A Q&A with Sienna Parker, Ph.D. Student

Our department had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting with Sienna Parker, one of our current PhD students. Read the full interview to learn more about her career and educational background, her research interests, and more! 

Find Sienna at her LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siennaparker/ 

Tell me a little bit about yourself. 

Q: What is your background?

A: I grew up in the Bay Area—specifically the East Bay in Alameda and Oakland. I graduated high school in 2014, and went on to do my undergraduate degree at Northwestern University in Chicago. I studied Learning Organizational Change (LOC) in the School of Education and Social Policy (SESP). The area focused on how people learn and adapted in organizational settings. In that program, I took a variety of courses, including a practicum internship and several classes in subjects like culture and cognition, human development, and inclusive making. I think my first real taste for research and part of why I'm in a Ph.D. program is a course I did on qualitative research methods. In the class, I did an ethnography about gender in the context of acapella groups with a team of other undergraduate students, and that was my first experience with social sciences research using methods like observation and interviews. Another entry point into research was during my junior year, I was invited to be in an honors thesis program where I had the opportunity to do a self-directed research project. For my thesis, I conducted a study about sound bathing, which is an alternative wellness practice adjacent to meditation. My main finding was that people sought out sound bathing as a means to reclaim feelings of agency in reaction to negative experiences with allopathic medicine where they felt they lacked control as patients.  I didn’t begin my undergraduate studies knowing that research was something I could pursue, but I now realize how important these classes and opportunities were for lighting the spark for my interest in being a researcher. 

After finishing my undergraduate degree, I went to work in industry at LinkedIn. I did a rotational program for new college graduates where I rotated through three different functions at the company. It was great as a transition out of college because you were able to hit the ground running, but there was a lot of development in you and your career. Also, being at a company like LinkedIn, which has unparalleled data given it’s the world’s largest professional social media platform, I gained an understanding of the workforce in a new light; I found myself tying a lot of what I was seeing from LinkedIn’s data on talent movement and skills with my coursework from college. This led me to think about many questions on adult learning and how careers evolve in the face of technological change. I soon realized that these questions were probably best answered by going back to school and researching, so I decided to do that.

Q: What would people be surprised to know about you? 

A: I don’t know if this is surprising for Santa Barbara because so many people do outdoor things, but I love trail running and surfing. I ran my first 50k trail race last year in Monterey and won 2nd place amongst the women, which was really surprising to me! The funny thing is—I hated running simply for the sake of running when I was growing up. I did sports, but the concept of just running never made sense to me. But after I finished my undergraduate and moved back to the Bay Area from Chicago, I took advantage of my location (having sunny days warm enough in the winter to wear shorts was something I had taken for granted growing up) and started venturing outdoors in a way I hadn’t when I was younger. Northern California is so beautiful, and trail running, I found, is a great way to experience a type of serenity that is often hard to find in the busy day-to-day parts of life. Plus, there are so many trails in the Bay Area! One of my favorite hometown facts is that the East Bay Regional Parks Department has the most parks per capita of any regional park in the United States. 

Tell me about your research interests. 

Q: What are your main research areas, and how did you first get interested?

A: Broadly, I'm interested in how the extension of people’s careers interfaces with how digital technologies facilitate new ways and models of working. More people are living longer than at any other time in history, and emergent technologies like online labor platforms are enabling new types of work beyond “traditional” employment. I’m interested in this intersection. In summary, I look at how the future of work is connected to the aging workforce. The idea that a person’s career will occur within one or two organizations before retirement in their 50s or 60s is not really the norm anymore. People both want to and have to work longer than that but often don't want to work or can’t work as full-time employees at a single organization for 40+ hours a week. There's not only a lot of ageism preventing older workers from conventional, full-time employment, but also new and flexible ways of working in the ‘gig economy’ for high-skilled, knowledge work. I’m interested in understanding how older knowledge workers construct their late-stage careers and make sense of their past, present, and future as they venture into these new models of work mediated by technology. 

