Emily Sloan-Pace: On Empathy and Teaching Shakespeare to Engineers
Can a Shakespearean scholar transform the user experience for a global software company? University of California, Santa Cruz alumna Emily Sloan-Pace (Ph.D. Literature, 2012) found out. What she has accomplished could serve well as a model to help businesses discover the value of hiring those who study the humanities.
From the serenity of the UC Santa Cruz campus, to the grim cement walls of San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco, and the bustling technology centers of Chennai, India, Sloan-Pace has carried her passion for Shakespeare to some of the unlikeliest venues, and along the way has discovered audiences hungry to learn what Shakespeare’s plays still have to teach us today.
In August, Sarah Caldwell, UC Santa Cruz Humanities Division Assistant Director of Development, and I met with Emily at her workplace in Pleasanton, CA, where she is Professor in Residence at Zoho, a cloud-based technology company headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
We wanted to learn how Emily brought her deep knowledge of Shakespeare to the high-tech world of software development. In the course of our 2-hour conversation, Emily’s journey unfolded, and the logic of her position at Zoho became clear to us. It’s a journey that holds a positive message for anyone wondering how a love for the humanities can lead to a meaningful and rewarding career.
Teaching Shakespeare in Prison
In 2010, Emily was like any graduate student, working to complete her coursework and Ph.D. thesis on gender roles in Shakespeare’s English history plays. At some point she got a bit stuck, and took two years off from writing. She kept reading and teaching, but the break from writing gave her some free time, which she chose to use in a remarkably relevant way.
She explains, “One thing that I started during that period was a lot of volunteer work. I was looking for other ways, interesting ways to use Shakespeare that weren’t necessarily academic. I volunteered for the Shakespeare Santa Cruz festival as a dramaturg.”
Emily continues, “And I also volunteered at San Quentin State Prison, working with prisoners to put on productions of Shakespeare.” She laughs, and says, “I was really looking for other things to do rather than write my dissertation, basically, because that’s painful. It motivated me and gave me the kind of creative energy I needed to finish. There’s nothing like going into a prison every week to make you feel really grateful about your own life.”
“There’s nothing like going into a prison every week to make you feel really grateful about your own life.”
She shakes her head, perhaps a bit amazed at the challenge she accepted: “I went every other week for about 2 years. It’s a long commute from Santa Cruz; every other Friday I’d go up to San Quentin. We’d spend about three-and-a-half hours in the space with them. It takes about half an hour to get into the prison and half an hour to get out.” The experience, and effort, must have been emotionally draining, but also rewarding.
She says, “In terms of just learning gratitude, every time I left, I cried, because it was overwhelming and so emotionally hard to go into that space, to be vulnerable and make art with people.”
Perhaps most remarkable is how her Shakespeare training was received among the inmates at the maximum security correctional facility. Emily says, “We did Hamlet the first year and Merchant of Venice the second year. Merchant is all about justice and mercy, and they were really in tune with that.”
Emily recalls, “The guy who was playing our Hamlet — who was just breathtakingly amazing — he was in prison for second-degree murder. Listening to someone who has been in prison for 26 years reflecting on what it means to kill, when they had to internalize it… it’s just mind blowing. It’s just profound.”
She adds, “For a lot of these guys, it’s the first play they have ever seen. We performed it one time, and only one time, for the guys in the prison, for an audience of about 300 inmates. For some, it’s the only Shakespeare they have ever seen. And they get it — it resonates with them.”
To get a sense of their rendition of Hamlet, you can view a 30-minute video by David Wayne Wright, Shakespeare in Blue, that introduces the dramaturges, the inmates, and the stories of their personal experiences, as well as segments of the play performed on site.
The San Quentin teaching and other Shakespeare volunteer work, combined with her years of academic studies, writing and teaching, gave Sloan-Pace a deep and ingrained understanding of the wisdom and insight we can gain from great literature and art. This would come back to reward her in ways that she could not possibly have imagined.
A Career in Academia Does Not Materialize
The volunteer teaching experience did help Emily refocus on her thesis, and she then, “went back to it, and chugged through it.” Having completed her doctorate, she now felt it was surely time to find a faculty position at a college or university. But that’s not how things worked out.
