05: Katie Panciera, from Google to Assistant Professor, on Leaving Well
Katie Panciera serves as an Assistant Professor at Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communications Department. She teaches a wide range of classes, primarily in the User Experience Program, and left a career as a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google to teach at MSOE. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, race, and disability in computing education. She has a number of degrees, but is most proud of being a graduate of Berea College in Kentucky. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband and daughter and spends most of her time reading and knitting and definitely not wandering down internet rabbit holes.
In this episode, Katie shares about her long-arc of leaving, starting as a young age with a father in academia (and frequent moves due to that), continuing through her own leaving: trading tech at Google for her own career in academia. Katie talks about how she brings the lessons learned across her own journey through school and her early career, now to her students. We discuss caretaking for each other, prioritizing your own needs when job searching, and really great advice about not overworking.
“I think it’s kind of like Leave No Trace. How can I make the space a little bit better? How can I pick up a couple of pieces of trash along the way so the next generation or the people who fill my job after me, are set up for success?”
Additional Quotes:
“If we go back and look at all of our job descriptions, how many are actually what they said? Our jobs really are based on us. No one gets into the first job and does not receive training. It’s assumed you don’t know things. Good managers and good teams shift things based on skill sets and what they see.”
“Don’t work 60 hour weeks, because if you work 60 hour weeks and your manager thinks you’re working 40, they will assume the next is working 40 hours per week when they’re working 75.”
To learn more about Katie, visit her website.
To learn more about Leaving Well, click here.
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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
Transcription:
I think it's kind of like leave no trace. How can I make the space a little bit better? How can I pick up a couple of pieces of trash along the way so that the next generation or the people who fill my job after me or whoever it is are set up for success?
This is Leaving Well, where we unearth and explore the realities of leaving a job, role, project, or title with intention and purpose, and when possible, Joy. I'm Naomi Hattaway, your host. I will bring you experiences and lessons learned about necessary endings in the workplace with nuanced takes from guests on topics such as grief, confidence, leadership, and career development.
Braided throughout will be solo episodes sharing my best practices and leaving well framework. Expect to be inspired, challenged and reminded that you too can embed and embody the art and practice of leaving well as you seek to leave your imprint in this world.
Katie Panciera serves as an assistant professor at Milwaukee School of Engineering in the humanities, social sciences, and communications department. She teaches a wide range of classes, primarily in the User Experience Program, and left a career as a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google to teach at MSOE.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, race, and disability in computing education. She has a number of degrees, but is most proud of being a graduate of Berea College in Kentucky. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband and daughter and spends most of her time reading, knitting, and definitely not wandering down internet rabbit holes.
Okay, Katie, tell me about your change story or about your experience with transition.
I've been thinking about this since you reached out and trying to figure out what makes the most sense to talk about. And I think what makes the most sense is in the summer of 2019, I left a big tech job. I was living in Silicon Valley.
I'd been working in tech for six years and moved to teaching and academia and also to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so kind of two transitions that were obviously very interrelated at the same time, but kind of a more personal one with the move and then a professional one with the switch of jobs as well. And it was, it was something that I knew was coming.
I'd gotten a PhD. in part so that I could teach. I knew I wanted to teach. I knew I wanted to eventually end up in the classroom. And in this case, higher ed was always the plan. When I finished my PhD program, I'd been in academia since I was five. And I think I was 31 when I finished my PhD. So it's a long time to be in school.
And I had done an internship in industry. I knew I really liked it. And so I decided to work in industry for a while and we moved to California, but I knew that it wasn't going to be, it never felt sustainable to put down roots in California or especially Silicon Valley. And so we kind of knew it was a stopping point along the way, but not an end point.
And so kind of in both those ways, I knew that at some point I would transition. The question was, When and where would I go? And what would I do? Okay.
So before all of that, what would you say your relationship to change was like maybe thinking back to childhood or even through middle school, high school, college, early days of college?Are you, do you like change? Are you change averse? Like what would you say your relationship is to it?
I think those are a bunch of different questions. So I was very familiar with change. I was on a call last week where someone asked me where I'm from. And I was like, I don't even know how to answer that question.
Cause I was, I was born to an academic. So my dad was doing a postdoc and then get a teaching faculty position. It's laid off from that position, ended up getting a research faculty position after 10 years in that. Position with tenure was like, No, I want to teach. And then we moved again. And none of these moves were small.
