Stories from Beyond Academia #6: Mark Williams
PhD in Experimental Psychology
Have you ever wondered if moving beyond academia would be letting your supervisor down?
We’ve been asked this question plenty in our talks and workshops about our paths to non-academic careers. We even wondered this ourselves. And today we got to ask the question of an experienced PhD supervisor – one who has since made the move beyond academia himself!
In many of the stories we’ve heard so far, the move beyond academia occurred immediately post-PhD, or perhaps after a postdoc of two. But this story is different. It tells of a move made by a Professor with more than 20 years of success in academia – Dr Mark Williams.
Since moving beyond academia, Mark has founded ‘Rethinking the Brain’ and authored ‘The Connected Species: How the Evolution of the Human Brain Can Save the World’.
We talk to Mark about what prompted the change, how he went about making the change happen, and how the non-academic world is looking so far. And we ask for his perspective on that controversial question of whether it’s letting your supervisor down…
Jonathan McGuire: Alright, rock and roll, let’s get straight into it! Mark, you're a bit different to the people we've been interviewing thus far. And that’s because you had quite a long and successful career as a cognitive scientist before moving beyond academia. So could we start there - could you tell us a bit about the research that you were doing, and your academic career more generally?
Mark Williams: I sure can, although I think that may be a backhanded way of saying I’m quite old!
I didn't actually start my academic career until I was a mature age student. I didn't like school – actually, I hated school – and I was a truant for most of my school years. When I was about 15, my principal told me that I'd be dead or in prison by the time I was 25, and that I should get a job at the local abattoir as an apprentice. So I went off and did lots of odd jobs. I didn't think about going to university until I was 25, which is when I went back to school and got my HSC – and I did that because two of my friends had drug overdoses and I decided I wanted to change things up. So I went back to school, and there was a physics teacher there that convinced me that I was brighter than I ever thought I was, and that I should go to university. The start to my university career was therefore much later than most.
I went to Monash University, because he convinced me that was a good idea and I didn't really know where I was headed. I did a double degree in physiology and psychology: psychology because I wanted to work out why I was so screwed up and why my family was so screwed up; physiology because I'd always been interested in science, even from a young age when I used to take things apart to work out how they worked. So I think that's why I got into science, and why I was so interested in sciences. I then did a PhD in neuropsychology, which was really interesting as it combined both the physiology and the psychology side of things and that was unusual in those days. And then I got a postdoc to work with Jason Mattingley, on a Unilever grant. Unilever is a huge multinational company, I think they have about 60% of the products in most supermarkets. And they were interested in whether or not they could scan people's brains to work out what products would be successful. This was way back in the early days, so they funded Jason, gave him money to hire a postdoc (me!), and I spent three years working in the basement at St. Vincent's Hospital trying to get the MRI to actually do functional MRI, because functional MRI wasn't done in Australia at that stage. So we were one of the first to try and get that to work here, which was amazing because I got to work with physicists, I got to work with engineers, all on the back end of the MRI, so I really got a good handle on how it actually worked and learned how to develop sequences so that I could actually do the functional imaging studies. From there, I was lucky enough to get a CJ Martin Fellowship and I went to MIT and worked with Nancy Kanwisher in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. That was an amazing place to work, she was just the most amazing supervisor, and I met some incredible people there who I'm still very good friends with: one now has his own lab at NIH, another is back in Belgium and another is in France, so we all went all over the world. And that’s awesome, I now have friends everywhere!
So I spent a couple of years there. Macquarie University, at that stage, were building a new hospital that they own, and they were interested in increasing their research potential, and they wanted someone to help set up the MRI facility there so that it could be used for functional imaging. So Max Coltheart contacted myself and Anina Rich, my partner. It was quite funny, he contacted us and said there were these jobs, but it turned out there was only one job in our area. And so we replied that we were not really interested because there's two of us, and Anina wanted to do another postdoc – she’d just finished her first postdoc and she wanted to do another postdoc in the US, and I was looking at jobs in the US too. And then we went to Russia for a conference. We were in Russia for about three weeks traveling, and we didn't have any internet access – back then Internet access was much more unstable than it is today – so when we got back to Boston there were a bunch of emails from Max. He had maybe thought we were trying to get him to offer something better and better, and he kept offering us better and better! And he ended up telling us to just come and there’d be two jobs, so we flew out here and interviewed and both got offered the jobs. It was quite incredible what they offered us for the first couple of years that we were here actually. I helped set up the MRI at the hospital, I was involved in the placement of the MRI and the room, and how we can use it properly for doing functional imaging.
