of jobs people have held between ages eighteen and forty-eight, sorted by four different levels of education. Mobility ran lowest among people who didn’t finish high school or who had nothing more than a high-school education. (They averaged 11.7 and 11.5 jobs, respectively.) For people with some college education or a four-year college degree, job mobility increased. (They averaged 12.3 and 11.8 jobs, respectively.) It’s old-fashioned to regard a college education as a path to greater job stability. College provides something more precious: the ability to switch jobs successfully when new opportunities arise or old ones wither.
Fixating on starting salaries blinds us to the value of mobility. It’s true that people with business, engineering, and other preprofessional degrees generally win higher pay straight out of college. Engineers frequently keep that lead for most of their careers, and good for them! For graduates in many other preprofessional fields, however, the earnings curve flattens out. It’s liberal arts majors, particularly those in history, political science, international relations, and philosophy, who see their earnings rocket ahead. Full details on these trends and how to use them to your advantage can be found in chapter 13, “Getting Paid Properly.” For now, it’s sufficient to say that a decade or two after graduation, your liberal arts degree is likely to propel you ahead of many classmates with practical majors who thought they had seized an unbeatable lead at age twenty-two.
It’s time to help meandering regain its good name.
This chapter will show how resilient the liberal arts’ strengths can be, even in settings that hardly resemble the Ivy League comforts of the previous chapter. Take away the resources of Dartmouth’s Baker-Berry Library with its two million volumes, and you can still tap into endless knowledge at any smaller college with an Internet connection. Take away the many benefits of a well-established study-abroad program in Greece, and you can create your own life-changing immersion program by doing field research in schools, hospitals, or police precincts within thirty miles of your campus. Take away the bracing experience of being surrounded by hundreds of valedictorians and National Merit Scholars who have won admission to the world’s most elite schools, and you can still find classmates at less-famous schools who will stretch your horizons and inspire you to try harder.
Only one element can’t be discarded without ruining everything: your own desire to grow. If you want to work on the frontier, sharpen your analytic skills, and embrace the best elements of a liberal arts education, you can make remarkable progress anywhere—and that includes schools that some cynic might refer to as Rustic College or Proletariat State. The mayor of America’s tenth-largest city (San Jose, California) and a recent chief data scientist of the United States both got started at the same two-year institution: De Anza College. By contrast, if you sleep through classes, skip the reading, and pay someone else to write your papers, it’s all a charade, regardless of how prestigious your school might be.
In September 2015, Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, invited me to Washington to hear a daylong presentation on the virtues of small liberal arts schools such as Ohio Wesleyan and Emerson College. All the professional educators at the conference made appropriately worthy points. The showstopping moments, however, came when individual graduates opened up about their personal journeys. The recurring theme: how an open-minded spirit of inquiry brought them to a better life.
Bill Newsome concentrated on physics at Stetson University in Florida but also tried some religion classes, just because he could. Those haphazard explorations eventually led him to a nationally prominent role in medical ethics. Isaac Holeman recalled the sudden realization, as a freshman at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, that he wasn’t just consuming other people’s knowledge anymore; he could start creating knowledge himself. By the time he graduated, he had the confidence and the audacity to found Medic Mobile, a company that uses smartphone services to provide better health care in rural Africa.
Right after college, I took an entry-level job at a big newspaper, copyediting minor news stories and writing headlines. My boss was a stocky, irritable man in his mid-forties who was consumed by the idea that Yale graduates enjoyed unimaginable career networks that he would never experience. Every few days, John would fulminate about the power of secret societies such as Skull and Bones. In his view, Yale’s clubby elite was capable of parking any of its members, no matter how dumb or lazy, into a job that paid vastly more than his or mine. All us younger fellows stifled our smiles when these outbursts began. Yet there was something genuinely distressing in his belief that he had gone to the wrong school and that nothing he ever did could make up for this failing.