She says, “I had finished my Ph.D. in the summer of 2012, and I had been ‘adjuncting’ that year, and just doing the academic thing of applying for jobs, and had gotten hired on as an administrative assistant at UC Santa Cruz. That was my world.”
Unfortunately, the 2008 financial crash had caused a multi-level disruption in the California educational system, as elsewhere. Educational funding dried up, as state tax revenue plummeted, and campuses were forced to drastically cut back their budgets, including hiring staff.
Sloan-Pace says, “When I started my Ph.D., people were getting jobs — great jobs teaching. But after 2008, all the teaching jobs had disappeared. It’s so hard when you have invested 15 years of your life in thinking, ‘I’m going to be an academic, I’m going to work in academia,’ and then never get a tenured job. I had to completely shift my expectation.”
The teaching roles she had were temporary, so circumstances forced her to look for something longer term: “I was working as a part-time adjunct professor, and as a part-time administrative assistant at Cowell, teaching the Core course (a seminar in analytical reading and critical thinking required of all first-year students) and teaching literature courses. I was the assistant to the Provost at Cowell College, Faye Crosby, for a while. What I envisioned at the university was that if I stayed on long enough, I would get hired into an administrative position. That was my plan.”
Meanwhile, Zoho’s President, Raj Sabhlok, a UC Santa Cruz graduate (B.A. mathematics, Cowell, 1986), reached out to the Provost, and told her, “We are looking for smart people.”
So Crosby approached Sloan-Pace and, “asked if I might be interested.” Emily demurred, saying, “I’m still looking for academic jobs.” But then a year passed, and Crosby “came to me again, and said, ‘they are still looking; do you want to come?’”
Emily went for a series of job interviews that stretched over several months. Zoho did not rush the process because, as you’ll see, Zoho doesn’t operate like most other technology companies.
Finally, Zoho offered Emily a job. She explains, “They said to me, over the phone, ‘We’re not really sure what you are going to do, and if you’re okay with not having a real clear sense of what you are going to do, we’re okay with that, and we’d love to have you.’”
“If you’re okay with not having a real clear sense of what you are going to do, we’re okay with that, and we’d love to have you.”
She accepted the offer.
About Zoho
Zoho is an on-demand, cloud-based suite of applications for small and medium-sized businesses. Zoho’s 40-plus software products include WorkPlace, a full-featured competitor to Microsoft Office, CRM Plus, a Customer Relationship Management product (similar to Salesforce), Books for online accounting, and many more that comprise a full suite of software tools that let users work online. Despite its extensive application integration and rich feature set, Zoho offers highly competitive pricing; in fact, all their applications are available in individual versions at no cost. Zoho products are currently available worldwide; the company is based in Chennai, with offices in the U.S. in Pleasanton and Austin, TX.
Because Zoho is privately owned with no outside investment, the management team is free to develop their products on their own timeline, plan for the long term, and — as you’ll shortly learn — invest in their employees in novel ways that are unusual, but highly effective.
Becoming a Professor in Residence
Emily — Shakespeare scholar and Ph.D. — became Professor in Residence at Zoho. Imagine how that must have felt! Emily admits, “The first day I was here — the first couple of months — I was terrified. I was sure they were going to find out they had made a terrible mistake, and fire me.” She laughs, a bit nervously, recalling those days.
“I was sure they were going to find out they had made a terrible mistake, and fire me.”
Leaving academia for an unfamiliar role in an unknown industry was clearly a brave leap of faith. She was leaving behind the world she had known, lived in and loved, severing close ties and the sense of belonging. But she still had what was most important: her education, skills, her drive, and her love of Shakespeare and the humanities.
And finally, a defined role… sort of.
Emily says, “The first day, the CEO said to me, ‘I’d like you to work on quality and refinement.’” Not exactly a clear mandate, especially for someone new to the industry. So, she tried to apply her academic training to the challenge: “Quality is really a question of aesthetic judgement,” she reasoned, “so I thought, ‘maybe I need to learn a whole bunch about aesthetics.’ I started reading Aristotle on aesthetics… and I realized, ‘No, this isn’t going to help me.’ So I put that aside.”
