Interview with Rachel Smith

Rachel Smith Interview Transcription 

Journee: Wow. That’s really cool to hear that you were able to set up something where you were able to free up your brain space because I didn’t know that was a thing. 

Rachel: Yeah, I was lucky to be able to make that move. The work that I took on was remotely editing lesson plans that were already written. I came from a learning design role where I was responsible for collaborating with professors to develop the learning design and strategy for grad-level courses and also thinking about the curriculum and the content itself. But the emphasis was on strategy, not working with real material, which I really love. In this new role, I had no responsibility other than editing the lesson plans. To me, editing is a craft, and the material of that craft is language and page elements. That, and the fact that I think I’m a good editor, meant I got some satisfaction out of it.  But really, I’d said to myself, I’m gonna work this many hours a week, and that’s it, and it had no kind of emotional bearing on my life. It did become tedious after a while because at a certain point, I wanted to be more invested in the work I was doing. Especially because Covid had started. But at the time I made the switch, my thinking was that I needed to make a little money, but I didn’t want to be at my job anymore. I wanted to be freer to think about what I actually wanted. So, yeah, it was a good move for me. It’s not easy to find. This was kind of a unique opportunity in that it checked those boxes for me. 

Journee: Wow. That’s incredible. So let’s start all the way back to little Rachel. Where did you grow up, and how were you raised?

Rachel: I grew up in Hastings in Hudson, New York. It’s about 20 minutes outside of New York City, right above the Bronx. It’s a small, little town on the Hudson River that I really didn’t appreciate. I was constantly wanting to be in the city and mad at my parents for moving to the suburbs. That said, I couldn’t really complain. I had a nice big yard, and I built fairy houses out there. I got to play outside and look at the river. I’m an identical twin, and my sister and I spent a lot of our time just dreaming up what life would be like when we moved to the city. We were kind of shy and into ourselves and each other, and we would spend hours rearranging our room, watching pretentious movies, writing poetry, and taking pictures. We would go into the city every weekend as tweens and early teens to take accessory design classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). I sewed all the time and made dog collars and leashes, made old clothes into new clothes, went to flea markets and bought big sweaters, and sewed them to fit me. So I spent most of my childhood making stuff and dreaming about leaving my small town. 

Journee: What did you think you wanted to be when you were younger?

Rachel: Some kind of writer. I loved magazines, so I would think about magazine writing. Also, at that time, there were all these movies where the magazine writer or the magazine editor was the cool main character, which probably had a big influence on me. And my dad is a writer, which probably had something to do with why I thought of it as a realistic pursuit. I always wanted to make things, but even as a young person who loved magazines and spent my weekends at FIT, I was pretty grossed out by the fashion world and knew that’s wasn’t gonna be a realistic place for me, ever. I knew that was not my path and thought that making stuff was just going to be a thing I did on the side. I never really thought about that as a pathway, even though I did it all the time. 

Journee: Can you talk about your journey into college and higher education?

Rachel: I went to New York University, and when I got there, I didn’t really know what I wanted to study. I was really interested in art and film, but I didn’t apply to the film school. I was in the general arts and sciences school, so I decided to study art history because it felt like the most in line with my identity or how I saw myself. I quickly found myself incredibly bored because my classes placed no emphasis on art history’s relationship to contemporary life or to everyday people’s experiences. It was just pictures of pictures and the stories of the artists and where they came from. So I switched over to anthropology, and I was a creative writing minor. What’s interesting to me still is that I never thought to be a writing major. It was always my minor even though I cared about it so much. I spent so much more time on my poetry assignments and my short stories than I ever did my anthropology assignments, but I never thought about creative writing being something I could major in. I might be able to blame my father for that a little bit because I didn’t want to be a writer like him anymore. I had seen the way it beats you down. You never stop working, ever, and there’s just so little payoff. So I thought I was never going to be a writer. I wasn’t really thinking about where anthropology would get me at that point. I was just really interested in people. I was obsessed with medical anthropology. Those are the classes I loved the most. Seeing the way medicine was practiced and health was interpreted in different cultures. I was very interested in it, but I never gave it my all. I think again, kind of like in high school, I was just really ready to be in the world. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do in the world. I just wanted to be in it. I wish I could go back and do undergrad again, enjoy the luxury of being able to choose a topic and research it and not have it be tied to productivity or income. 

When I left college, I worked in restaurants and a little design studio, just floating around trying things, liking them for a little while, then trying something else, getting sick of it, and moving to something else. Eventually, I found myself managing restaurants and loved working in service because of the people component. You have to engage on so many levels, with the public, with your staff, and with your coworkers. It’s all relationships; it’s all about figuring out who needs you in what way, how to be there for them, how to maintain your own sanity, and your own physical health. The whole thing was so embodied, and I think that’s why I loved it. 