Even though some people still fixate on ranking schools’ prestige, the opportunities to start anywhere—and rise high—are stronger than ever. In the summer of 2015, LinkedIn data analyst Alice Ma tracked the destinies of more than one million liberal arts majors who had graduated from colleges across the United States in the previous ten years. She found about 9 percent of them had migrated into the tech sector, often for showcase jobs at impressive companies such as Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb. The migration rate was slightly higher (9.9 percent) for graduates of elite schools in the top-twenty lists of U.S. News and World Report than it was for graduates of schools that didn’t make the top-hundred lists (7.5 percent), but not all that different.
Among the schools providing especially robust pipelines into good tech-sector jobs: Western Washington University, University of South Florida, San Francisco State, Arizona State, and Temple University. All of them placed at least two hundred liberal arts graduates into tech-sector jobs during the period that Ma studied. Widen the list further, to include any college that sent at least thirty liberal arts graduates into the tech sector, and you’re looking at a list of many hundreds of schools, ranging from Azusa Pacific to Western Kentucky. The data scientist’s conclusion: “You don’t need to attend an Ivy League school to make your liberal arts degree work for you in the long run.”
If you’re looking for a path into the tech-influenced sector of the economy, or if you just want a good job in any realm that will put your liberal arts education to work, here are five specific themes that can improve your odds, no matter where you start.
The Courage to Explore
Do the assigned reading. Review the study guide at least three times. Answer the prompt. Know the grading rubric and make sure you conform to it… Curriculum designers have done a lot in the past twenty years to take the exploration out of education. The fastest route to an A in many classes is to provide the answers that the system is expecting—and dodge any controversial or unresolved areas where your emerging ideas might break the rules.
College doesn’t have to be that way. Freethinkers can still be found in many classrooms, and when they come in contact with one another, good things happen. Mai-Ling Garcia’s academic awakening began when two professors at a community college encouraged her to aim higher. Josh Sucher found his tribe in a series of design classes after college, when he realized his dormant interest in anthropology could be revived in a big way as part of the tech sector’s user-experience community. For the Dartmouth students in the previous chapter, their greatest moments of personal growth came when classics professor Paul Christesen tossed them into the deep end of the pool of knowledge—and encouraged them to find answers themselves.
How do any of us build up the courage to explore? In 2014, former Hartwick College president Richard Detweiler set out to study the difference between people who achieved major lifelong benefits from their college experience and those who didn’t fare nearly so well. Being a research psychologist by training, he set up a thousand-person survey that peered into the fates of college graduates at all stages in life. His youngest respondents were in their twenties; his oldest in their sixties. Half of his survey looked at outcomes. Who had risen into leadership jobs? Who was earning at least a hundred thousand dollars a year? And who felt fundamentally satisfied with the way everything in life (family, health, peace of mind) had worked out?
With the other half of his survey, Detweiler asked respondents to recall their actual day-to-day habits during college. Who studied a lot? Who was deeply involved in extracurricular activities? Who spent a lot of time talking about social issues with friends? Who got to know classmates with radically different attitudes and backgrounds? And who got to know professors outside of class? All told, Detweiler tracked nearly a dozen important ways that his respondents’ college experiences might have varied.
Data in hand, Detweiler began looking for the top performers’ unique edge. The factor that caught his eye: building a close affinity with at least a few professors. About one-third of his respondents had made an extra effort to stop by for office hours, to meet for lunch—and to ask for professors’ job tips, life advice, and other pointers that deepened the mentor-protégé relationship. The payoff: Students who sought out faculty mentors had a 28 percent higher chance of getting a better-than-average first job after graduation. Later on, these graduates were nearly twice as likely to end up in leadership positions. Generally, they felt more fulfilled in life. And they were more likely to be seen as mentors to others.
It sounds counterintuitive, but great mentoring and adversity often go hand in hand. After all, mentoring at its core is all about helping you overcome your doubts and frailties so that you can unlock the stronger, more capable you that’s been hidden away for too long.