She started over — this time, from the point of view of the company business. “I started thinking about how we have a lot of communications problems — problems that are internal. I did not understand it at the time, but now I can see that people aren’t as empathetic as they need to be in communication — and that this translates into the way that we communicate with customers.”
Using her professional skills to evaluate the company communications, both internal and external, Emily found there was a disconnect between what the company was saying and what customers, and internal staff, needed to know.
She was now engaging in an industry that she had only known from the outside, as a customer and user of software and technology solutions, not as a content creator. She was not yet versed in the concepts, the language, or the work habits of software engineers, product managers, and technical support staff. And yet, sometimes it takes someone with a very different perspective; someone who — like a new user — sees things from the outside, from another profession, another language, another country.
Sloan-Pace says, “I think one of the things that I bring is that I’m not fluent in the language — whether Tamil, or Hindi, or Engineering. I had to learn ‘Engineer’ when I got here. I didn’t appreciate the totally different language, or different mind set, that it is.”
That distance and sense of not knowing can provide a fresh perspective that helps identify problems or gaps: “I think that being a non-engineer, who comes in and looks at this stuff and says, ‘this doesn’t make sense,’ or, ‘what you are saying is full or jargon,’ is really valuable.”
In the distinctive Zoho culture, she learned that the cause of the distance between engineers and customers had deep roots. Emily says, “Part of the unique challenge of this job is that we have about 25 people in the Pleasanton office, and about 35 people in Austin — and 6,500 people in India. And so everything — all of the marketing, all the engineering, all the support — is done in India.”
In the Indian educational system, great emphasis is placed on engineering, math, and medicine as the most important professions. Which is fine, if you are preparing to become an engineer; but if your dream is to work in marketing, sales, or customer support, your engineering degree may not be sufficient to prepare you to speak or work with customers. There is a lot of value that can come from college-level training in the humanities, including literature, history, philosophy, and languages; but that was missing for much of the Zoho staff.
She says, “The way hiring is done — the mantra of the company — is that we hire talent, and we let them find what fits them. The kind of people that we hire as marketers are not trained as marketers: they are engineers.”
“The way hiring is done — the mantra of the company — is that we hire talent, and we let them find what fits them.”
Because of this educational emphasis on engineering, the humanities and foreign languages are not given the time and focus that are needed. And while English is widely taught and spoken in India, it is often not the primary language. In addition, Emily says, “They are trained in British English, and the idioms are totally different than American idioms. And then there are Indian idioms that are completely foreign to Americans.” This is a problem primarily because the majority of Zoho’s customers — the audience for their communications — are in the U.S.
As she puts it, “There is lots of ‘language mediation’ that is required. I realized that I needed to set up a review process. Now all customer communications go through a review process that is housed here [in Pleasanton and Austin]. This includes product communications, the buttons inside the UI, the help documentation, email campaigns, all social media — all outbound stuff. That was the first communications challenge that I faced.”
Engineers, for all their accomplishments, can still benefit from a humanities “set of eyes.” Sloan-Pace admits, “I’m so consistently amazed by what my engineering colleagues can do, but then I think: ‘why would you put that there? It makes no sense.’ And I’m sure they think the same thing about my writing: ‘why is that better? This is shorter therefore it should be better,’ or whatever the case may be.”
In addition, “Convincing people that a humanist has something to say about engineering — that was a big challenge.”
“Convincing people that a humanist has something to say about engineering — that was a big challenge.”
She explains, “It became clear that we needed a QA (quality assurance) process around content. We had one for code, why wouldn’t we have one for English, or content?” Sounds logical, but it doesn’t always work out that way: “It took a while to get buy-in. Plus lots of diplomacy.”
As for results: “I am very proud that we have managed to take a lot of the help guides and make them more user friendly. In 2016, we released a new UI (User Interface) for CRM, which is our biggest product, and I led the review of that UI, all the error messages, all the setup instructions, and it was a massive project. I think it made the product much more usable.”
