Sociology Advisory Board Spotlights

Pamela J. Conrad, a founding member of the Sociology Advisory Board, has spent 44 years working in government and healthcare, starting as a policy analyst for the State of Ohio, then the City of Columbus. After working as a government affairs specialist for Blue Shield, she indulged her love of politics to become the Finance Director for the Ohio Democratic Party. After six years in that role, Ms. Conrad moved back to the healthcare industry, where she spent 28 years helping state government Medicaid programs upgrade their information management systems. Ms. Conrad recently spoke to us about the ways in which her Ohio State Sociology B.A. shaped her career trajectory in data analytics, government, and healthcare. 

You have had a long, successful career; did your sociology major prepare you for a career in government and health care? If so, how? 

Ohio State and my sociology training were vital to my career success. My first job out of college in 1971 was as a policy analyst for the Women’s Services Division of the Ohio Bureau of Employment Services. At that time, the women’s movement was just finding its voice in the American workplace. Then-Governor Jack Gilligan formed the division to address gender discrimination in occupations and pay. It was a great start; I was able to apply my coursework in social stratification and inequality. I felt well-prepared. Sociology provides an understanding of social and organizational structures, critical thinking, and information analysis, all of which are vital to success in many walks of life. Here’s an example from my experience: In the middle of my career, I took a sales job with a company that researched and analyzed government health-care agencies (that company eventually became IBM Watson Health). The company was filled with PhDs in math and epidemiology. The hallway chit-chat wasn’t about sports, kids, or politics — it was about denominators and random variation. Yikes! At first, I was intimated; but soon enough, memories of my sociology courses in quantitative research came flooding back. I realized that I knew enough about statistics to do the job. All those long hours I’d spent in the Ohio State stat lab circa 1969 suddenly became useful. Thank you, sociology degree.

Given your expertise in health policy at the state and city level, can you comment on how the state and city of Columbus have handled the COVID-19 pandemic?

I think our state of Ohio, Franklin County and Columbus city leaders have done a good job dealing with the pandemic, especially given the failure of federal leadership when the pandemic erupted. Our frontline health-care workers have been rightly praised, but there are many unsung heroes. The professional civil servants running our public health agencies have my profound respect. They are the state and local government policy analysts, researchers, planners, public information officers and public health workers who had to develop, communicate, and execute pandemic control policies and strategies overnight, under great pressure, with little or no information about this new virus and inadequate funding. And worse, they had to fight the tsunami of erroneous information, conspiracy theories, distrust and self-serving criticism that flooded social media. Government workers and the private contractors that support them receive much less credit than they deserve for the great work they do.

You have been very supportive of Ohio State and the Department of Sociology, especially since joining the Sociology Advisory Board several years ago. Can you talk a bit about your motivation for supporting and serving your alma mater? 

When I started my first job out of college, I had no career path in mind. It turned out I didn’t need one. My first job led to my second job, which led to my third job, my fourth job and so on. I connected to my first five jobs because of the knowledge I gained or the friends I made at Ohio State. They gave me advice or information about openings, or a reference, or a connection with someone who connected me to someone else, who then hired me. By the time my sixth job came along, my career in government health care had been established. I support the Department of Sociology and other Ohio State missions to help today’s students find lifelong success, confidence, connections, and close friendships like I found here. 

What words of wisdom do you have for students as they prepare for the next chapter after graduation? 

Stay flexible and open-minded about your career path. Cast a wide net in your job search. Your actual first job may not be your first choice, but it could turn out to be your best job. Keep in touch with your Ohio State friends, favorite faculty members and classmates. Join the Ohio State Alumni Association; it’s a great, friendly, worldwide network and a valuable resource. Start giving back to Ohio State as soon as you achieve discretionary income; it will strengthen your bond. Make sure your resume emphasizes the data analytics and research courses you took and all the teamwork experience you have; they’re important to almost everything you’ll do in the workplace of tomorrow. 

What do you most look forward to once this pandemic has ended?

Attending an Ohio State football game with 104,000 of my closest personal friends.

Dean Gibson, founding Chair of the Sociology Advisory Board, recently received the College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Service Award. He serves as a mentor in the College of Arts and Sciences Match Mentor Program as well as the new Sociology Mentorship Program, which serves to guide students in their professional and career development success. Gibson also serves as a mentor in the Ohio State Young Alumni Academy, a professional and personal development program for early-career Ohio State alumni to help participants succeed in their career and life journeys. For this newsletter, we ask him how his Ohio State Sociology degree shaped both his career and his commitment to community service.  

Can you tell us about the purpose of the Sociology Advisory Board?  

A significant role of the Advisory Board is listening and providing advice to the department chair, faculty, and staff in their critically important roles as teachers, researchers and mentors. This helps strengthen the department's mission and impact throughout the year.  We also enjoy encouraging highly motivated faculty, students, and other department members as they strive to find solutions to the world's most pressing and complex problems, including eliminating systemic racism, improving the criminal justice system, reducing wage inequality and so many other serious societal issues.  

We are a philanthropic board that provides financial support for student and faculty scholarships and research, as well as other department initiatives. The Advisory Board works closely with the chair to enrich and support the departmental mission to serve students, faculty, alumni and friends of the department, the state of Ohio and sociology as a discipline.  

Members of the board also mentor students through their own life and career experiences. They share how important a sociology education is for serving and helping others while fulfilling career and life goals. We've initiated salon events on timely topics to illuminate the department's innovative research to a wider audience. We also created the Department of Sociology Mentoring Program, with the first event launched in fall 2020. Board members and Department of Sociology alumni shared with students how their sociology, criminology and criminal justice studies provided them with a strong academic foundation and skills. The board strongly supports the department's focus on diversity and inclusion and its efforts to increase the number of first-generation students in the undergraduate and graduate sociology programs.  