What mentors do is heroic, but the best mentors don’t need to be textbook heroes themselves. Often it’s their own zigzags and personal struggles that make them uniquely good at connecting with students. Or to make the point another way, consider the credo of Drew University’s Jennifer Kohn: “My long and winding journey helps me help my students.” Drew’s faculty website lists Kohn as an associate professor of economics. That’s part of her identity—but there’s so much more. She has been a philosophy major at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a political campaign manager, a consumer advocate, and the senior administrator of a leading New York hospital’s cardiology unit. She knows life can be full of strange, branching paths that lead from one type of career to another. That helps her see ways that students with widely scattered passions can pursue nonformulaic jobs that might unify what others regard as conflicting priorities. As a result, when Drew students aren’t sure what to do next, they walk up the narrow staircase of Lewis House to Kohn’s third-floor office. They chat about everything and nothing with her, trying to make all the pieces come together.
One student loved art history but kept feeling parental pressure to aim toward a job in finance. You can have both, Kohn explained. Take a seminar on Wall Street’s operations—and turn your attention to the way the art market works. Full-time consultants advise people on what paintings or sculptures to buy. You could make a career in that happy junction of money and beauty. Other students have wanted to pair business and music, or business and psychology. It’s hard to come up with a combination that Kohn can’t tackle. She knows an endless assortment of people from her previous jobs. She’s a facilitator and a doer by nature.
No matter how renowned or unappreciated your campus might be, there’s someone on the faculty who wants to help you become a bolder, more confident explorer. Make the most of that opportunity. Even if you can’t convert each possibility into a job or a breakthrough research project, you will come away with a greater sense of what’s feasible—and a renewed desire to chart your own future.
Keep Learning After College
What can you do with a master’s degree in Irish history? When Chris LaRoche was in his early thirties, he hated being asked that question. He could tell you why the Irish Uprising of 1798 failed or what Jonathan Swift really meant when writing about Ireland’s politics in 1728. LaRoche still thought of himself as a thinker, probing into different cultures and the complexities of why people make the choices that they do. Unfortunately, LaRoche’s dreams of becoming a history professor had fallen apart. He had lost the funding needed to pursue a PhD, and his master’s degree from Trinity College wasn’t much consolation. Neither was his undergraduate literature degree from the University of Connecticut.
LaRoche now works for MIT—a leap that isn’t easy to make. It’s worth looking closely at how he pulled it off. Like many people in this book, he migrated into a new type of work that blends a little bit of tech with a lot of the empathetic, inquisitive skills that he picked up during his liberal arts days. He taught himself some of the new skills that he needed. But he also did an unusually systematic job of sharpening up his résumé by making the most of what I’m going to call “the gray market” in academic knowledge. Instead of hurling himself into more full-time, costly, multiyear educational programs, he found ingenious ways of getting everything he needed—actual knowledge, formal certifications, and a new set of professional connections—via a much more ad hoc approach. His methods turn out to be cheaper, faster, and easy to emulate.
Formal degree programs may be pricing themselves into a zone of insane unaffordability, but more informal alternatives are rapidly filling the gap. Go online and you can take hundreds of tutorials or mini-courses from services such as Khan Academy, LinkedIn Learning, Udacity.com, and EdX.org. Need a systematic, multi-session set of tutorials on Excel or Photoshop? For thirty-five dollars or less, the Internet will help you. Would you be better off with a six-week, face-to-face course or workshops on digital marketing or user-experience research? Organizations such as General Assembly, Thinkful, and Designlab have expanded into dozens of cities with such offerings. Even traditional universities have stepped up the role of just-in-time instruction via graduate certifications for students who don’t have the time or money for an advanced degree but are willing to take a cluster of job-relevant classes in a new specialty.
Chris LaRoche took a while to find his footing. First he worked for a year as an administrative assistant for the State of Massachusetts. Then he drifted into technical writing. One of Boston’s big mutual-fund groups paid him to write software documentation; so did several tech companies. For him, that was purgatory. “I’m not the world’s best writer,” LaRoche later told me. “And I found the work tiresome.” He began doing what every disaffected office worker does: he started surfing the Internet on company time.
Goofing off has its merits. LaRoche grew interested—and then fascinated—at how some sites were beautifully easy to use, while others were tangled messes. He rejiggered his consulting contracts so that he could spend more time working on computer-usability projects and less time banging out arid, mechanical paragraphs for technical manuals. He was a self-taught man at this stage, which limited his earnings power and his ability to take a senior role on projects. But that could be fixed. Several Boston-area colleges were offering graduate certificates in the hands-on areas of the digital world that interested him. These were a bit grander than night school but a lot simpler and cheaper than pursuing another advanced degree. For eight thousand dollars, he could take eight classes and get a certificate in web design from Northeastern; for ten thousand dollars, he could take nine classes and get a certificate in user experience from Bentley University.
