Caption: Image of Chicago office buildings, photo courtesy of Max Bender via Unsplash
For over half my undergraduate career, I helped lead a social impact consulting club on campus. Most of our work was relegated to public interest work and focused on empowering nonprofit groups to tackle fundraising, engagement, and strategic challenges in their programming. In my first year on the board as a second year, I helped work with new consultants to develop consulting hard skills like research and analysis, but also soft skills like public speaking and client relationships. In my second year as one of two Co-Presidents, I spent most of my time overseeing club operations and helping source clients throughout the year, which included—for the first time—a startup. Aside from working on the daily operations of the club, my favorite part of the work by far was mentoring new students—mostly freshman and sophomore associates—about recruitment and academic life at Columbia. One of the questions that I was asked most frequently was about my research experiences and how I translated that work into the professional practice of consulting.
Before I dive more into that question, I think it’s worth taking a step back to understand how I got involved in public interest consulting in the first place. It was not a path I saw for myself when I arrived at Columbia, but it stands out as one of the most formative and rewarding experiences during my time here. During high school, I spent some time leading a local advocacy and literary/visual arts nonprofit in the DC area, working with its founders to help expand involvement among public and private schools in the area. The pandemic, while challenging itself, offered us a chance to take the nonprofit nationally. We were able to widen our engagement and recruitment efforts beyond the nation’s capital to include schools along the East Coast as far north as Connecticut and Massachusetts, but also to the West Coast in California. I spent a lot of time learning how to lead a nonprofit, refine its mission, and scale the work beyond a local level. Fast forward to September of my second year at Columbia and I was starting out as a board member, helping lead a group of nearly fifty associates. At the same time, I also began research in the inaugural cohort of fellows at the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights. I began to see a lot of parallels between my work in nonprofits and the type of deep discipline and inquiry that research required of me. I continued serving on the board throughout the year and was elected as a Co-President in the spring. By the time I left Columbia for the summer, I also began a summer fellowship at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL) and committed to a ten-week residency at an Arabic language intensive at Middlebury (a story for another time).
Since then, my research and consulting work has expanded considerably. I have wonderful memories of evening meetings with our associates, one-on-one mentoring meetings over coffee, and the bittersweet conclusion of my term as Co-President. I held an internship with a smaller, boutique consulting firm over the summer and am excited to return after graduation. And the research experiences that I had throughout my time at Columbia were invaluable in recruitment and my success as a consultant. So, I think that the act of transforming research into something you can talk about during an interview (or otherwise to people outside Columbia) is a critical, if not essential, skill. But there’s no formula or stepwise process to make this process come to life. Of course, being able to talk about your work concisely and accessibly is crucial, but there’s no special structure that you must follow when you bring up research during an interview.
Some of the best conversations about my work that I’ve had during an interview were ones brought about through genuine interest. Generating that interest begins with talking about your research and abandoning niche jargon without shying away from the complexity of the work. Be honest about your challenges, audit your decision-making process, and be vulnerable in a way that invites questions. Research is frequently constrained by the real-world limitations, and the choices that you make to design your methodology and the pivots you make along the way are equally as important as your results. The process, often, involves arriving at substantive findings that shed light on an issue or topic of your choosing, but also reveal how we think as academics and problem-solvers beyond the classroom. Grounding yourself in that act of self-reflection and the twists and turns involved in research is the best advice I can give when it comes to translating research into an adjacent, professional realm.