So the 10 years that we lived, we lived in Alaska, which was across the continent from all of our relatives. When we moved, we moved from Alaska to Kentucky, which was My brother and I, I remembered we drove and we hit Edmonton and we thought we died because of the heat in Edmonton, Alberta, and we were headed to Kentucky in July, and we, we did not know what we were for.
In the same way, I went to the same schools through elementary and middle school. I went to one school for, for high school and took classes at the local college. I went to that local college for college and I did study abroad. But again, there was kind of this underlying continuity, even when there was a lot of change.
And so, My gifts and my passions were still with me, right? So I'm, I'm a musician and you know, since I was little, I'd been in band. And then when I moved to Kentucky, I stayed in the band and then I went to the college band. And then I joined the college choir and I took music classes. So, And even when I started grad school, I joined a church choir.
So there's kind of, you know, the continuity of music or the continuity of, I love to read and the continuity books, right? Like everywhere I've lived, there's a library, right? And so I can go and delve into the stacks and find something that feels like home, even if I don't feel like home. I'm not one who actively seeks out change and I don't like turmoil.
I will say that. So like this notion of leaving, well, it feels good to me because I'm not someone who wants to burn bridges, I, I want to leave in a way that I can change my mind if, if, if it happens, but I also like my dad was an academic, but my mom never used her college degree, and then when I was in high school went back to school and got a nursing degree.
And then worked as a nurse until she retired. And so there was kind of also this notion in my family of you're never going to be stuck. You can always reinvent yourself or pivot. And it may not be a smooth transition, but you'll figure it out.
So Katie, we could stop talking right now and you've had, you have like all these drops of gems and genius. Um, and so I'm just so excited to keep exploring a little bit. I would like to ask you about either, and this is again, like two questions, but I would be just interested in which one you want to answer. What have you lost? Do you think through all of those transitions? Or if you'd rather, what is something because of transition that you consistently walk towards?
Again, those are both interesting questions. So thinking about what I've lost, I will say when we left Alaska, we left in 1998. And so I was on the Internet. My friends were on the internet. It was dial up. It was slow. My mom would kick us off because she had to make a phone call. So I had to go to the library.
Right. But like, I remember sitting in the library and having online chats with my best friend in Alaska. Um, but that, and, and that was something that Obviously we didn't have when I was four and moving to Alaska, I don't know that I had good enough friends then to be worried about losing them kind of a few things come to mind.
One is that I have not invested as much time in maintaining some of my friendships. So, and part of that is age. Part of that is how I prioritize my time. And so there are friendships that have just kind of faded away. Now, some of them are ones that I know if I dropped back in their life, we could pick right back up.
Others are ones that I don't know that I would want to reignite just because of where I am and where they are and like how our paths crossed at one point, but very much have diverged since then. And I often think about this because when I chose a grad school, I was picking from three very different programs, like three different degrees at three different schools.
And I don't think I probably picked the one that was best for me in an academic sense, but I picked the one that I, that ended up being really good for me, even if it wasn't what I needed academically. And that's been a long journey to.
Um, I met and the experiences that I got have been pivotal to becoming who I am. So I would also say like, I don't, I often think of what would have happened if I'd made a different choice. Yeah. Right. But I don't think I actively regret any of my choices. And part of that is because when I choose something, it's a very. Deep process. Mm-hmm. . And so it's not something that I am just like, oh, let's see about this. Like let's just apply at a win. Right? Yeah. Like when I applied to my current job, it was the only job I applied to and I was like, well, if I don't get it, I'm fine staying where I am, I have a great salary, I have stock options.
Like things are good. I don't feel like I can afford to live here, but like that's, that's a different thing, but it was something where, like, I had multiple good options, and I think that that's one of the things that has been kind of consistent throughout is, like, having good options to choose from and putting myself in a position where I do have good options to choose from, as opposed to feeling backed into a corner, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, that intention around, um, I would guess that if you did a review of your values and what you hold true to yourself, that maybe something that would rise high is, you know, something to do with. Having agency in decisions that you make, you know, I don't know what value that would be, but that was really high as, as I'm listening to you talk.
Mm hmm. And actually, if I looked at when I transitioned teams even while I was in tech, one of the transitions that I did was because I was not given autonomy and I, my opinions, my professional, my professional opinions and my professional recommendations were not being respected. And so when that happened, That was kind of the thing that kicked off for me.
This is not where I need to be right now. I need to be somewhere else and I need to find somewhere where me being who I am is going to be valued instead of a negative side effect. Um, and I think that that has also been something that has kind of been a through line for me of like, at one point I, my dad pointed out I was, I was doing job interviews while pregnant and I was not far enough along that anyone could know.