Step by step, LaRoche built a new professional network. After a while, he wasn’t just a student at Northeastern; he did well enough in his classes that the university hired him to run some user-experience projects too. At usability conferences in the Boston area, he met his counterparts from Tufts, MIT, Boston College, and other local schools. Suddenly he was awash in peers who could share best practices and alert him to new job opportunities. To his surprise, he discovered most of them were liberal arts graduates as well. They all had cobbled together tech skills at some point in their journeys. What made them so valuable in the job market, though, was their empathy with users, insight into their experiences, and well-developed expertise in figuring out what users really wanted.
“We’re trained in the methods of field research,” LaRoche told me. “There’s a lot of empathy in what we do. We also understand the differences between what users do and say. Just because users say one thing doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what they want to do.”
When I spoke with LaRoche, he had become a full-time usability consultant to MIT, helping the university optimize its internal websites for faculty and students as well as its online courses aimed at learners in India, China, and other countries. That job called for him to keep a lot of different perspectives in mind, which many people find hard to do. For LaRoche, it is second nature. He had spent years in his youth trying to understand the tangled ways that Irish Anglicans, Irish Presbyterians, and Irish Catholics all reacted to the uprising of 1798. In his new job, he was harnessing those skills once again.
Move Early and Often
When Brian Anderson graduated from the University of Arizona in 1991 with a degree in psychology, he lingered in the Grand Canyon State for another eighteen months, trying to get his own business started. When that didn’t work out, he decided his best opportunities would be in California. He relocated to Silicon Valley and enrolled in a master’s program in organizational psychology at San Jose State University. “I had this feeling that if I could get into a hot geography, a lot of good things would happen,” Anderson told me.
Ever since, Anderson’s career has been on the fast track. He became one of Silicon Valley’s early specialists in talent assessment and coaching, helping technically trained engineers master the managerial and interpersonal skills needed to be effective leaders. The more rapidly companies grew, the greater the need for his skills. Working for Personnel Decisions in the 1990s, Anderson opened offices in three California cities, eventually rising to be a vice president. After that, he developed a leadership-effectiveness program for another big consulting firm and did the same for Apple a few years later. Now he runs his own consulting shop, Performance Edge. Much of his advice invokes classic liberal arts virtues, he says, including the importance of “abstract thinking, judgment, and speed of learning.”
What works in Silicon Valley is just as effective in similar growth hubs across the country. Seattle belongs on any opportunity seeker’s list. So does Boston, Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, and the greater Washington, DC, area. Job openings there are more bountiful, average pay is higher, and labor markets often end up being so tight that employers are unusually likely to end a job interview with every candidate’s favorite question: “When can you start?”
In his book The New Geography of Jobs, Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti explains why these regional economy booms have become so extensive—and long lasting. Growth in tech jobs is only part of the story. What’s more significant is that each metro area turns into a “brain hub” that attracts clever people across many disciplines. You can see the evidence on display in the sidewalk cafés of Mountain View, California, or the antique shops of Alexandria, Virginia. These metro areas become packed with an unusually high percentage of college graduates, who cluster in the same neighborhoods for social compatibility.
Software engineers like to live near graphic designers, who enjoy mingling with architects at coffee shops. Lawyers, writers, city planners, and community activists join the mix. Theaters and art galleries spring up, providing edgy entertainment for appreciative audiences and more work for college-trained artists. Prosperity feeds on itself, to the point that a fifteen-hundred-dollar check to a moving company can become one of the best investments of your life.
When should you make a Moretti move? These relocations can pay off anywhere on the continuum between picking a college and starting your fourth or fifth job. If you live in South Carolina and are looking at college choices within three hundred miles of your home, getting into a DC-area school such as George Washington or George Mason will put you in a peer group where typical graduates earn $57,000 to $64,000 a year. Stay closer to home, and even though the cost of living will be lower, your paycheck is likely to be annoyingly smaller. Graduates of South Carolina schools with comparable reputations to GWU and GMU earn nearly 25 percent less than their northern counterparts.
