Experiential Learning Embedded in Higher Education: Meet Dr. Jessica Tollette of IE University

Dr. Jessica Tollette is the academic director of the Bachelor in Behavior and Social Sciences at IE University. She has experience teaching courses on research methods, race, gender, education and behavioural science. Dr. Tollette’s previous research examines immigration policy, immigrant integration and intergroup relations in Madrid. She has previously received several awards and grants to conduct her research, including a Fulbright grant. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology at Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Communication. We at Xperienceships caught up with Jessica to ask her about her future-proofed trailblazing Bachelor program, how students can prepare for careers of the future using behavioural science, and why employer integrations are so important for her students’ learning.

You can read the full interview below, or watch a 4 minute clip on our YouTube channel here.

Xperienceships: As we’re going to talk about career exploration, maybe we should ask you: what was your first job, Dr. Tollette?

Jessica: I have lots of first jobs! There was the first job where someone paid me to do a service, which was in high school, as a tutor for one of my friends’ little brother. I tutored him in math, science and Latin. And that was the first time that someone paid me to do a job. Maybe the first job where I was like on a payroll was in college, I worked at the library. And I would sit at the front desk and welcome people, direct them where to go, check out books, which I think suits me for the nerd that I am not ashamed to be. I spent a lot of time in the library so it was a good fit for me. And then my first job, maybe I would say in my career was a management consultant for a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but I was in the New York office and I guess about 10 years ago, they got bought out by Deloitte.

Both of the first two jobs were in academia, but I refused to see that as a career until I literally finished my PhD. And even when I finished I was like, “I'm not going into academia,” and here I am!

X: So what do you think are the learning experiences that you've had that prepared you best for the job that you do today?

J: My primary role is the Academic Director of a Bachelor degree program. And that means that I manage the day to day, my job is essentially to service the students through. Finding faculty designing the academic program, working with the faculty to create the curriculum, extracurricular activities and things of that nature. So I would say the job that probably helped me prepare the best for that was actually not a job that I necessarily think of on my CV as a real job because it wasn't properly paid. I was a residential advisor for five years when I was in graduate school. So I basically got my housing and food for free. By living with the students and serving in mentorship and advising capacities, I ran programming around diversity and inclusion. I was an academic advisor for students that had special needs. I would host events that provided food and snacks, mentorship and camaraderie. So that job is what made me realize that I love working with students in a capacity that goes beyond just teaching. I take my role as a mentor very seriously. And I think that's what is one of the best parts about being an Academic Director is that there's this mentorship component involved. 

Now, the creativity and entrepreneurship of starting a program from scratch: I don't know if I really have those skills that I had developed anywhere, maybe that's just in me. And maybe that's something that you learn by taking on a PhD and investigating a project from zero to the finish line, which is essentially writing a book. So I think this kind of idea of starting a project from nothing and creating an entire idea or concept or theory around it could be the equivalent of starting a program from nothing and bringing it to life finding students, faculty curriculum, syllabi, and so on.

As for the teaching thing, it was a requirement to get my PhD. So that was the training for that. One of the foundations of my job is working with people and that's just something I was born with. I'm social. I have sisters. I was on sports teams and college, in clubs. These kinds of things fed my passion for being around people and helping people.

X: What makes a successful student for your program? And do they generally join you ready for success?

J: This program is a new program. These students are pioneers because they're really joining a bachelor degree that is one of the first of its kind in the world, and it's very multidisciplinary. So what makes someone successful in a multidisciplinary environment is an open mind, a breadth of interest. These students don't come here saying, I just want to learn about psychology, they're also interested in sociology. They're also interested in data analysis and research and numbers and Economics and Political Science. And so this bachelor is offering them a taste of a wide range of disciplines. And that's not necessarily something that you would get if you were to do a more traditional career path, right? 

Someone might ask: what is a behavioral scientist? That's something that we're defining as the field continues to grow. It's people that come from different disciplinary backgrounds, different training, people who come from the design world can be behavioral scientists. Economists can be behavioral scientists, psychologists can be a behavioral scientist. So you know, interest in and passion for broadening your understanding and a wide array of fields is really what's going to make the student most successful in this bachelor quantitative capabilities. I am a self defined math phobic and I somehow managed to get through my PhD. I tell my students all the time: you think that just because you're interested in people you don't need to know numbers. But actually, you need to know numbers even more, because now the way that we're understanding people is through data analysis using big data. So there's a lot of behavioral scientists that are working closely with the data science teams in organizations, and being able to run statistical analyses and know what to do with data that you get from a one on one interview just as much as a database that has 2000 respondents is going to be important. 