But I remember thinking, what if they offer me the job and then I tell them I want my first term off and they say, just kidding, we don't want you. And my dad pointed out, he was like, if they want you to start teaching your first term full time teaching with a six week old baby they're not setting you up for success.
And if they're not setting you up for success, is that where you want to be? And so that's kind of something that, that goes around in my head. Like I don't, I don't pretend to be who I'm not in job interviews because if you don't want me, I don't want to be who you want like, I don't want to work for you if you don't want me, because that just seems too exhausting. Like I don't have to pretend for 48, 40 plus hours a week.
Yeah. Okay. So I'm grabbing that bit of advice from your dad around be who you really are in an interview. You've taken that with you. What would you, what would be a piece of advice you would give someone from kind of a career job, whether it's seeking or anything, I guess, related to jobs, what would be your top tip that comes to mind?
Okay. I mean, one of the things that I'm constantly telling my students, especially if they're not white cis male students, is that they don't need to meet all of the criteria, right? We know that women and underrepresented groups do not apply if they don't meet a certain percentage of that, those requirements and that percentage is ridiculously high, like 90%, right?
I almost didn't apply for this job because it seemed very design-y and I'm not a designer, I'm a researcher. And so I was like, I don't know, like I can make my fonts a little pretty, but like, that's not who I am. And I think that there've been multiple times where I've applied for those where I know I don't meet the requirements.
Now, sometimes I really didn't meet the requirements. So one of the times they said, we don't have the position you're looking for, but we have this other position. We usually give it to like PhDs and statistics as opposed to most of what I was doing was like much more psychology, computer science ish, but we want you to interview for it anyways.
And I did, and it went horribly. And I was like, I saw that one coming, but part of it was people who I knew and respected me were like, you should try this. I said, okay. I evaluate what do I have to lose? And in that case, I didn't feel like I had much to lose. So I said, okay, I'll go for it. And I panicked a lot, right?
Like before the phone call and you know, my heart dropped in my chest, but it was fine. Yeah. Again, I ended up. In a good place. And I think that that's part of it too, is like realizing that I think a lot of people think of their journeys as a road. Right. And it's got the signposts and it's probably a little more interstate y, right, where you've got all the exits labeled and you know what restaurants are at the exit and like, you don't want to take too many risks.
And when I was telling my story a few years ago at a workshop, someone said almost everyone in this workshop took a river, right? It's kind of windy. You have no clue if your boat washes up on the bank, whether there's going to be anything to eat. Right. Right. Or like what's going to be around, but it's not a better journey or a worse journey.
It's just a different journey. And I think a lot of my students, especially are very concerned about doing the right thing, right, making the right choice for their professional development. And I think a lot of times I mean, sometimes there is a very clear right choice and wrong choice, but sometimes it's just there's a choice and you just have to pick something and then figure out where you go from there.
And it's kind of a, it's a journey, and it's a long journey, but I think the journey is part of what makes it interesting. And I think that's really hard, especially for my 22 year old students to see, in part because they've just come out of school. They're, the school that I'm at, is known for having very good job placement rates.
So a lot of them are in school in the first place to get a job. And then it's like, if the right job doesn't come up, did they make a giant mistake? Instead of thinking about, okay, what advantages does my path give me that I would not have had otherwise?
That's good. That's good. Such great advice, especially around, you know, when you think about the identities that we do share publicly and the identities that are maybe not so obvious or that are invisible. And then when, when you come to start deciding whether you have the right expertise, sometimes that intersection too gets messy around what we want to share and maybe we're qualified or not qualified based on identity.
So that's really powerful. Like even students coming to me and saying, well, do I have to disclose a disability? And one of them and said, I didn't even know you had a disability. And if you don't put that you have a disability like, you are not required to say yes. You are not required to answer that question.
And if you don't need accommodations now and need them later, they're not going to go back to your job application and be like, well, you said you were disabled, so. Right. Give you those amenities. Um, and so I think that that's also something where, like, who you're willing to publicly be changes over time.
And part of, I think, being a human is figuring out how to deal with that. Yeah, and figuring out what you're willing to be open with and what you're not and like how that balance works and you see how you're perceived and you pivot based on those perceptions and you keep going. But one of the things I love to see on job sites is saying, if you don't meet all the criteria, please still submit your application because we probably do want to hear from you, and I think that that's, that is one of the most validating things I can see on a jobs website, because I can see so many of my students be like, Oh, well, I guess maybe I should apply.