In California, San Jose State is perhaps the most extreme example of what good geography can do for you. The California school isn’t especially selective; it takes 63 percent of all applicants. It’s rated number 39 by U.S. News and World Report among regional western universities. But its campus is just ten miles from Apple’s headquarters. The payoff? Apple’s top source of college talent, according to LinkedIn’s databases, is San Jose State, with 1,494 hires. Stanford is in second place, nearly 250 hires behind.
Wait until after college, and the argument for a Moretti move is just as strong. Look at the Dartmouth graduates in the previous chapter as cases in point. Nobody stayed in Hanover, New Hampshire, even though the Dartmouth campus and surrounding town is quite beautiful. For Evan Golden, his dreams of making it as a screenwriter meant heading to Los Angeles. Environmental consultant Joe Indvik settled in Washington. Professional investor Arthur Motch opted for New York. No matter what your ambitions might be, take a moment to consider which cities are hungriest for talent like yours.
If you’re especially restless right after college, that’s a virtue, not a flaw. You’re probably at the peak of your lifetime “freedom curve”—unencumbered by the commitments associated with raising a family or owning a home. You can make a go of it in a new city, whether that means sharing a house with friends or renting a studio apartment on your own. All the mechanics of relocation get harder after age thirty. The best opportunities to make geography work for you are available right now.
Making Audacity Pay Off
Growing up in a Mississippi cotton town, LeAnne Gault knew she had to be good at something. She just wasn’t sure what. Shy, awkward, and ambitious with a jokey streak that she never could fully control, she dreamed of an acting career. When her mother squashed that idea, Gault became an English major at the University of Mississippi. She devoured the poems of Louise Glück and Sharon Olds as well as the novels of Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. She hoped to become a writer herself. For the next ten years, her love of literature kept opening new doors, but when she walked through them, she found herself in situations where everything went bad in a hurry.
The first crisis came in a collegiate English class where Gault tried to defend Faulkner’s Sanctuary as a brilliant novel, even though most scholars regard it as a hastily assembled, lurid tale written only for the money. Gault’s professor scoffed. Gault argued back. The instructor cut loose with a refutation that, in Gault’s words, “scared the hell out of me. I tried to hold strong, but I knew I was going to be chewed up, no matter what.” Things got worse after graduation. Gault headed to Starkville, Mississippi, to try her luck at teaching eighth-grade English, with grisly results. “I did not have great classroom-management skills,” Gault recalled. “I just wanted them to love literature as much as I did.” No such luck. Her classroom became a seething mess of angry fourteen-year-olds with no desire to learn. After a nine-month battle to impose order, Gault left the school system, never to return.
A few years later, Gault met Fred Carl, the founder of Viking Range, at a party. His kitchen-appliance company needed an in-house writer—and Gault needed income. She had retreated into the safety of freelance journalism, writing pieces about Southern food and Southern music while raising her children. Paying the bills by writing news releases and product brochures didn’t sound thrilling. But it beat being broke. When Carl asked her to submit some writing samples, she impudently e-mailed him two poems.
For once, impertinence worked. Gault had played into a useful stereotype: corporate executives’ tendency to view professional writers as feisty, reckless talents, akin to moonshiners or belly dancers. As far as Carl was concerned, if Gault liked to write poetry in her spare time, so be it. She was a writer. He assigned her to create catalog copy about 4,000-BTU burners, which started out as a soul-crushing experience. But that didn’t last long. The social-media revolution had begun, and Gault was about to find her voice. On her Facebook and MySpace accounts, she began bantering with musicians such as Mississippi blues legend David “Honeyboy” Edwards. She liked blues, pop, and an occasional bit of funk; performers enjoyed her friendly, sassy commentary. She struck up online friendships with chefs and food critics around the country too. The shy woman from Greenwood, Mississippi, discovered to her delight that she could say anything she wanted online. She was racing miles ahead of her bosses.