And then I spent almost 14 years at Macquarie University, became a professor there, and supervised a whole bunch of PhD students. I also started a course in philosophy of science for PhD students, as our PhD students weren't doing any courses back then. I really wanted to start a philosophy of science course, and we had PhD students from all over the university come to do that course which was great. I taught it with great people like John Sutton and David Kaplan, and then David and I decided we wanted to do an undergraduate course in neuroscience. So we set that up and we were hoping to get 50 students in the first year, and it maxed out at about 400 students in that first year. We went from nothing to crazy numbers, pretty much overnight. We actually ended up getting a grant so that we could set up real labs for that course, so the students could do real labs. And I think that’s what made it so popular. Now the course is at well over 1000 students. And following that, a lot of us in the department got together and decided to set up the Bachelor of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, which has been hugely successful and now has its own students coming through, and a student society, and it's amazing to see what's happened with that. The Department of Cognitive Science was an amazing place to work. But then our new Vice-Chancellor, for some reason, decided he wanted to shut down the faculty and the department. I fought very hard to try and save both, including getting more than half of the professors at the university to sign a letter to the Vice Chancellor arguing the case, but unfortunately I lost that fight so I decided it was time to move on. And that was my academic career!
I think because I never expected to achieve anything, then anything I’ve achieved I've been extremely proud of and extremely thankful for
JM: It seems like you really went from zero to 100 on so many things in that career! I also think you managed to entirely predict my next question, which was going to be what made you decide to switch careers. I think maybe we now know why you decided to switch careers…
MW: A lot of people comment on what I’ve achieved, and I think because I never expected to achieve anything, then anything I’ve achieved I've been extremely proud of and extremely thankful for, and I think that's why I keep pushing myself. At the same time, which I didn't mention, I started working with the Leap team when I was at Macquarie University – they’re a federally funded organisation within Macquarie University and they go out to low-SES schools and try to get kids from low SES schools to think about going to university or think about other career options. I've been on at least 90% of the roadshows, they always call me ‘the talent’, and we go out and spend a week in an area where there's maybe gang problems or racial tension or huge unemployment. A lot of these schools are locked schools, so they're locked up at nine o'clock in the morning and opened up again at three o'clock, and that’s to keep the gangs out of the schools. I did Leap roadshows for a long time, about six years and I’m still doing them – I did one just the other week and I’m booked for another soon. And I keep going because I find it hugely rewarding, but in doing that I also realised that schools needed more help with how to actually teach, how to connect with the students. There were a lot of myths out there in the education area that were causing detrimental effects in education. And through that I realised this is a big need.
So, at the same time as I was fighting for the department and faculty at the university, I was also starting to work with schools. My kids were at school and their principal asked me to come along and do a few things, which I did. And his director saw what I was doing and asked me to work with a whole bunch of his other schools, so I started working with other schools through that. And then, as a result of that, I was contacted by a few schools down in Victoria too. So I'd already started doing that work and I was really, really enjoying it, much more than the university work. So there was something of a transition: there was just this much brighter light that was really pulling me towards it, which is why I sort of decided that it was time to go. I'm definitely not someone who believes in fate, but there was something there. I'd already started working on these other programs, and they were doing so well that I thought it was time to put all my eggs into that basket.
JM: It almost sounds like you had that potential other path there in front of you and you just had to say “I'm gonna go for that”.
MW: There were a few strings left, and I did have to cut those. It was sad because I walked away from the degree which I loved and a whole bunch of colleagues that I love. Funnily enough, I'm actually going back – I just signed a contract to go and convene two courses, so I did cut ties but now I’ve been lassoed back!
JM: When you were looking down that path, did you do anything to prepare for that switch? Or did it just happen organically?
MW: I guess it was a slow process. I first reduced my role to a part-time role at Macquarie (80%), and worked 20% on this new business. At that stage it was just some small things I was doing. And then a bit later I decided to go 50/50, and I set up the business ‘Rethinking the Brain’ and did all the paperwork at that stage. I started doing a course with a guy called Mark Hodgson on transitioning into your own business and how that works. I spend a lot of time doing micro-courses on how to run a business, keeping cash flow, marketing and advertising and sales, and all these things that I’d never ever dealt with before. I don’t love that stuff, but do it because I have to. What I love is getting to schools and actually spending time with the students or with the teachers. I get such a buzz out of that, but it is a business and you've got to sell your program. I had to learn all that, which took a while, and still takes time - I’m still learning. It's a whole different game!
JM: So you cut the strings a couple of years ago now. What’s happened since?
