Founder Helps Researchers Present in More Memorable Ways

Name: Andrew Churchill (he/him)

PhD: Education, McGill University, 2011

What is your current job?

I am the Founder of PresentBetter based in Montreal, QC, Canada.

I develop programming to help researchers present their work in more accessible, engaging, memorable ways. I lead workshops of this programming in both university and industry settings. I do individual coaching of early stage researchers, experienced professors, and industry professionals to help them hone their communication skills.

What is your favorite thing about your job?

The smiles from people after they present reflecting on how much they feel they've grown and the letters I get from people from years ago that talk about how something I said or taught them still impacts the way they communicate.

What is the most important skill you developed or experience you had during your PhD that now helps you in your current position?

The ability to uncover and question tacit understandings.

My PhD delved deeply into critical pedagogy and from that I learned to question much of what is often taken for granted about education and from that I came to understand that the best practices of today are not necessarily good practices.

Much of my work now begins with understanding the tacit assumptions of why we present the ways we do, questioning their continued validity, and building new strategies and ways of understanding free from these previously tacit constraints.

How did you build the skills necessary for your current role?

Some of the skills for my current role come from my PhD, but many, many others come from other areas of work and lived experience.

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

I created it. It took almost 10 years, and that is a story in itself. The micro version is that what started as a course at McGill became workshops at McGill, became workshops at other universities, became a full time workshop, coaching and consulting business within and beyond academia.

PhD ➡️ sessional instructor ➡️ McGill workshop developer and facilitator ➡️ founder.

But it was not linear like that and much of the origins of my work now predate my PhD and come from work experience as well as an MBA.

If someone is interested in a similar role, what would you recommend they start doing now to prepare?

For teaching/coaching: go do it. The work I now do is influenced as much by coaching high school lacrosse as it is by teaching university classes. There's no better experience than experience.

For the founding, running your own business: surround yourself with people who do it. It's a commitment a bit unlike any other so talk to people who do it and learn what they do. Part of my comfort in the space was that my father has always run his own business – some successful, some not. So the foundation for what I know comes from him, and I've been learning from others ever since.

Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia? Was it a hard or easy decision?

A mix. My initial goal was never to stay in academia, but once I was in academia I was surrounded by people who wanted to stay. The hardest part for me was the feeling from them that somehow the path I was choosing was 2nd best.

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

Don't second guess yourself and don't let the people who are remaining in academia let you feel lesser for not staying. You're not. There are many, many, many more PhDs working beyond academia than working within it, and there is no correlation I can see between the impact or satisfaction with lives led for those that chose one path vs. the other.

And for those interested, what was your main area of research?

I completed a review of The New York Times coverage of charter schools over a 2-year period. The focus was to assess the ways in which charter schools and the charter school movement was characterized by the New York Times with a particular interest in how that reflected various aspects of the charter school movement including its origin. The conclusions were that the coverage was overwhelmingly positive (not balanced) and that the characterization of charter schools was often quite narrow in its focus, unlike the charter school movement which at the time was quite diverse in its range of approaches.