One afternoon, Gault decided to spice up Viking’s Facebook page. It had become a little-noticed repository of corporate backgrounders about the history of Viking. Audience involvement was undetectable, but that was about to change. First Gault announced the start of National Egg Month. She shared a zany video about how to roll up an omelet and asked viewers to share their favorite recipes. Twenty-one people engaged. A few weeks later, she celebrated Maple Syrup Day. This time she got 203 likes and twenty-nine comments. Soon afterward: a contest in which Facebook visitors had a chance to win a lemon-yellow range if they just posted something clever on the site in observation of Lemonade Day.
As Gault’s online banter stepped into high gear, Viking’s Facebook page became an Internet sensation. Before long, it had five hundred thousand followers. Visitors loved Gault’s whimsical, nutty style; her bosses appreciated the way her jokey touch helped Viking get its brand positioning right. The Mississippi company had made rapid headway selling industrial-grade ranges to wealthy suburbanites across the United States. Even people who could barely cook took pride in having three-thousand-dollar flamethrowers in their kitchens. But Viking needed to show a softer side too. To become a kitchen mainstay, Viking had to associate a good-natured sense of joy with its massive machines. The more that Gault could do to turn the company’s backwoods Southern origins into a folksy competitive advantage, the better.
The balloon of Internet fame kept lifting Gault higher. She won a Shorty Award for running America’s best social-commerce campaign, collecting her trophy in a New York ceremony that also honored CNN, HBO, and Major League Baseball. She went on the speaking circuit, telling audiences what made Viking’s campaign work so well. When people asked how she dealt with customer complaints posted on the company’s Facebook page, she avoided the corporate doublespeak that other panelists tended to use. Instead, Gault took her Mississippi drawl up a notch and replied: “We just try to get them to talk about fried chicken.”
If you stand too long in the back of the line for life’s rewards, it’s easy to let defeatism take hold. What’s inspiring about LeAnne Gault’s story is that even after a long run of tough luck, she stood tall when opportunity showed up. If Viking founder Fred Carl was looking for a writer, she wanted him to know that she thought of herself as a poet—not a hack. She didn’t know whether he would be offended or intrigued. Either way, she wasn’t afraid to be bold.
That’s the key lesson from her story, and from the other strivers’ too. Calling yourself a bureaucratic ninja is eccentric, but Mai-Ling Garcia made it work. Talking up parallels between eighteenth-century Irish factionalism and modern-day user-experience research isn’t the standard way of getting hired. But it’s working for Chris LaRoche. We’re all outsiders at some point. You break into the inner circle when you champion your strengths with as much conviction as if you were declaring, “I graduated from Harvard.”
No matter where you went to school or what supposedly “useless” liberal arts degree you earned, some dimension of you deserves its own drumroll too.
Putting All the Pieces Together
When Mai-Ling Garcia arrived at Berkeley as a junior-year transfer, she struggled to fit in. Short on cash, she and her then-husband moved into an aging cottage with a leaky roof about a mile west of campus. Most days, they subsisted on bowls of Top Ramen. Her husband’s military paycheck was gone; they were both students now. Each of them had secured partial scholarships, but they didn’t know enough about their financial-aid options to get the maximum possible support. Neighbors took pity on the couple and shared stockpiles of frozen food. To cover expenses, Garcia took a part-time job teaching art at a grade-school recreation center in Oakland.
Finishing college can become impossible when life gets this harrowing. Partway through her second semester, Garcia began tracking down what she now refers to as “a series of odd little foundations with funky scholarships.” People wanted to help her. Before long, she was attending Berkeley on a full ride. Her money problems abated. What she couldn’t forget was that initial feeling of being in trouble and ill-prepared. Her travails were pulling her into sociology’s most pressing issues: how vulnerable people fare in a world they don’t understand, and what can be done to make their lives better.
Simultaneously, Berkeley’s professors were arming Garcia with the tools that would ultimately define her career. She spent a year learning the fine points of ethnography from a Vietnam-era Marine, Martin Sanchez-Jankowski. He had earned a PhD from MIT; at Berkeley he taught students how to conduct field research. He sent Garcia into the Oakland courthouse to watch judges in action, advising her to pay close attention to the ways racial differences tinged courtroom conduct. She learned to take careful notes, to be explicit about her theories and assumptions, and to operate with a rigor that could withstand peer-review scrutiny. Instead of getting mad, she was learning how to dig deeper.