With that, too, I eventually burnt out and kept getting pulled back to design. I ended up going to work at a design studio as a studio manager because I had experience with operations and maintaining spaces, but kind of like my earlier role in the design studio that I had right after college, there was no real room for critically exploring the work that was being done. It was very much just aesthetics making things look good. I realized that I wanted to do more critical exploration of how design relates to people, society, politics, history. So, I obviously was ready for grad school. I went to Parsons School of Design to study design studies in a great little program that is no longer operational, although it is a minor now. I went because of my anthropological interest in why people behave the way they do, why we craft our own environments the way we do, how and why we interact in public spaces, and how all of our identities and behaviors, and relationships are mediated by and filled with things. What do these things mean? What does it mean to create them? I was thinking I wanted to be a design researcher when I started grad school, and was also really interested in the built environment and writing about it. I just explored a bunch of areas, learned a lot, and changed my thesis topic like three times. I was always just interested in everything. 

While I was in school, I got an internship at what I’d told myself was my dream workplace, which was a museum design consultancy. I was working on the content development team, essentially researching, organizing, and writing content for museum exhibitions and proposals for museums. The museum space is special in that it allows “word people” to contribute in the design and planning, and interpretation of spaces. At first, I thought I would stay there for the rest of my career, and then pretty quickly realized that it was not a happy place to be and that dream jobs don’t exist. I decided not to sacrifice my happiness just because it fit the narrative I’d built for myself. In reality, I was miserable.

But we also get into trouble because we expect our jobs alone to make us feel whole and happy. I’m a person who has a family and friends and a dog and interests that take place entirely off-screen and will never pay me a dime but are no less important to who I am. And right now, I have three or four different things that I call “work” and they don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. To me, this is the only kind of dream work scenario I think I can believe in, where I’m paid to do things I don’t hate, that I’m decent at, that do some good for the world, that continues to shift and change, and that gives me time and energy to do some other things I care about. For me, this arrangement feels sustainable because I no longer feel hemmed in, so I don’t feel the need to escape.  Obviously, there are issues of precarity and things like that I haven’t touched on that make this kind of setup not feasible for lots of people, and maybe not for me either at some point in the future. It’s still really hard to find part-time or more flexible opportunities that are also well compensated, stable, and offer benefits. Hopefully, this will change at some point.  

Journee: So, at what point did you transition into freelancing? Can you connect the realization that the “dream job” doesn’t exist with the move to freelance work? 

Rachel: There’s a really important transitionary time that I haven’t talked about, which happened after I left my non-dream job. I actually left with nothing planned because I just had to get out of there. I had started my newsletter (Words of Mouth /  wordsofmouth.org) while I was there because I was looking for work so much, and I wanted to make something good from the time that I was essentially stealing from my employer while, you know, sitting at a desk in their office, looking for other work. But I hadn’t found anything yet. I was looking in architecture and built environment spaces, and I really did all the research that one can do around what organizations existed, what companies would hire someone like me, where I could pitch myself. I got to know the corner of my industry in such an intimate way through job searching that I think that became one of my greatest skills:  uncovering people and organizations doing the work I cared about. The newsletter has really helped me keep up with that area of knowledge. 

So I was applying for jobs for a few months after I quit, and I weirdly ended up with two job offers on the same day. One was for a traditional architecture firm, where they offered me a job titled “Editorial Strategist,” but the job description read more like Press Release Writer, as in writing press releases for skyscrapers going up on Central Park South that would block all the sunlight. And I was like, “What am I doing? I don’t care about this work. I spent two years in grad school studying how things like this are bad. How did I already get to this point where I’m making these kinds of compromises just to fit a made-up idea of what success looks like? Because Parsons might love to know that one of their alumni has a sleek job title at this fancy architecture firm? No, I’m not gonna do that.” 