You were involved with the Advisory Board from the very beginning. Why did you decide to become involved?  

In early 2016, I was finishing up my final term on Ohio State's National Alumni Advisory Council as liaison for the College of Arts and Sciences when Claudia Buchmann, who at the time was chair of the Department of Sociology, asked me to help create and chair the board. I felt truly blessed to have another opportunity to give back to the university and department. My Ohio State experience and sociology degree have given me so much to be grateful for and provided career opportunities I truly enjoyed, a wonderful family and the ability to serve others through community service throughout my life. Had it not been for an Ohio State sociology degree, I would not have had all these opportunities.  

I'm extremely passionate and surrounded by an equally passionate, highly accomplished and diverse team of Advisory Board members who believe deeply in the importance of sociology — it is foundational, versatile, teaches you to think critically, creatively and strategically, and offers unlimited career possibilities. The department and discipline, through its research and teaching, will continue to be at the forefront of finding state-of-the-art solutions to some of society's most critical issues.  

As a former graduate of Ohio State’s Department of Sociology, how did you use your degree?  

I'm a retired partner of Aon Hewitt, one of the world's largest human resources, total rewards, actuarial and risk management consulting and brokerage firms. For more than 30 years, I served as client relationship manager to many mid-to-large client organizations and Fortune 500 and 1000 companies. My clients included publicly traded and privately owned corporations, as well as public sector and tax-exempt organizations. During my career at Aon Hewitt, I held office management, sales and sales management and client relationship management positions.  

My first job after graduating from Ohio State was with the FBI. I worked in the FBI/National Crime Information Center at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., for more than four years in the professional staff ranks a few doors down from the FBI director's office. I was in the "Modified" program to become an FBI agent. It's a program today, I believe, called the "Diversified" program that requires a four-year degree that draws from within the bureau people like me who do not have accounting, law or specialized technical degrees. In this role, employees work in a sensitive, strategic area of the bureau, and when there is a slow-down of lawyers, accountants and/or specialized technical personnel applying to the bureau, you go into agent's class. Based on my entry-on-duty (EOD date) class at the bureau, it was going to be approximately eight years for me to go into agent's class.  

After meeting my wife in the FBI and a lot of discernment, we decided that, based on the time commitment before going into agent's class, it was time to make a career change into corporate America. I sent out resumes and soon had an offer from a major insurance company. I worked four-and-a-half years in their group pension sales and investments area, selling and administering defined benefit and defined contribution plans, investments and client relationship management services to medium and large corporations, government agencies, and public and private organizations. I called on large consulting and brokerage firms and ended up being recruited by three of the largest global firms. I accepted an offer from Aon Hewitt and worked there nearly 32 years.  

What are the specific skills you gained from studying sociology?    

My sociology degree provided me with many skills: problem solving, critical and strategic thinking, leadership, interpersonal and group dynamics, communication, and many other skills that were invaluable working with diverse, medium-to-large, and highly complex organizations. I remember in one of my criminology classes working with troubled youth at the Training Institute of Central Ohio (TICO). I learned, for the first time, how to interview people, ask good questions, listen, build trust, and communicate with juveniles who committed serious felony offenses. They were facing other serious issues and through bibliotherapy we explored ways to get their lives back on track. In another criminology class, I remember interviewing a group of motorcycle gang members and a former gang leader together with a team of criminology classmates. This was my first experience interviewing a group of people and conducting a "focus" group long before I knew what one was. I also learned from my sociology classes how to conduct and analyze broad-based surveys and problem-solve, along with many other sociological skills that helped me immeasurably throughout my career at Aon Hewitt.  

At Aon Hewitt, we had over 100 different consulting and brokerage practice areas to serve clients. For example, our Employee Engagement and Total Rewards Optimization (TRO) consulting practices were two of them. I was responsible for leading and working with subject matter experts, many of whom had PhDs in industrial and organizational psychology, to solve problems. We'd conduct executive level, mid-management, and rank-and-file interviews, focus groups, and broad-based, organization-wide engagement and TRO surveys to assess the level of engagement throughout the organization. We'd also measure the effectiveness of selected human resources, total rewards, compensation, benefits, and other programs. We would measure which were of greatest value to employees to maximize and optimize their engagement with the organization. We would provide recommendations to senior leadership to improve human resource, talent management and total rewards programs to increase employee engagement, performance, and productivity. The survey, data collection, research and analysis skills derived from my sociology education were invaluable.  

What advice would you have for today's sociology majors?  

Keep an open mind to all the wonderful career (and volunteer) possibilities your sociology education can provide beyond what you see on internet career sites. The possibilities are unlimited because the sociology and criminology majors are so foundational and versatile. I encourage you to reach out to Sociology Advisory Board members, advisors, sociology alumni and others for advice.  

I encourage you to seek a higher sense of career and life purpose throughout your life. Be positive and enthusiastic and underpin it all with the highest integrity. It's important to plan, set goals and engage in lifelong learning. Evolve within your field and know where it's going by reading, researching, and collaborating with experts so you can bring the "very best ideas and value" to your clients, colleagues, and all those you serve. It's also very important to strive for a healthy work-life balance.  

Finally, I was truly blessed throughout my career working for organizations that encouraged my desire for community service to help those less fortunate. Involvement truly enriched my career, personal and family growth beyond measure. When considering a future employer, ask about their views on involvement in community service. In my experience, "Employers of Choice" with positive cultures, performance, and engagement, truly embrace it.