Do you know, Katie, I saw recently a job from an organization that said at the bottom, I'm not going to remember exactly, but basically it was, even if you don't fit all the qualifications we've listed as recommendations or preferences, please apply. If you really just want to work with our team, because we probably really want to work with you too. And basically I think the idea was. Maybe you're a good fit for our team, regardless of what we think the job description may be today. And that blew me away. I was like, well, look at that.
Well, and I think it's also something where if we go back and look at all of our job descriptions, we've done like how many of them are actually what they said, right? Like it's completely different to that. Yeah, because it really is based on you. And I was talking to someone the other day who was saying, you know, no one gets in the first job and doesn't get any training, right?
Like it is assumed that you don't know things when you go in and then they, they shift things based on our good managers, good teams shift things based on skill sets and what they see. And that. That makes total sense to me, but I think it's also depends on kind of what sort of background you have as to whether or not you even think that that would be possible.
Right. Which is why it's great when they say that explicitly, like, if you're excited about us, we will probably be excited about you. Right. Well, and I think one of the, one of the components of leaving well is that if you embed it in your organization, you're doing things like reviewing job descriptions along the way to say, how far did we go astray from what you, we hired you on with what are you bringing to this that we should probably add and in an organization that's prioritizing leaving well, if there's safety.
This is a whole long conversation, but if there's a little bit of safety around saying, this might not be where I want to be in two years, I could, with my current job description, work with my manager to say, this might be what the organization needs going forward to redesign the job description. There's just so many ways to be a little bit more I don't know intuitive around all of it.
One thing I saw someone suggest for the candidate to ask the interviewer about a recent time that the organization implemented a suggestion from frontline staff or from someone that doesn't hold a manager position. Isn't that bold? The second thing I just have to say is I literally, one of my big dreams is that interview questions from the candidate will soon include things like what are your leaving well policies? How does your organization, um, institute and implement leaving well? That'd be so incredible if that we started asking jobs about that.
Well, and, and I think it's, it's also interesting thinking about this from an academic setting, right? Because the whole idea of hiring in academia is very long term. Right. So if it's not an adjunct position, we are basically setting up to hire you for 40 years in my school doesn't have tenure, but it's still kind of that long term first, we'll have a four year contract and then it'll be a six year contract and then it'll be an eight year contract. But like the idea is unless you really screw up, we want you here until you don't want to be here anymore.
And that means that stuff moves really slowly. But that also means so I came in with two other professors when I started in summer of 2019 in my department and the other two of them are gone and I have stayed and I look and I sit right now in the building with the computer science people and all four of the people that I started with in computer science are still there.
And I don't think it's a reflection on my department. But it is something that I think about in terms of like, what does this say about our, about our program and our institution that we have had people come in and go out and come in and go out. And one of the problems computer science faces, in particular, is they have no people teaching who are female computer scientists.
So, because that's my background, I kind of fill that hole, even though I'm not in their department. But it is something that they have been thinking with and wrestling with like how do we make this more this job more attractive to women, because we know that representation plays a role, and we know that not having full time faculty member on this floor.
In our department, who's female is saying something now we have kind of this traumatized group of students. How can I support them? What do I need to change in terms of my policies? How do I need to think about how can I center their well being and how can I help them center their own well being right because we're also talking 20 year olds who have also often been really hard workers in high school, but also always at the top.
So another thing I thought about was like, how can I create a safe place for them to fail, like not fail the class, but fail an assignment and realize, okay, life will continue and it will be okay and it's hard. And it's obviously like those of us who have encountered failure before, no one wants to fail, right?
No one's like, yes, I failed again. But a lot of my teaching journey has been about, okay, how can I make sure they're paying attention to their mental health? How can I make sure they're getting the help they need? How can I make sure that they're listening to what they need? Which is kind of then I hope setting them up for success in the workplace to advocate for themselves and their needs.
My research is on looking at underrepresented groups in computing and that's Gender that's race. That's also disability and thinking about like how are we serving or not serving these students and how could we do a better job because we know like as a field we know we are failing. So, stepping back my question is, are there some small things that we can do that would make it less bad.
Right. We know this 40 years we're not going to fix it overnight. But what can we do to make it a little better, so that. The next generation won't have to do as much work with masking or won't talk down about themselves as much or, or whatever it is, right? Because I feel like some of these things are so systemic that it's not something like we can't fix all of HR culture, right?