How did I get interested in that? I think there are three key reasons why I’m interested in this area. First, in my undergraduate, I took a class about adult development that opened up this whole body of research and theories about adulthood and aging that I had never considered. For most people, the majority of their lives take place in adulthood, and it was fascinating to me to understand how learning occurs in adulthood absent of formalized schooling. Second, I began to see how these concepts about adult development played out within my own family, especially in the context of work. It was interesting to me how many of my older family members would make remarks about how they did not want to “retire” in a traditional sense, but wanted to work and use the expertise they had accumulated throughout their careers but in new ways.  Third, working at LinkedIn and living in the tech hub that is the Bay area made me notice a lot of trends in the workforce, like how digital skills were constantly being touted as necessary for employment and how many companies and start-ups were building technologies that promoted allowing people to work with more autonomy and flexibility. When I say that I started to have a lot of questions that led me to want to do research it was questions at the intersection of these areas. 

Q: What is the most exciting thing about your research and what do you think is the most surprising thing about it?

A: Personally, I think one of the most exciting parts about this research, as a qualitative researcher, is interviewing people from the population of older working adults that I am interested in. I think it's inspiring when I talk to my informants, and they find this research that I am doing important because it's their own experience. They're trying to figure it out and are open to sharing their stories, perspectives, challenges, and goals with me. So that, to me, makes it feel like my work matters. 

Something that's surprising is the richness of differences in an older population. Although we say the “older workforce” as if it were a monolith, they are not a homogenous group of people. The number of things that could be different in this group is even broader than with younger people because they have had so many more experiences across their lives, leading to many points of divergence from each other. 

Another surprising aspect emerging from a study I am in the beginning stages of is how older adults reflect on all these experiences to create a narrative of their careers. I think there's a lot of surprising insights that come from that, too. It's surprising to hear how people reflect on major technology changes today with hindsight from their pasts. I was recently doing an interview, and my informant was describing how he remembered the way his company switched from leaving voicemails to doing emails and his reflections on that in comparison to the changes today he’s seeing using different instant communication tools like Slack and Teams. He talked about how he made sense of those changes in communication, mediated by various digital technologies throughout his career. I haven’t yet begun to theorize about these narratives, but I think there’s something interesting that could be elaborated on about how people reminisce on technological innovations that impacted their careers and draw on these memories as models for changes in the present. 

Q: What would you like to study in the future? Or how would you expand on what you're studying right now?

A: Well, what I'm doing right now is fun. There are many different ways and models of work that are emerging beyond full-time employment in a single organization, so that's one area that I think is really interesting. 

On the point of reminiscing and crafting narratives, I think doing a project that includes technology life histories could be fascinating, especially because there are so many changes and technological advancements that can occur over the course of one’s career. It's like—what are the ones that actually stick out to you, and why? Or, what were the fundamental stories that you drew on to make sense of your work and career? Even thinking about my own life, I remember that at the end of our yearbooks in grade school, there would be this supplementary  “year in review” added by the editor. I remember when I was in third grade, this “year in review” included a blurb about the first cell phone that included a camera, and for some reason, that really stuck with me. It was a huge thing. I mean, a lot of developments, both technically and socially, have been built around this concept of a camera being part of your phone. Considering the existence of social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram, these ways of interacting only exist because we are accustomed to always having a camera on our phones. I think life histories focused on those out-sized moments of technological change could illuminate many interesting insights. 

Q: What are some of the most important things you've learned so far in the classes you've taken?

A: I think our required courses are a great baseline for developing the language necessary to be able to participate in conversations with other scholars. I say this in retrospect, after taking my qualifying exams, because in that moment, you get to synthesize everything that you learned in your classes. But, having a general understanding of the field and its many different streams of literature and perspectives gives you the language to participate. I didn't realize, coming into the Ph.D. program, what the term “be in conversation with…” really meant (and quite honestly, I am still figuring this out). There are so many different perspectives and strands of literature that can be used to converse. Learning how to read and engage with articles, especially how people theorize and argue in their writing, is a critical skill that was developed during my classes. 