Getting the Team to Empathy
Sloan-Pace then focused on the problem she had identified at the start: the need for greater empathy among the engineering teams for customers and their experiences using Zoho’s products. She concluded that this would require direct, in-person training, for people throughout the company, in the form of an internal continuing education program.
We asked Emily how she came to realize that the main issue was empathy — that is, being willing and able to sense, respect, and address the situation of another person.
She replied, “What I realized is that to communicate well with people, you have to have a good understanding of where they are coming from. The shorthand for that is essentially empathy. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that.
“Lately,” she says, “a lot of what I’m doing is focusing on building out a culture of empathy, because I think that matters — not just how we engage with customers, but how we engage with one another in our work space.”
Beyond that, she realized, “What would really make a difference is how we train people in how to be better at their jobs. That became continuing education.”
She adds, “Now I’m working on empathy in terms of [customer] support. It took me a while, but I realized that support is really the face of the company in a way that marketing isn’t. So that’s where my focus is going.”
In other words: to successfully engage customers through empathy, the first step was to make it a standard part of the customer support methodology. Then, to make it part of employee training so it becomes a full and equal part of the company culture.
“When I go to India,” Emily says, “I run these empathy workshops and give a lot of feedback on support. We’re building out a customer advocacy team to advocate for the customer inside the company, because that’s not something that we’re good at right now — in part because we didn’t have someone who could focus on that, and who spoke the language of empathy.”
“We’re building out a customer advocacy team to advocate for the customer inside the company.”
Now that the process is working, and her team has grown, she’s moved on to new responsibilities: “I used to review content; now I don’t review content any longer. I built out of team, and I handed that off to someone else. And now I’m working on building out this empathy team that will eventually be ten people. That’s the next big project.”
There have been other challenges, as well. Because Zoho is a very non-hierarchical company, the 40 various product teams run their businesses independently, which makes it difficult for someone new to introduce a new comprehensive plan for content. “Just because you build credibility with one team, doesn’t mean you have credibility with other teams.”
This requires a clear strategy, of working with one team and then another, while not being forced to re-invent the process each time: “I had to build a lot of credibility with the CRM team, because they are the biggest, and they are linked to the most other products,” she says. “Then I was able to extend into other places.”
Each new challenge requires its own unique strategy. Emily explains, “My strategy for this new customer advocacy role is to learn as much as possible about the major challenges with the products, primarily so I can answer those front-line questions, and then hand off those questions to a support representative that has better technical support skills.”
In her words: “First soothe them with empathy, and get them to a place where they are ready to be helped.”
“First soothe them with empathy, and get them to a place where they are ready to be helped.”
The process has been revealing for her personally. She says, “Our new empathy program is really exciting for me, because I’m learning a lot, both professionally and personally. I can now feel myself when I’m not empathetic, I can look at that mindset, and say, ‘OK, that’s a non-empathetic response, and I can change that.’ And that’s exciting for me.”
Engineers Learning the Humanities
By now, the Zoho Professor in Residence has addressed several major challenges: first, improving the user experience with the documentation, user interface, help and marketing content. Second, creating several in-house training programs for marketing and engineering teams. Third, building a program for empathy training to help understand the user experience. Not a small achievement for someone entirely new to the industry.
But Sloan-Pace was just getting started, as each accomplishment led to awareness of a new issue to address. She realized that the kind of humanities education she had received at UC Santa Cruz would benefit the teams at Zoho.
She realized that the kind of humanities education she had received at UC Santa Cruz would benefit the teams at Zoho.
Emily says, “I realized, in the course of doing the continuing education, that as much as I wanted to give people a broad humanities education — because I think that’s valuable, and I think that the only way to learn how to write is by reading and writing about that — that there were logistical challenges, unless I was willing to pick up and move to India. And even then, there is no way to cram a four-year humanities education down into two weeks or even two months.”
An integral part of the Zoho culture is the process they use to select, train and employ new hires from start to finish. She explains, “This is one of the things that really appealed to me: 20 percent of our employees are drawn from our in-house training program, called Zoho University, based in India. This is where we take people who could have gone to college but chose not to, usually because it was outside of financial reach, and we put them through a nine-to twelve-month internship, where they learn English, math, and coding. Because they are paid, it’s less of an internship and more of a training.”