So if I was really advising someone who was interested in applying for any bachelor degree program is that you come with a willingness to learn to push yourself to seek out the resources that you need to support you for the courses that might not be your strength. And come with a passion, because that's really what's going to carry you through. 

X: For our schools, are there other things that could be shared perspectives for educators? How do they get students ready with the resources that they have? 

J: Since the time that I went to high school, there has been a push towards standardized tests and preparing students for standardized tests. I can only speak to the American context because I'm not as familiar with international school systems. But it leads to this kind of rote memorization of just studying for an exam, instead of teaching our students how to think out of the box. Give them some challenge that they're unfamiliar with and throw them into the fire and have them figure it out with problem solving skills! I would teach my students how to deal with problem solving and not just memorizing things because that's not how real education works. I would teach my students skills that aren't on the syllabus of most classes, which are like empathy, compassion, perseverance, endurance, grit, like those kinds of soft skills that don't get enough credit for preparing people for jobs. 

X: We absolutely agree. What are some of the trends that you see in your day to day work in the social sciences that could be useful for today's students and educators to know about? 

J: Adaptability! I'm a sociologist by training. So I wasn't trained to be a behavioral scientist, but by nature, the fields of sociology and the social sciences and behavioral science are all interconnected. I have a lot of colleagues who thought they had one kind of research agenda or one project that they were working towards, and COVID happened and they've changed their research agenda, rapidly. There's also this idea that behavioral science is a baby, in terms of disciplines. And I think one thing that is really cool about that is that companies and organizations and people who consider themselves to be behavioral scientists are very eager to work with our students, because it’s an opportunity to bring people into your organization in this very young field.

I certainly didn't experience that in college, where I saw how integrated this idea of collaborating with companies was. Not just a summer internship - actually in the middle of your class, having someone come and sit in on a panel that you're presenting your final project or giving a guest lecture talking about how they run experiments in their organization. We didn't have those kinds of things when I was studying and I'm not that old! So it's very much rapidly changing. Companies are very keen to integrate themselves into our educational experience and have this kind of shared exchange between them learning from our students what a behavioral scientist looks like.The students are saying, “sign me up”, and they're getting the training and they're getting the resources that they need from an organizational perspective.

X: How will behavioral science as a discipline exist or be embedded into organizations in the future? We wonder if you could speak a little bit to that, as you're helping to prepare future ready students for a discipline that some teachers won't know exists...

J: I don't think a lot of people know what behavioral science even is. Behavioral science is this interdisciplinary field that looks at human behavior. It looks at decision making, why we do things the way that we do, and it stems from this idea that, you know, economics has always looked at people as acting very rationally. And then behavioral science says, Yeah, that's what it makes sense to do, but we don't do that. So this field is designed to help us make the decisions for our health or education for and within politics and policies.

It's such a broad field that says: let's help people make better decisions. A lot of behavioral scientists call themselves changemakers for good because they go into organizations. For example, there's an organization in the United States that is an insurance company, and it's called Lemonaid. It basically helps make the insurance process easier. It uses AI and data to facilitate what you should do after you get in a car accident. And then iit takes you through a step by step process that only takes 10 minutes. At the end of 10 minutes, the chatbot has helped you resolve the issue. And then it says: “by working with Lemonaid, you saved $2.10, what would you like to do with your $2.10?” and you can donate it to a charity. So it's not only helping you, but it's helping society. 

I can think of a lot of different organizations that have these kind of behavioral science integrated within them. But you could also think about companies like Facebook, Google, they're hiring chief behavioral officers who are coming in and working internally in the organization with each of the different departments. So the marketing team has a marketing campaign that's just not landing with people. They'll bring in the behavioral science unit. And they'll say, "can you guys run some experiments and see which campaign would be better suited to help people make the decision to buy this product?" Or they're using behavioral science within policy organizations. So behavioral scientists could go in, run some experiments and say, okay, what's the easiest way to get people to do this, to go to the doctor when they're sick, to sign up for this free annual clinic. All these ways that we're trying to get people to help themselves. The field of behavioral science is really about this marriage of economics and psychology. 

For our educators who might not know what behavioral science is, I can recommend some books for you. There's a famous book called Nudge that's about pushing people to make decisions and how small decisions have big impacts. One of my favorite behavioral scientists is named Dan Ariely. He has a book called Predictably Irrational, which is what really made me think: I'm definitely into this field. 

