We recently connected with Laura Bright and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Laura, thanks for joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

In 2008, I finished my PhD at UT Austin and was desperate to stay in town and be around my family so I took an industry job instead of going on the academic track that all of my advisors wanted me to do. The job turned out to be a bust and I couldn’t make it work so I resigned after a year and pieced together a few odd jobs including mentoring student athletes, doing freelance consulting, and adjunct teaching work at a few universities in the area – needless to say, it was almost impossible to make ends meet with the student loans I was trying to pay off. So, in 2010 I made the decision to apply for tenure track academic jobs that would allow me to put my PhD to work. I ended up landing a job at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas and moved up there in July 2010. This was the first time that I would be in a city where my husband and I would be completely on our own with no friends and no family – it felt overwhelming and exciting at the same time. This was the biggest risk I had ever taken and it felt really good to bet on myself no matter how scary it was. When I left, it felt like I would never be able to come back to Austin and be with my family – however, all of the hard work I put in at TCU paid off and I was recruited to come back to my alma mater in 2019 and have been working in my home department at UT ever since. It made me sad and scared and anxious at the time but it all worked out in the end and taught me to always bet on myself.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an Associate Professor of Media Analytics and the Co-Director of the Nelson Center for Brand and Demand Analytics in the School of Advertising and Public Relations at UT Austin. I teach classes related to media management, social media effects, and research methods – most of my students are Masters or PhD level but I also teach undergraduates. My research is all about things in the digital world – social media effects (social media fatigue, addiction, FOMO) , privacy, digital wellbeing, and industry impacts from big data and AI.

I started my career during the dot-com boom in Austin and went back to graduate school when most of the tech companies in town shut down or went bankrupt – this was around 2002. I spent the next 6 years getting my Masters and PhD in advertising and digital media. I then went to work for a Disney funded research lab for about a year before I landed my first tenure track academic job at Texas Christian University. I was there for almost a decade and worked my way up to being the department chair and an associate professor with tenure. In my first year as department chair, I was recruited to come back to UT and serve in a similar role in my home department here.

When I reflect on things I am most proud of during my career the faces of my students are the first thing that pop into my mind. It is a wonderful gift to get to engage with young minds and then watch them go off and do great things in the industry. It makes me so fulfilled to have fun with students in class and watch them grow and expand their mindsets. I am also endlessly proud of my PhD advisees who are all out in the world doing wonderful things – it is so awesome to watch them make their mark on the world.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

During my teaching career, the moments that tested my resilience the most were during the COVID-19 pandemic. My husband and I are both educators so the pandemic was a time when we had to completely rethink the ways we were delivering content to our students as well as how to provide a nurturing and stable environment when the world was changing very quickly around us. Having such an abrupt change in the middle of a school year really tested our capacity to pivot to a whole new mode of teaching online not to mention how to handle all of our student interactions on a screen instead of in person. We both made adjustments and made it work but it was a crazy time with a very steep learning curve. Now that we are through it, I sometimes miss my online teaching studio that I created in a corner of my office and how much fun Zoom class could be once I got the hang of it!

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

I’ve had the opportunity to manage several teams during my career as well as have a few partnerships along the way both in the business and academic space. My best advice for managing a team and maintaining high morale is to treat everyone with respect and make sure that you are all on the same team, working towards the same goals. In academia, it can be hard to coalesce a team because everyone is doing their own independent research to move their careers forward – however, I have found that if you focus on student needs and success then it is easy to gather around that common goal. I also try to let people gravitate towards the things that they are naturally good at or enjoy so that team work doesn’t feel like a chore to anyone. This allows people on the team to show up as their best selves most of the time. And, always try to have fun and know people – it’s amazing to me that a small personal connection like asking about someone’s family or a hardship they are navigating really goes a long way in developing team morale.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://brightwoman.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lbrightphd/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brightwoman/

Image Credits

Claire Hargis took the headshots.