Name: Brittany Currenti (she/her)
PhD: Marketing, University of Adelaide, 2025
What was your main area of research?
My PhD focused on the concept of convenience and how it has become doctrine in the service experience and service design and as technology allows for greater convenience than ever, we're seeing problematic consequences arise. It's often assumed that convenience is inherently beneficial, so I challenged this idea to propose a new phenomenon, overconvenience, where high levels of convenience lead to negative effects. This PhD took a conceptual and qualitative approach, with future plans for scale development and quant.
I've worked in the tech industry and in design for years now, and I see this problem come up a lot where we're told to make experiences easier and faster, but I see problems such as a loss of autonomy, memory retention and focus, impulse shopping and regret and long-term loss of customer value as a result of the quick profit convenience can bring in.
What is your current job?
I am the Director of Behavioural Research for MinterEllison in Brisbane, Australia.
In my current role, my focus is on designing legal AI tools in the innovation team. This is primarily a research role, where I consider what factors influence the trust and adoption of AI and use this information to inform our developers. This includes tasks such as creating a foundational literature database on trust and adoption of technology, persona development and segmentation, predictive bayesian framework for adoption, experiments, benchmarks, testing of our tools, user tests, etc. I collaborate and manage consultants we bring in from universities to assist me on projects.
I like doing work that has real impact and has massive potential to disrupt industry, as well as to potentially help people gain legal access in a much more affordable way (lawyers are very expensive).
How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?
I was contacted over LinkedIn by a Partner who was forming an innovation team. My GPA and background in user experience research is what stood out to him.
I worked concurrently as I did my degrees.
Bachelor in Information Technology & Internship at an app development company ➡️ honours degree in marketing ➡️ last year of honours & moved to Melbourne to work at Envato as a user experience researcher ➡️ PhD at University of Adelaide, dropped to part time work at Envato ➡️ took 1 year off to focus on PhD ➡️ finished PhD off and worked at MinterEllison as Director of Behavioural Research
I note, I also worked as a Research Assistant (RA), course designer, and tutor at various universities during my whole career as a 'side hustle'.
Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?
I've been in industry since my bachelor's - I didn't want to graduate and suddenly not have a job or income, and I wanted to get ahead of the game early. I couldn't imagine only just starting my career now and how far behind I would be. I love academia, but there's not a lot of jobs in it, it's hyper-competitive and it doesn't pay as well. Ideally, I'd like to always keep one foot in academia, and I'm lucky enough to be able to work directly with universities at the moment.
What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?
For early careers, if you do 'consulting' work with a client, if you can, get hired through the client because they pay you better than you would as an RA. I had 2 options for my current role, to go in with this university I had lined up to assist me with the major project proposal and be an RA for them, or to get hired through MinterEllison. I would be on less than half what I am now as an RA. Considering the scope of the work I do, my current role title is also far more appropriate given my industry experience, it's just that a university doesn't really have any higher position than 'Research Assistant' for casuals.
Do an internship early. A lot of PhD student's I've met are scared of industry because it's different, it's unknown, so it's scary! Get some experience in industry, get to know it, so you can make an informed choice on your career path. Dismantle some of that ambiguity.
Doing an internship, working on industry projects, actually working alongside industry people is, in my opinion, the only way to actually network effectively. It's difficult for people who've only met you for an hour at a meetup or conference or whatever to actually know who you are and what you can do, and to essentially trust and recommend you- your best networks are the people who have seen you work. All of my useful networks are people I've worked with as they are willing to recommend me to jobs, connect me with other people, forward me useful information, etc.