Q: What would you say was your most impactful, interesting, or memorable experience in this department so far?

A: The level of support, especially from our faculty. What I mean by that is they really engage with your ideas as a doctoral student and help you build them, expand them, and point you in the right direction. Also, I didn't even realize while applying to this program how well-known our faculty are. I had no idea because this wasn’t what I studied in my undergraduate nor did I know anyone who was an academic in this area. This was the only management and organizations-focused program I applied to, even though I was looking at other Ph.D. programs. I talked to a couple of the faculty members here at TMD and was like, oh, their research sounds not only cutting edge but also very important to the contemporary workforce. I think a very memorable experience was when I had just started the Ph.D., and Paul Leonardi, who is now my advisor, started working with me right off the bat and talking me through ideas. Those conversations have continued through today. I think it was only upon going to conferences and hearing people talk about the faculty that I realized how renowned they are across management and organization studies. The fact that the faculty here are so willing to respect and develop you as a doctoral student is a testament to the collegiality of the department. 

Q: If you could give any advice to students interested in applying for a PhD in the department, what would you say?

A: I think something that's really great about our department and the students here is that if you're interested in work and technology, this is a very good place for you. You could have such a different background. I explained my background, but there are other PhD students like Roni who came from studying marine biology and working in the veterinarian and animal care industry, and people like Dylan who did more of an academic path, having done a Masters in Information Sciences. For those considering doing a doctorate, I think if you just have that broad topic area or even a specific area of interest in the world of work and technology, this is a really great place for that. Even the faculty—a lot of them are publishing in different areas, with some focused more on the innovation side and some focused more on the organizational side, for example, but they all share a united interest in technology So, I think that you don't have to feel that you have to fit this particular mold to thrive here as a Ph.D. student. 

Q: What do you wish everyone knew about the department?

I think I may have implied through my other answers, but technology management is such a unique area. It seems very specific, but it is very broad in the sense that technology is everywhere in organizations. Everyone in the departments just comes at the study of technology from different angles and in different contexts, but we're all very interested in the future of work, which creates a dynamic and vibrant community. The department is small, but it's mighty, and despite our size we cover so many different areas. 

Tell me about your personal goals.

Q: Where would you like to see yourself in the future? 

A: Though I struggle to know exactly what my future holds, I know that I would like to continue doing research. I certainly know that I would like to kind of cohere to a research identity a bit more and that the research program I develop also serves in how we think about aging, work, and technology. If anything, the most concrete vision of what I am doing is that I am sitting by a wide window (without glare) on my laptop, and I’m just pattering along on my keyboard, just that I’m really deep in my writing, and ideas all start to align and make sense; I’m just in a flow state of work. Concretely, that is how I envision what I am doing in my future.

Q: Are you associated with any academic or on-campus organizations that you would like to highlight? 

A: Structurally, there are a lot of things that make it very difficult to do a Ph.D., and I don't think anyone should be barred from doing it if they don't have the means to care for themselves or navigate these systems that have historically been incredibly exclusive. I think that's something that is important a, on this campus, for the UC system, and in academia in general. A program that I am a part of at UCSB related to this in a small way is the Graduate Scholars Program which is for creating community amongst graduate students from marginalized identities. From that program, I also recently joined the Promise Scholars Program which connects undergrads wanting to apply to graduate school with a current graduate student to help them one-on-one with the application process. I think these kinds of programs created for sharing knowledge about the ‘hidden curriculum’ of how things work in graduate school that are often not known are very valuable. If you don't have people in your family who have the experiences you are having or who can really tell you and guide you, these kinds of programs are a really important resource. However, there also needs to be more done if equity and inclusivity are something that we want to achieve.