Overnight, we can't fix all of computing culture overnight. There are so many of these things that we can't fix. And so I don't think it's cause I'm super optimistic that I'm thinking about this. It's more just kind of, and to be honest, it comes from a really selfish point, which is like, what do I wish I had known kind of going into this field? Or what do I wish someone had told me 10 years ago? Or what do I wish I had thought about when I was making the certain decision?
I think that I hadn't thought how closely the living well concept correlates with academia, and it's huge.
Well, and I think part of it is because it's where we're setting students up for the rest of their lives, or we think we are. But part of it is also really like about who you want to end up in the workforce and how you want them to show up as the managers in 40 years, right? Because these are going to be in 40 years. I'm hopefully going to be retired.
But I want that next generation to be just as strong or stronger and more empowered. Set up that next generation for better things. And I think we don't think about that a lot in terms of like generalized workplace culture. We think of that a lot in terms of like, Oh, this generation of programmers or this generation of interior designers or whatever, but we don't think about it as like a, this is going to be a generation of employees.
And we know there's a lot of stereotypes now. And we know their stereotypes and so we should not treat them with heavy value, but in the same way, these are going to be the leaders someday and we should help them.
So my last question for you is, how would you describe leaving well in the way that it means something to you?
A lot of what I think about it is based on you because I was watching you leave and make that transition and kind of using that that is a hashtag to show what that was. I think it's about, it's going to be a random analogy. I think it's kind of like leave no trace. I mean, not, not literally, just to be clear, don't vanish into the night, but how can I make the space a little bit better?
Not a lot better. Like I'm not going to go through and figure out a new way to filter water and desalination techniques and everything so everyone can have water, right? Like, I'm not going to do that. But how can I make it a little bit better? How can I pick up a couple of pieces of trash along the way, so that the next generation or the people who fill my job after me or whoever it is are set up for success.
And I think that that's how I think about it a lot. Like when I've changed jobs. Within tech was like, how can I make sure the people after me are set up for success? And even with my students, I think about that. I'm like, don't work 60 hour weeks. Cause if you work 60 hour weeks and your manager thinks you're working 40, they're going to assume the next intern is working 40 hours a week when they're working 75.
And so it's kind of all like setting reasonable expectations, communicating those expectations and like making things a little bit better. So that, again, we're not going to transform the world overnight, but like. It can be, we can feel like we're in a good place and our organization is in a good place and our community is in a good place so that you can go back and visit and stay in touch and keep those connections you want, but there aren't connections that you need to burn because It went so poorly.
Yeah. No, it makes total sense. And it, it brings together kind of, you know, imprint and legacy of that leave no trace, uh, is all around what's your imprint after you've been in a place or at a place. So that totally resonates. Thank you so much for this conversation. I have notes galore and I'm really excited to share your story and your brilliance and wisdom out into the world.
Well, I'm, I'm excited to keep watching you and see what you do and kind of how you took this concept that, you know, I had never even thought of a few years ago and like bring it to more people. It's one of those, it's definitely one of those, you can't unsee it once you start thinking about . Well, right?
It. Yeah. But I think that's a good thing because I think we often think about the introduction as the important part. That, that beginnings. And I think, I mean, in our society in general, right? Like we don't like to talk about funerals. We don't like death. We don't like any endings, basically. But I think part of that is like, we don't have those rituals and those connections.
And when our society isn't comfortable talking about them, I mean, It turns out that not talking about it often doesn't work out very well, I think, which is part of why I'm open about everything, because I'm like, just pretending that I'm not who I am is not going to make It's not going to help anybody, and it's just going to make things worse.
Yeah, and not talking about endings doesn't mean they don't happen. Right. No, just because we don't talk about death doesn't mean no one dies. Right. Yeah, we, we've got a little bit of a ways to go, uh, before we normalize talking about endings in the workplace and in our institutions. And I think it's also interesting, like, even if you think about like the standard notion of the two weeks notice, right?
Because of the academic job cycle, I was on a completely different planet. So I told them in January that I was going to leave at the end of June. And at the beginning of January, that was a hard choice to make. By the end of June, it was no longer a hard choice. And it was not just me wrestling with it.
It was also seeing the change in the organization over those six months. Right? And, and. I think that's also something that makes academia and academic transitions really weird is because often you can know a year in advance. I'm not going to be here. And this is a transition period. And that could be really awkward, but it also is, is an opportunity to then, okay, how can I document things differently? How can I change things?
Thank you, Katie.
Thanks. This was a lot of fun.
To learn more about Leaving Well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, visit naomihattaway.com. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system.
We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide. To shift culture and to create transformation. Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hattaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.
