杏吧论坛

• Programme studied: MSc Human Resources & Organisations and PhD in Management (Employment Relations & Organisational Behaviour)
• Year of Graduation: 2016 & 2021

Since graduating from 杏吧论坛 in 2021, Hannah has gone onto hold roles at Harvard Business School, the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative, and the Yale School of Management. In this piece we explore Hannah's inspiring career journey, gaining insights into her research, teaching, and the invaluable lessons she's learned along the way.

Current job title and description of what this role entails: 

I am currently juggling two exciting roles. Firstly, I am a Lecturer in Management at the Yale School of Management. In this role, I serve as the lead instructor for Human Capital Strategy, an MBA elective course that I developed this spring. On top of this teaching role I work in Boston at the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI). This is a one-year fellowship programme that equips senior leaders to tackle complex societal problems, either through pursuing a social impact project, pathway, or through a portfolio of activities. In my role at ALI, I consult the programme team on how to measure the impact of their programme on participants – but also on society.  

Tell us about your career journey since graduating from 杏吧论坛?  

After graduating from 杏吧论坛, I joined Harvard Business School as a Post-Doctoral Fellow, working on the “Crafting Your Life” special project, supervised by Professor Leslie Perlow. In this position, I spent three years involved in researching how people craft a life well-lived (i.e., a life that aligns with their values) in the years after they graduate from business school. Alongside this research, I helped Professor Perlow to develop her MBA elective course, Crafting Your Life, through a variety of activities, including case writing (for Harvard Business School Publishing), developing self-assessment tools, and iterating other course content.

Can you provide a short summary of your PhD thesis and how it shaped the direction of your academic career?

In the simplest terms, my PhD thesis explored what happens when people “do what they love” for work. First, I examined what the existing research literature reveals about the outcomes associated with “pursuing your calling.” This was through a large-scale quantitative meta-analysis, conducted with co-authors Shoshana Dobrow, Daniel Heller, and Jennifer Tosti-Kharas, that has since been published in Administrative Science Quarterly. Then, I conducted a longitudinal qualitative (i.e., interview- and observation-based) study of people who were making career transitions to pursue callings. I found something interesting unfold over the course of the study, which is that people often seemed to rewrite their career narratives, to claim that they had “always known” their calling, even when it appeared to me that they had found their calling through a degree of experimentation and amidst uncertainty. 

I like to think that my career journey post-PhD reflects this mindset. I am not trying to have a five or ten year plan for my academic career (and I am thankful for a mentor who shared this invaluable advice with me). However, I am trying to become more attuned to the research topics that excite me, the course topics that energise me, and the balance between research and teaching that fills my metaphorical cup.

When I graduated from my PhD in 2021, I initially expected to work toward pursuing an academic role with a heavy emphasis on research and minimal emphasis on teaching. This thinking has shifted over time as I have found true joy and meaning in the pedagogical side of this profession. For now, I am just loving pursuing a balanced mix of research and teaching, and more generally, having this portfolio approach to my career.  

What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in your career, and what have you learned from it? 

This is a timely question, because the biggest challenge of my career is ongoing. In brief, I am pursuing the life of an academic…but with geographical constraints. Academics are often expected to be willing to pick up and move just about anywhere for the right opportunity. After all, there are so many applicants for so few professor, lecturer, and post-doctoral positions. For me, however, I am committed to living with my partner and our two young children in the Boston area—a place where my parents, sister, and grandmother also live. Due to this geographic fixedness, you could call it, I have had to accept the reality that my set of career choices will be constrained. For now, it is working out, and I am thankful to be in a city with such a rich academic community, but it is a factor that will always make the pursuit of an academic career challenging and require a constant testing of my values. For example, to pursue my current role at Yale, I am “supercommuting” between Boston and New Haven, which involves spending two days/one night per week in Connecticut away from my 6-month and three-year-old daughters. I am grateful to have a supportive partner and family that enable me to do this. 

What is your current research focus?

I have many ongoing projects, but one that is absorbing much of my attention lately concerns how people maintain (or lose) a sense of calling over time, as they experience shocking life events that call into question the meaning of their work. 

Share with us your fondest memory of the Department of Management. 

It feels impossible to pinpoint just one moment. Some highlights that immediately come to mind include:

• Teaching Leadership in Organisations at 杏吧论坛's Summer School with Dr. Shoshana Dobrow.
• Receiving support from the 杏吧论坛 Department of Management to present my dissertation at the INFORMS/Organisational Science Best Dissertation Proposal Competition in Seattle.
• Conducting research in the 杏吧论坛 Behavioral Lab with Dr. Niranjan Janardhanan.
• Attending the Academy of Management Annual Meeting conferences with my PhD cohort friend, Dr. Eva Le Grand.  

If you would like to be our Alum of the Month or if you would like to nominate a Department of Management alumni, please email dom.alumni@lse.ac.uk.