Waldron Career Conversation w/ Karen Smith '94 & Abigail Thomas '26

In this episode of the Weinberg in the World podcast, student host Abigail Thomas '26 sits down with Northwestern alum Karen Smith '94 to explore how an early cognitive science degree shaped Karen's career and life. Karen reflects on discovering cognitive science in its early days, launching into the tech boom to design early digital learning systems, and later channeling her interdisciplinary background into writing, podcasting, and a decade-long positive‑psychology journaling practice. She shares advice for current students—embrace curiosity, explore campus and Chicago, stay open to changing paths, and trust that a Northwestern education provides adaptable, lifelong tools for whatever comes next. Transcript Abigail Welcome to the Weinberg in the World Podcast, where we explore the value of interdisciplinary liberal arts education in today's complex world. My name is Abigail, and I'm your student host of this special episode of the podcast. I'm a senior at Northwestern majoring in cognitive science and minoring in data science, and I'm looking forward to learning more about how your academic experience is connected to your professional journey and how your cognitive science background supports the work you do. Today I'm excited to be speaking with Karen Smith. Thank you, Karen, for taking the time to speak with me today. Karen Thank you for having me. Abigail To start us off today, I'm wondering if you can tell us more about your time at Northwestern as an undergraduate. What did you study? What were the impactful experiences for you that led you to your current career path? Karen I received a cognitive science degree in 1994. The lore or the legend is that we were the second graduating class. I'm not sure I haven't fact-checked that. but I know that I graduated with just two or three others with our degree. I understand that the cognitive science program has grown, so I think that's fantastic. I found cognitive science because one of those other two or three was a friend of mine, and I was complaining to him about how to choose a path when I found a lot of college classes really interesting, but I kind of had the sense that I couldn't choose just one. there wasn't one thing. I was dabbling with the idea of doing a sociology major. And my father, who was a business consultant, a technology and business consultant, asked me once as I was just exploring this at home on a break, there aren't very many sociologists out in the world. I don't see a lot of people saying, you know, hello, hi, I'm A sociologist. His point just being that if I were to be really interested in that path, I might need to have some idea of what else I wanted to do or to be planning to pursue a career in academia, which had never really occurred to me and wasn't what I found interesting. I thought sociology was interesting because we were studying people and cultures and how people do things in groups. That I found plenty interesting, but it wasn't so interesting that I was sure. And then the friend mentioned, you should think about this new interdisciplinary program 'cause it lets you do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. So I started looking into cognitive science and realized that the classes I already took were already quite applicable to the required courses for the degree. And then I looked at what else I should take. I think I was, it was first or second. quarter sophomore year. So I still had 2 1/2 years plus to look at. And everything in the list was something I wanted to take. Like it was already on my radar screen or it was new on my radar screen. I was like, are you kidding? I could take classes like this. is perfect. So that interdisciplinary sense is what appealed to me back then. I don't know if it's the same for folks today. Abigail Yeah, definitely. I find it, I also chose it because I just loved how interdisciplinary it was and how you could take classes from different fields and still be able to apply that to my major. So that definitely still holds true. Karen Yeah, wonderful. Well, what I did with my degree, I graduated into the early, early phases of the technology boom. And you know, we've been in boom and bust cycles. And so part of my career story includes both. But I graduated into an atmosphere where we were beginning to use technology to solve all kinds of problems that previously we had to do manually. We had to do in person with people, very labor and time intensive. And I worked at what is now Accenture, but was then Anderson Consulting. And my job was to build learning systems for corporate clients. So I was teaching adults how to do their job using technology to mediate it instead of having to create a course that was then led by an instructor and conducted in person on site somewhere, which was the old model of training. And that's how all corporate training had been done till then. So it was a pretty exciting time to launch out into that. But a lot of the technology tools we used were very early days. Like I remember waiting for videos to compress. and waiting for hours and hours for videos to compress and then finding that the edit had gone poorly and that we had to do it over. And things that today are kind of comical since we can use our phones to just go out and do an on the street interview with someone and have it on the internet in minutes or even live stream. These things were just not even, like we hadn't even imagined where we were going to go with this technology. So There were inconveniences, but it was also tremendously interesting because there was just so much to consider. And a lot of the times we needed to write new software to do the things we wanted to do. There now are authoring tools and platforms that you can kind of plop your training content into and sort of publish without needing a lot of technology background. Back then, we were doing things with teams of five and six. developers, plus I was on the design side, designing the learning experience and then management and content creators and things like that. I'm sure it's quite different now, but as I mentioned, the boom and bust cycle, or the bust and boom cycle, led to, it was the early 2000s, the technology, the.com bubble burst is how history tends to refer to that. And companies like mine did massive layoffs that included me. That time coincided with when my husband and I were starting our family. And so it led me to just kind of reevaluate a lot of things and choose to take a step back for a while, which has been great for myself, but it meant that I wasn't out there doing the things that I had been doing. So I don't have as good a perspective on how we're using those technology tools in these last 20 years. But for a time in the 90s, it was a fascinating and interesting way to apply my degree. And I was one of the only people I knew who did in my work what I studied in my undergrad degree. Everyone else was like a political science major who's now writing code or what else, like a anthropology major who was one of my co-designers on my team, things like that. Abigail Yeah, that's really interesting. I was just wondering, like going based off of having something you learn applied to your work experience, are there other classes or experiences specifically at Northwestern that ended up being more valuable than you realized at the time? Karen I certainly appreciate the computer science classes I took, even though my job never required me personally to write code. And I don't today choose that as a way to spend my time either. Even when I'm just like dabbling with my own personal projects, I find some of the code aspects aggravating. And it's one of the places where I'm most comfortable with the AI revolution because frankly, These are things that I feel like I should be able to get my head around, but I can't get my website designed to look the way I want it to. So if an AI bot can do it for me, that would be great. I would love that. But the underpinning of just understanding some of how technology systems work and a lot of the, I'm not sure I can put this into words very well, but the way when you're trying to write a computer program, you have to think both logically, but also you have to think divergently, right? You have to think in order. This has to happen, then that. This has to happen, then that. You have to do a lot of the dependencies and understanding what needs to come first and what needs to come later. But you also have to be prepared for things that are way outside the realm of what you might have expected. So you have to expect someone's going to use your computer system in a sideways way. And so you have to be prepared and to be able to think about those things differently. And I for sure wouldn't have had as much facility with that had I not taken, it wasn't a million, but I probably took, I don't know, four or five computer science courses in the course of getting my cognitive science degree. And I feel like each one just contributed to this ability to think in several different flexible ways and to break a problem down out into even just, planning a bake sale or, trying to do something completely, every day out in the real world, being able to know, oh, if we don't come up with a language for the flyers first, we won't have anything to put on the flyers. If we don't, we can't give it to the person to use Canva to go make the flyers for us if we don't have all the wording written, and things like that. I find it's not that these skills don't exist in others, but sometimes they're like overlooked. Folks don't maybe think through things in a process-based way. And I believe, it's been some time, but I believe that a lot of that came from some of this more technical work that I did while in undergrad. Abigail Yeah, definitely. Thank you. I saw that you worked in different industries after leaving Anderson or Accenture at that time. How has your cognitive science degree prepared you for taking on th