Doing a podcast on our career confusions

Archana Atmakuri is a Research Analyst at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) at the National University of Singapore. I (Nirupama V) am a Research Associate at Good Business Lab, a research firm that works on labour welfare in Bengaluru, India. In 2014, we went together to the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ), Chennai for our Post Graduate Diploma in Journalism. And now, we’re doing a podcast (!) on What’s Next in Social Sciences, which is a question we’re trying to answer ourselves.

Meant for students and early-career professionals in social sciences, it comes out every two weeks, and can be found here

I’d first met Archana at the common room in the hostel at ACJ, in the first few days of our professional journalism course. She was watching a Hyderabadi film with a friend. Intrigued, I sat down with them and ended up loving it! After a year at the institute, and a few meetings later in Bengaluru (where we worked for a while), we’d lost touch. I’d followed her on LinkedIn and knew that she too — just like me — had gone to study further, and ended up as a researcher in the social sciences space.

Recently, in one of the existential crises induced by the global pandemic and social isolation, I’d gone down a rabbit-hole of career possibilities ahead of me. A wanderer with way too many interests, career confusions are a constant in my life. I reached out to Archana on LinkedIn to ask her about South Asian studies and NUS, and what she thinks about doing a PhD.

Turns out, she’d done a lot of thinking and research on these lines, and had a whole lot of insights to share! After a few hours of conversation and catching up, I jokingly said that our discussion should be a podcast — it would help numerous confused people such as me. To Archana, this sounded like a legitimate idea that we could work on.

And here we are!

It’s been two months since our LinkedIn catch-up. After dealing with lots of self-doubt, concerns about whether it would actually help anyone, and a lot of freaking out about sounding like a chipmunk on my part, we’re here. We have created a super-short preview to introduce this podcast project we plan to keep working on for a while.

We’ve recorded the first two episodes which serve as detailed introductions of each of us, and a glimpse into our fields of study — International Relations and Development Studies.

Going forward, we intend to bring in guests to share insights, tips, and answers to a wide range of questions that students and early career professionals in social sciences have. These guests could be researchers; those who work in other roles at nonprofits or think tanks; consultants; PhD. scholars; or academics. Context is crucial for a lot of these discussions, and hence we’d be looking at it from a South and South-east Asian perspective (but will be talking about opportunities elsewhere too).

The two of us have little experience in producing podcasts, and so we’re starting very humble. We gave it the first title we could think of (it made sense). The episodes will be short and informative, and the rendering style very simple. In the future episodes with guests, you’d hear us having a conversation, rather than plain old Q&A.

Frankly, we’re super nervous about releasing it to the world. But we’re gonna bite our teeth and do it. But we definitely want to improve, and are eager to hear your constructive feedback!

(I personally welcome any tips on how to sound less like a hyper 12-year old.)

Our podcast is available on Spotify, and you can find us on LinkedIn at: Archana & Nirupama.