MW: I've got that business going now, which is ticking along really well. I've got the Connected Teachers Academy, which is an online academy, which teachers sign up for. That's very busy at the moment - there's a whole bunch of courses on there and I run live events on their Q and A's with teachers. I have several hundred teachers in the US and the UK, as well as a few in Australia, and so that’s why it's online, it’s a great way for me to reach more people. I'm currently in discussion with a big educational firm in Asia about doing some programs with some of the private schools. I do a lot of work with Upschool.co which is a free enterprise. They design and then film courses and they put them online, and teachers can download those courses for free. And they're all based on the Australian Curriculum. They've been to the North Pole and they've filmed around climate change, they just went to Antarctica with Dr. Karl and filmed there around polar ice caps. We're, at the moment, filming some stuff on mental health, brain health, and the brain. Again, as a one term thing that any teacher can just download and run with their students. I think they've got close to a million teachers on that site now.
And then, of course, the book: I've got a book coming on the 15th of August, which is called ‘The Connected Species: How the Evolution of the Human Brain can Save the World’, which is all about connection. I wrote it during COVID because I saw the problems that everyone was having during COVID. It's based on a lot of my research over the last 25 years, which has all been on social and emotional connection: facial expressions, how we actually connect, how faces are so important, how body language works, but also on the fact that we need to do it face to face. The neurotransmitters that are released when you're face to face are different to what they are online, so this so-called ‘new normal’ where everyone's working from home over devices isn't going to work. It also goes through what the tech companies are doing to manipulate us, and how the algorithms work in the background to manipulate us from a neuroscience point of view. And then each chapter contains tips you can actually put into your normal life to change your relationship with the devices. So that comes out in August, and then there's two other books on the way: one ‘Doing Digital Differently’ which will be for teenagers on doing devices differently which I'm writing with an ex-principal, and then another called ‘The Great Man Con’ and the fact that science is being biased towards dividing men and women when there's really very little difference between us. And hormones such as testosterone aren’t a male hormone at all, how there’s no evidence for that making you aggressive, and so on. That's an interesting book to write, working with a psychologist colleague who spent a lot of time working in prisons with men. I'm crazy busy to be honest, but I'm really enjoying it.
JM: Reflecting on the work you've been doing since you left academia, what skills or knowledge or experience from your academic career have carried over into this new work that you're doing? Obviously, there's the subject matter expertise, but is there anything else that you think carries over?
MW: Yeah, definitely the subject matter expertise for me. I get pretty frustrated because there's a lot of people out there who call themselves neuroscientists, especially in the business world, and they’ve maybe done a six-month course and then go and perpetuate all these neuro myths. So make sure if you’re hiring someone that they actually have the experience and have done the hard work. Also, just having the title - it sounds stupid - but having the title ‘Dr’ I think actually also makes a big difference. And I didn't realise this until I moved out of academia, because in academia everyone's got the ‘Dr’ and so no one really notices. But out of academia you realise that not many people do have the ‘Dr’ title. I was working, as I said, with Mark Hodgson who's had an amazing career working in huge companies all over the world as CFO and director and all sorts of things. But he told me one day that he wished he could go back and do a PhD so he could call himself ‘Dr’. He thinks that the title might mean twice as much work – I don’t know about that, but I would definitely say the title does make a big difference. We don't realise it when we're in academia, but it really does.
Also the people skills, having the ability to collaborate with people and to realise that it's important to have honest conversations when you are collaborating with people or when you're deciding to collaborate with people. And these are things you need to be able to do when you're an academic, or when you're doing your PhD. You take control of the experiments and know that you can’t let people push you around. I think that's a really important thing to learn, and I think that's a really good asset whether you’re trying to run your own business or if you're out there in the ‘real world’. And I don’t think you really learn that in other degree programs, but you do learn that when you're doing a PhD - how to take control of a project and feel confident enough to actually run with it. Then there's also the fact that you have been taught to think critically about everything. And so therefore you can spot the bulls**t very easily, I think, because you know how to spot it. And I think that's really, really important too. There's a lot of bulls**t out there, a lot of people that will try and spin things for you and I think you can spot that easily. And I think that's another thing we learn as PhD students that we don't really learn in any other environment, having that ability to critically think and critically evaluate other people and what they're saying or what they're offering or what they've come to the table with.
But I think those would be the key ones: 1) being able to take a project and run with it, having the ability to do that, the backbone to do that, the power to do that; and 2) critically thinking both about what you've been told, as well as about the person themselves and whether or not you're going to believe them. The other would be being able to learn and knowing you can learn things, because you’ve learned all this stuff and actually got a PhD focused on this crazy little question, which no one else was studying. And you were able to do that yourself, find all the information, learn how to do programming or whatever it happened to be. And if you can do that then you can probably learn how to do whatever it is that you need, and I think, really, that’s invaluable.