I had another job offer that was for less money, but it was space planning and research in workplaces. I had pitched myself to them as a content person because they didn’t have one, but I’d just wanted a way in. I didn’t actually want to do content stuff because I knew it would probably be mostly marketing. I wanted to be a researcher, but I figured maybe I could transition later. So I worked there for three weeks, and then I quit because I was miserable again. They were having me lead business development sales meetings. At this point, I was pretty devastated because I thought I knew everything about the opportunities that were available to me, and I still couldn’t figure out how to find work I wanted to do. I felt so trapped like I had somehow exhausted all my opportunities, which is ridiculous. Of course, I hadn’t, but I was still holding onto this particular identity with its particular boundaries. I wasn’t seeing that maybe working in this industry in this way wasn’t working because it wasn’t for me. So I was unemployed again. After a few weeks, I decided to teach myself how to code, which was totally different from anything I’d done before. I always thought of myself as a soft-skills person. But I’d been seeing more jobs related to content design, which fit my skills and interests but were focused on digital work. Totally different from the built environment work I’d been pursuing. It was appealing because I really wanted a faster pace. Built environment projects are super slow. These content design jobs all had to do with providing information in an accessible way. And they all wanted you to have some basic understanding of coding. So I spent two months teaching myself how to code, and then I started applying for roles that were in these more digital design spaces. But, I’ve never been interested in working with brands or selling. I’m so averse to profit-making that it’s a miracle that I have ever made any money. So that made it hard to find organizations I wanted to work for that weren’t traditional nonprofits, which also were not super interesting to me. But there was a lot of interesting work starting up in government at that time focused on digital content, led by design folks and civic design folks. And so I thought I could bring a lot of my museum design thinking experience, which is essentially creating systems of organization for information, to that work and also being able to write for broad audiences. So I actually got hired at the City of New York to work on their digital strategy team. The title was something like Communications Associate, but the job duties were pretty broad. Within a few weeks, I’d convinced them to let me change it to “content” instead of “communications” because communications just didn’t describe what I was doing. I really don’t know anything about traditional marketing or communications. It was also clear to me that the mayor’s office that I was working with didn’t need communications or press help. They needed to be able to support City agencies in making their websites work better and presenting information in a way that all New Yorkers could understand. So I made that my job. I had an incredible case of imposter syndrome when I started because I didn’t feel like I was an expert in this stuff. I just had started really getting familiar with UX design and UX content, which has a whole set of considerations that I had never encountered doing museum content work. I was doing a ton of research and reading and educating myself, but I was really stressed out about it because these agencies would come to us asking what to do to make their website better, and I was just regurgitating things I’d read the week before. The woman who hired me really helped me with this. She said, “You are the expert because you are the one here who wants to be the expert. That’s not always the case in the private sector, but we’re here in government. Whether or not you feel comfortable with it, you’ll be the expert on this stuff in most of the rooms you walk into in this job. You can provide people the information that they need, even if it’s not the most expert opinion that anyone’s ever had about it.” So I really started to see myself that way. And I started to become that. I was the expert in the room very often, which was an amazing motivator to learn as much as I could.,  Though I did  often end up wondering, “Oh, do I actually not have any idea what I’m doing?” 

After two years, I reached that point of wanting there to be someone who could really teach me some things that I wasn’t teaching myself. At that point, I had done a lot of learning and active work on live projects that served New Yorkers and other agencies. I got really invested in digital accessibility and had formed all of these new areas of interest and knowledge working in government. But the experience itself was not entirely enjoyable. Due to a lot of personal and political reasons, people in my office were leaving one after the other after the other, and I was one of those people. I decided I wanted to go somewhere where I could just be a part of a team and have guidance and mentorship and a real HR department. I had also become more interested in education and learning design because I had been developing some learning and training materials for City staff. So I went to work for a big private company, which felt like the opposite end of the world, to do essentially what ended up being a two-year boot camp in learning design. I got a lot of what I wanted, which was structure and support in a new area of knowledge and learning. But at the end, I realized this was another case where I had said, “This job is the right next step for you and makes perfect sense. You’re going to love it for these reasons,” and hadn’t been totally honest with myself about the things I probably wouldn’t like. In the end, it didn’t fit for a lot of reasons. And that’s okay. It taught me more about what I need in a work environment and a team, and it taught me a whole new skill set. And I realized I still had the part of me that came into being as a content designer for the City of New York. I’d spent the last two years as a learning designer, but it’s not like I was no longer a content designer; I now had broader skills and new experiences that I could bring together. 

At this point, I really thought I could do freelance and was realizing I might never be happy just being one thing or just living with the very basic constraints of a full-time job that requires you to be somewhere from this hour to this hour. I wanted to try life without those constraints for a while and see what happened. I’ve kind of managed to do it, to find sustaining work while also spending more time on projects and interests that I’d not taken seriously, really much thanks to this one client that I mostly work with right now. It’s kind of cosmic how well the work I’ve been able to do with them picks up all the threads of all of my past work lives, although I think that I might have just been lucky enough to find an exceptionally flexible and trusting client who let me shape the project and my role in it. It just goes to show that if you see a need and a way your skills can serve that need, you should make the case for how you can be of service. If there’s someone there to support you, it can come to life. I’ve been really lucky. The work I do now is quite varied, but it’s generally stuff that I like to do. Although last night I was thinking about how the flip side of not being beholden to a workplace is that as a consultant, I’m always on my own. I’m always expected to be the competent expert who doesn’t need too much advice or too much support. So that’s the other side of the coin. This is why being part of a team and a workplace can be nice, but it’s a trade-off. No dream job. Yeah, no dream. There’s always a compromise, always the other side.