An Education Liaison Improving School Communities

Name: Nelson Endebo (he/him)

PhD: Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 2024

What is your current job?

I am a Leadership Operations Associate at Spring Education Group in San Francisco, California. 

I work for a company that acquires and runs private K-12 schools (206 total across the US and a few more in East Asia). The company has a central office that provides services to its various school brands and works on managing assets, overall growth strategy and performance evaluation, among many other things.

My job is to be a liaison between the various schools and the central office. This involves immersion in the daily life of our schools and communities, connecting with local leadership, service staff and teachers on each site, and then partnering with central office leadership in defining action plans tailored to each brand and aligned with business goals.

In practice, this could look like anything from improving the online bookstore experience for teachers and parents in one school, to designing more efficient systems to manage classroom scheduling in another, to figuring out how to improve teacher retention in yet another, to developing internal tools for admissions staff in a fourth school.

I'm a systems thinker and have a gregarious personality, so I love that I get to meet new people constantly and interact with the communities we serve, while also addressing a broad range of problems, some quite complex, that keep me learning and growing professionally.

How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?

Someone actually ended up recommending me to the hiring manager. Proof that networking does indeed have benefits!

PhD student + part-time Associate Product Manager (2 yrs) ➡️ Leadership Operations Associate

Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia? Was this a difficult decision or one you felt came easily?

I could write a whole book about this. Academia is no longer a viable career path. It is not economically attractive to non-rich people; the market is overcrowded and undersupplied; the current business model for higher education exploits its students and non-tenured faculty; leadership generally lacks vision and fortitude, and the industry itself is filled with perverse incentives to boost productivity (and redundancy) in several fields in order to save what little market share remains. This creates all sorts of issues for entrants and an environment of mistrust and cynicism.

There are many other factors I could mention. Academia is a mess, and leaving it is without a question the best professional decision I ever made.

Did the decision come easy? Yes and no. Conceptually, it was clear to me already in my 2nd year of my PhD that I needed to do something else, and that was ok. Practically, however, the amount of side work and upskilling I had to take upon myself to pivot successfully was extraordinarily burdensome (from health and financial standpoints), and I had no guidance and support from my department whatsoever. I was essentially working two part-time jobs from 2019 to 2024 while working on the PhD degree requirements. All in all, it took me over 4 years to finally get to the right career pivot.

What are three pieces of advice you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?

1. Having attended a big-name university will not automatically give you anything.

2. Start pivoting as early as you realize you want out of academia. Define the industry you want to pivot to first. Then, figure out the role you want to have in it. Plan for a long pivot. If you are switching to a new industry, your job search will take more time than you think.

3. Do not take advice from faculty on non-faculty jobs, EVER.

4. BONUS: Networking is fundamental, but you need to have a solid career strategy for it to be effective. Networking takes time and you will get burnt out if you are not 100% intentional about it.