I would definitely say the title does make a big difference. We don't realise it when we're in academia, but it really does.
JM: You mentioned earlier that you supervised many PhD students. And now's the time for a big reveal of this interview: that you were Sam's PhD supervisor.
MW: She was lovely.
JM: Yeah, she seems ok I guess! So I’ve got a question for you as a supervisor, and this is one of the questions that we sometimes get from PhD candidates who are considering going into non-academic careers. Sometimes they're worried about what their supervisor is going to think, they might feel like they're letting their supervisor down. From a supervisor’s perspective, then, what was it like seeing some of your supervisees go into academic careers and others go into non-academic careers?
MW: I’d prefer that they didn't go on to academic careers because if you think about it, there's only a certain number of academic careers out there. And they're not increasing by a huge amount (or by any really). So each PhD supervisor should only really supervise one PhD student to take their job. And that should be it. So if you're supervising more than one PhD student, you're over populating the pool in a way. So those students would have to go out into the “real world” and get a job otherwise they're not going to succeed because there's just not the positions available. I always remember my supervisor at MIT, Nancy Kanwisher - absolutely brilliant woman and lovely, lovely woman, but she said academia is the strangest job in the world because what you are doing is training your competitors, you are training people up to compete with you for jobs, grants, to get published. So maybe we really should train them badly rather than well, so we can be more successful!
No, so I always wanted my PhD students to learn while they were with me and to be successful in that process, but after that it didn't make any difference to me what they actually did or where they went as long as they were happy and they were doing something that they really enjoyed. Because it doesn't make any difference to my career what happens to the students once they've graduated. I mean, it'd be really handy if they went and worked for the Nature journal and got my stuff published in Nature regularly. That'd be great. But that's highly unlikely. But other than that, it really doesn't make much difference to an academic as to what their students then do. Unless - and I'll be controversial here - unless it's one of those really selfish academics that get their PhD students to work for them, which is the worst thing an academic can do because if a student wants to go and become an academic they finish their PhD then they really should go out and establish themselves as an independent researcher and not continue to work with their supervisor. That’s good for the academic, the supervisor, but it's really bad for the student because the student doesn't establish themselves as independent and they'll have a lot of trouble getting their own grants, or getting their own positions later on.
I think Sam would agree, I was always really supportive no matter what the student wanted to do, and the vast majority of my students went on to do other things and didn't go into academia. And I'm really proud of that, because they're all over the place - I've got Sam, who’s doing great things, and other ex-students who ended up working at Foxtel and in the pharmaceutical industry, at Google, one who set up several psychology clinics down in Melbourne. So I don't mind, and we shouldn’t. We should be happy for the students as long as they get the job that they want and it's something that fulfills them. Plus, academia is a very competitive game – it’s not for the faint hearted, it's not for everybody., and a lot of people won’t thrive in that environment. It can be quite toxic.
JM: So perhaps the obvious next question, and this is the final question I’ve got for you, is what advice would you give to someone who's considering a career switch out of academia - whether they’re a recently minted doctor or whether they've been in academia for 20 years?
MW: If you're really not enjoying where you are and there's something else that you'd rather do, give it a go. You'll be amazed at how valuable you are out there in the community, as somebody who has a PhD. Just having a PhD means the sky's the limit, and I think we should emphasise that more – that doing a PhD isn't about becoming an academic, doing a PhD is about learning all these really unique and important skills that are really valuable out there in the community. And so we need to get more people doing PhDs to go back out into the community, rather than just having people doing PhDs to become academics, because, as I said, there's not the jobs - the jobs are getting harder and harder to get and there’s probably going to be even less jobs in the future. So we should be emphasising the fact that it is an amazing resource that you have in the PhD and you can get out there and sell it.
And with that, we thank Mark for sharing his story. As a former PhD supervisor, we found it fascinating to hear his perspective on PhD students moving beyond academia (and certainly one of us is very grateful Mark didn’t decide to train his PhD students badly so as to reduce the chance of competition!)
And that comment about being amazed at the value of the PhD? That sense of surprise about the PhD being more than just an academic apprenticeship? That really resonated - we see these examples of the value of our PhDs in our own roles, and now hearing the stories in this series is just reinforcing it for us!
Speaking of, if you are a PhD who has moved beyond academia and you are interested in sharing your story, please get in touch with us via our LinkedIn pages - Sam, Jonathan - we’d love to hear from you.
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by persons interviewed in this series are solely that of the persons interviewed and do not reflect the views, opinions, or position of Sam, Jonathan or Sequitur Consulting.