Behavioral scientists are in departments that you didn't even know that they were in and they're popping up in big businesses and organizations on a daily basis, especially in times of COVID where people are realizing that we need to be changing our decisions, and we need to be monitoring and see if there's experiments that people have been doing around things like social distancing, or what explains the panic toilet paper purchasing. Behavioral science is all around you and you didn't even know...I think it always almost always starts at the point of finding students who are interested in people, students who might be more driven towards being interested in the field of psychology, and then it would kind of go from there.

X: There's a number of job roles that might not be called Behavioral scientists, but they are using it: service designers, UX researchers, UX, customer relationships,market research. How can educators of students in high schools get a taste of this now as it's live and as it's becoming crucial in a post pandemic world?

J: One way to get involved is just starting to read about it because you don't necessarily know what it is, or you don't know what part about it excites you the most.You could be very interested in diversity and inclusion and not know that the field of behavioral science and unpacking biases and helping organizations be less bias could be a factor. You may not know that you really love doing experiments. And that's the core of what you could do at a job working as an internal consultant at a big bank or a big organization like Facebook or Google. 

I would read see what kind of companies and positions are out there. What are the skills that they're asking you to have? That could give you some inspiration for what type of bachelor degree program you would want to apply for. Maybe even being so bold as to send an email or write something to someone that you see that's inspirational and say, “This is a long shot. I'm in high school, I really want to learn more. Do you have a shadowing program?” I certainly wasn't so brave in high school, but maybe high schoolers have gotten more bold to do that!

X: We believe that if you can't explore, you can't possibly know what you want to do. You may have no idea that the career exists in the first place. Where can we create the opportunities for students to meet someone who's really working in a field that is very important for the future, do you think?

J: I can promise that there's any number of careers that they think that they want to have that there's behavioral science already built in. And they just need to develop it, develop it over experiences like what Xperienceships are offering. 

That's where I really think that having the work experience is what develops the students to be able to become the manager of this very specific department. A lot of companies are really excited at the profile of the students that we're creating in this bachelor, because we can do numbers, we know how to collaborate with this department, we know what this theory from economics is. And we can bring all those together to work in a department that maybe someone who has a very specific training wouldn't be able to do.

X: Why is it so important to you as an educator to integrate those external stakeholders into your classroom?

J: My major was communication. I remember some of my best learning experiences were opportunities for us to leave the classroom and go apply the theories that we were learning, in a real world setting. I got to meet Nancy Pelosi for my political communication class in my fourth year. We had a conversation with her where we had prepared some questions that we were learning about theories in class, and she could answer them for us. That was so memorable that X amount of years later, I'm still thinking about it. 

But from my perspective, when I'm creating a program and trying to think about how to read through giving them tangible skills and experiences, not just in the fourth year for them to find a job, but over the course of the four years, this kind of integration looks like a lot of things. In the first year, I have a course called Becoming a Behavioral Scientist where there's a guest speaker who is a professional in the field. For a lot of our students, that's the first time that they're really seeing what they’re going to be able to do with their bachelor. These are the kind of collaborations that he or she has within their organization, or this is their professional trajectory. And this is how they came to where they are today. 

In the second year, they're learning more about courses where they are able to show someone in the field what they know. I have had professionals come in and sit in on their final projects, or use data from an organization to run an analysis. I teach a qualitative research methods course. And I borrowed some qualitative data from a market research company for my students to do an assignment with real data. I asked them: what are the findings that you can extract from this and how is this relevant to what we've been learning in class. In the third year, they're actually starting to do things for different companies and organizations. For example, two of their professors are from a big bank here in Spain. And of course, in the fourth year, most students are doing internships. So hopefully my sense is that by bringing in guest speakers by having professional sit in on panels for final projects, or grant us their data to run analyses and help them look at the problem from a different perspective, that's both providing students with the opportunity to see what it's like to do this career and providing organizations with opportunities to show off all the things that our students can do in a future career, hopefully in their organization.

X: When have you seen the interaction with the employer really make a difference to the student's learning?

J: I think that happens when they get to see someone who's working in the field for the first time. A lot of the students are like, "I wanted to do psychology, I'm interested in human behavior," but they're not really 100% certain of what it means for them to be able to do what they're studying in a professional sense. Because we know about the importance of putting students in front of different people who give them different role models, different stories, different opportunities, different career paths, it seems to land with what students experience, and when they really switch on to an idea. It's giving them this taste of being like, this is why this matters. And this is why this is important. It’s to see: what's the potential impact that I can have? ?