Was Garcia destined to become a researcher—or an advocate? Unsure of her future, she moved between those two roles for several years. First she conducted field research with a Marine community in Southern California, building her senior thesis around the erratic nature of support systems for warriors’ families living on or near military bases. She documented bureaucratic snarls so powerfully that faculty members encouraged her to present her results to the California assembly and to the American Psychological Association.
For the next few years, Garcia tried to fix the system herself. She spent two years working at a nonprofit organization, Swords to Plowshares, that tried to untangle Veterans Administration bureaucracy. After that, three years at the Department of Labor evaluating hundreds of grant applications related to veterans’ employment. She was winning many small battles, but she felt profoundly frustrated working in an environment that was behind the times technologically.
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Garcia constantly faced the contrast between government torpor and the private sector’s giddy embrace of mobile technologies that put an incredible new power into everyone’s hands. Renting a vacation home, booking a restaurant, or arguing online about a news article had never been so easy. Trying to accomplish anything in government—from reporting a pothole to changing a jury-duty date—was utterly different. American democracy remained stuck with primitive online systems that were hard to use. If the VA could work as smoothly online as Instagram, if city hall were as easy to use as Yelp, everything would be different. Instead, nothing was changing.
Could Garcia help fix government? Yes, she decided, but it would require more zigzags in her training. She needed to become a tech enabler rather than someone who merely bemoaned its failings. She started with night-school lessons in digital marketing from General Assembly.
After that, she spent eighteen months as a marketing specialist at Back to the Roots, which sold mushroom-growing kits online. It was hardly the pinnacle of Garcia’s career, but the pay was good and the training even better. She was learning the fast-paced cadence of California’s start-up culture—where new ideas were being tried out all the time, where “failing fast” was considered a virtue, and where raw prototypes were rapidly retooled and relaunched until a winning new product emerged. Power flows differently in such settings, and the sociologist in her needed to know how and why.
By the summer of 2014, Garcia was ready to reenter government, this time as a full-strength agitator for change. She pounced on a job ad in which the City of Oakland announced that it was seeking a bridge builder who could amp up online government services on behalf of the city’s four hundred thousand residents. How would this happen? No one knew exactly, but Garcia—and Oakland—were ready to find out.
Within a few months, Garcia became a co-manager of Oakland’s Digital Front Door initiative. She and communications manager Karen Boyd pinpointed parts of city government that weren’t making full use of modern online technology and coordinated teams of software engineers and department officials who could take city services to a better place.
This wasn’t just an exercise in technology upgrading; it required a fundamental rethinking of the way that Oakland delivered services. Clerks handling paper records at city hall would need to let go of longtime habits in favor of instant electronic access for anyone with an Internet connection. Buffers between city workers and an impatient public would come down. The social structures of power would change. To make this transition, it certainly helped to have a digitally savvy sociologist in the house.
Over coffee one afternoon, Garcia told me excitedly about ways in which Oakland’s city services were already improving and how much more progress was within sight. The technology that powers Expedia’s plane-ticket sales and Instagram’s photo-sharing service needn’t be the exclusive preserve of profit-minded companies. It can be put to use for the public good too. Already, if street-art creators want more recognition for their work, Garcia can drum up interest on social media. If garbage is piling up and requests for timely pickups are being ignored, new digital tools let citizens visit the city’s Facebook page and summon services within seconds. “It’s as simple as zooming in on a map and clicking the exact location where there’s a mess,” Garcia explained.
Looking ahead, Garcia envisions a day when landing a municipal job becomes vastly easier, with cities’ Twitter feeds posting each new opening. Other aspects of digital technology ought to help residents connect quickly with whatever part of government matters to them—whether that means signing up for summer camp or giving the mayor a piece of one’s mind. Each new wave of technology redefines city life, social norms, and the ways that power flows through society. We’re just beginning to recognize the opportunities before us.