And remember, these new employees are being trained primarily as engineers, so what’s missing are the humanities qualities to complete that education. Emily realized she had to condense some of the lessons of the humanities, and apply them in the most critical areas in terms of the business needs, through courses and sessions with the teams in India.
But engineers are busy. Emily explains, “I advertised. It was the same way when I was teaching a summer session class at UC Santa Cruz: I marketed the class. When you are an adjunct, if you don’t get enrollment, they cancel the class. It’s your job to market the class.”
And how did the Zoho engineers and marketers respond? She says, “Without fail, the kind of feedback we get is: ‘This is just the college experience I wish that I had had. I wished that I could be a humanities major, but my parents forced me to be an engineering major.’ I hear that so much.”
Emily continues, “I think there is so much need for people who are trained in the humanities in tech spaces, for any number of reasons, whether it’s for communication, thinking about things from a non-engineering perspective — from an end-user’s perspective, from a neophyte perspective — to just being able to experience not knowing, and being comfortable with that. That’s one of the skills that I learned in the humanities training.”
It should come as no surprise that Emily found meaningful ways to bring Shakespeare into her training, and she was able to apply Shakespeare’s lessons directly to the challenges faced by her students. “I was in Chennai last month, and did a workshop,” she explains. “It’s one of my favorite workshops, on Shakespeare as the ‘ultimate marketer.’ We read Julius Caesar, and we looked at Marc Antony’s funeral oration. It’s a great example of a ‘call to action,’ where you have an audience that’s not on your side; and 200 lines later, they are up in arms, ready to burn down the houses of the traitors. So we look at how you use rhetorical questions, and how we can use that in our own writing.”
Emily recalls, “The very first writing session that I did was two hours every day for two weeks, and it was like a mini version of UC Santa Cruz’s Core Course (the first-year course in analytical reading): we looked at the letter from Birmingham City Jail [by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.], we looked at a passage from Shakespeare and [Indian novelist] Jhumpa Lahiri. I got a letter after from one participant, who said that I had, ‘given him the coordinates to ‘writing avenue’; and if he couldn’t walk there, he would take a taxi, and if he couldn’t take a taxi, he would crawl.’”
Similar to the prisoners in San Quentin, encountering the insights of Shakespeare’s plays for the first time in their lives, the engineers at Zoho were learning to see their software from someone else’s point of view — their users. Great literature offers a window into human emotions and experiences that can be transformative, and enrich people’s lives in almost any context.
The engineers at Zoho were learning to see their software from someone else’s point of view — their users.
Lessons and Opportunities for Humanities Students
We asked which lessons Sloan-Pace learned as a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz that prepared her for the experience of becoming a high-tech manager and content innovator. she explains, “It’s like writing a dissertation, it’s a huge amount of work and information. In that sense, it’s about training to think broadly about many, many possible approaches to a problem. The Ph.D. program absolutely trained me to do that.”
This involves both expertise and a willingness to try things: “To be able to design different types of curricula,” she continued “I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t have the training that I got in the Literature department, to know how to design a curriculum, to find what is interesting. It’s trial by fire: you are an apprentice essentially, in a Ph.D. program. You submit classes, they get picked and you go and teach that class for the first time, and see if it works or not. In terms of crafting assignments, I got a lot of feedback when I was a teaching assistant on how to write assignments, write tests, evaluate work. That came from years of training at UC Santa Cruz.”
Does that translate directly into what she is doing now? “Yes,” she replies, “definitely.”
Sarah asks about Zoho’s unique and effective approach to hiring and training: “Do you think this will catch on? Will it open more doors as this idea spreads?”
Emily replies, “There is definitely a push in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] to turn it into STEAM [by adding Arts] — to bring the arts into the sciences and engineering. I follow Phi Beta Kappa (@PhiBetaKappa ) on Twitter and every week they are posting articles about what people are looking for in tech: people that have critical thinking skills, ability to function in a lot of different roles, and to think broadly.”
I follow Phi Beta Kappa (@PhiBetaKappa ) on Twitter and every week they are posting articles about what people are looking for in tech: people that have critical thinking skills, ability to function in a lot of different roles, and to think broadly.”
In her short time at Zoho, Emily has already managed to build a team, drawing from her wealth of contacts at UC Santa Cruz: “One of the really exciting things that I’ve gotten to do is help to bring on other people that have humanities training. I got to hire on one of my best friends from my Ph.D. program. I lured him away — he had his Ph.D. in Homer, and he was tenured, working for a university in Korea, and he decided he did not want to do the ‘publish or perish’ route. I got him hired on about 2 years ago.”
And that employee is not the only one from the well-trained graduates of UC Santa Cruz: “In the nearly 4 years I’ve been here, I have probably helped bring on more than a dozen people from Santa Cruz, all of them in Literature and the Humanities. We are bringing on a lot of people.”
She says proudly, “They are all thrilled to get a job as soon as they graduate.”
And the folks from UCSC are thriving, taking on everything from public speaking to event planning to HR. “I find the UCSC humanities grads are able to look at the world from a much broader perspective than you might expect from a typical 22-year old,” says Emily. “I’m continually amazed (as is the C-suite) at how much they have to offer, which is no small feat in an engineering-driven company.
“We’ve repeatedly turned to UCSC alums and faculty for employee referrals, and the program has been a smashing success. Some measure of this can be directly attributed to the instruction they received as humanists at UC Santa Cruz.”
“We’ve repeatedly turned to UC Santa Cruz alums and faculty for employee referrals, and the program has been a smashing success.”
And what do these UC Santa Cruz humanities graduates think? Here are quotes from two of the Evangelists at Zoho whom Emily recruited:
Taylor Backman: “The critical thinking and writing skills I developed in the humanities have been really helpful in my time here. It’s definitely helpful to have some experience or training in thinking critically about the meaning of particular words when you’re trying to communicate with a mass market. In my schooling, I really learned that you can’t assume anyone knows what you’re saying. So that’s more or less a mantra for me here and everywhere else.”
Dylan Mahood: “Studying literature at UC Santa Cruz taught me to think about other people’s perspectives and communicate precisely, which are useful skills to have when you need to present to customers from all walks of life.”
Lastly, we ask Emily, “What would you say to people in the humanities about how to be qualified to find meaningful jobs?”
Sloan-Pace summarizes, “I would say that the ability to communicate translates — regardless of what field that you are in. The people who know how to clearly articulate thinking and make a convincing argument are the ones who are able to get jobs, be successful at work, and advance the programs that they want to advance. Those are the skills that you learn with a humanities background in a way that you don’t necessarily learn with a background exclusively in engineering.”
“The people who know how to clearly articulate thinking and make a convincing argument are the ones who are able to get jobs, be successful at work, and advance the programs that they want to advance. Those are the skills that you learn in a humanities background.”
Further: “I think also the ability to critically assess information, based on the source, is really encouraged in a humanities background.” The Humanities can bring a lot of clarity to evaluating information, and the daily news attests to the need for this kind of critical examination of sources.
In summary, Emily reviews the new professional life she is living and all that she has accomplished: “I never thought this would be the turn that my life would take. Last Friday afternoon, I spent half an hour speaking with the CEO. Tomorrow I’ll sit down with the Chief Strategic Officer for a couple of hours. Just the kind of diversity of projects is exciting and interesting, and there is never a shortage of things to do. It’s so rewarding, especially to give former students their first job out of college. The people I’ve brought on have all done great things with the company. Some have gone on to be product evangelists traveling the world, while others are team leads, marketers or designers.”
From UC Santa Cruz, to San Quentin, to Chennai, Emily has already made her mark using her knowledge of Shakespeare and her academic training. Her success is an inspiration, not only for other companies to bring on their own professors in residence, but also for humanities students to broaden their vision, and reach out into the world.
This profile of Emily Sloan-Pace is the third in a series, Beyond the Forest: David Gleason’s Humanities Alumni Profiles. Throughout this series, we’ll continue to look at the lives and careers of UC Santa Cruz grads who have found their own paths using the humanities as their foundation.
