Exploring Careers in Human Rights

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“If you follow your heart and passions, you can’t go wrong with your career choice – but this is not a linear career path. You have to know what you’re getting yourself into,” said Charlie Clements, the Executive Director at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. At the OCS Human Rights Event, panelists spoke about their experiences as human rights activists and offered beads of wisdom about the highs and lows of working in the field.

Roxanne Krystalli ‘08, a graduate student at the Fletcher School, left Harvard without a strong sense of what she wanted to do for a career. “I took a year off “to live” and to think about what I wanted to do and what was important to me. I worked at a law firm but wanted to spend more time on what I cared about,” she explained. Now, she is a conflict management specialist who has implemented capacity development initiatives and post-conflict reintegration programs in the Middle East, East Africa, and Latin America by working with UN agencies, NGOs and community-based organizations in Egypt, Uganda, Colombia, Guatemala, and Jordan. “This work is what makes me come alive,” she said. “There’s nothing that compares to getting to do what you really love, especially because I needed my work to reflect my values and principles – what I want to talk about in after hours has to be what I do. There are a lot of people who are very cynical about the way human rights activism works, a lot of people who will say “no work will ever make anything better,” but I have to work to look for grains of hope and resist those sentiments.”

Lise Balk King, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, recounted her experience working in North Dakota on a confidence-building project for teenage girls, in which her salary was not as high as her morale. “Following your heart in these situations is key, because you need passion to enjoy this kind of work,” she explained.

While the panel emphasized passion as a prerequisite for this career field, they also stressed the importance of emotionally separating yourself from your work. “Working in this field is kind of like being in the mafia: once you’re in, you can’t get out. I get letters from people in prison and Facebook messages asking for help and I can’t say no,” Lise said. “There’s a personal balance issue of maintaining yourself and taking the space you need for yourself, because you do want to passionately help everyone but at some point you have to put stuff down.”

Apart from the emotional pull of this work, it can also be incredibly frustrating at times. “Working at a nonprofit, you don’t always win. You can invest years of your life and see it go nowhere. It’s work, but you can’t help but build a legacy because the work you’re doing is so important and you can’t get anything better than an intrinsically satisfying career,” said Rupert Elderkin, a former lawyer with the Office of the Prosecutor at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. “When you feel so strongly about the work, and either ego or profit-making gets involved, it’s dangerous. You have to get over ethical dilemmas because you could stay enraged forever. It’s really important to take yourself out of it.”

In a field with such challenging working conditions, what is it that keeps these activists engaged? “I’m in this field because I couldn’t make myself do anything else,” Benjamin said. “There is a purity that comes with the relationships you build at a nonprofit that will last from organization to organization and project to project. You get so much access to what’s going on at the organization and you get to know how everything works – there’s a lot more room to succeed and fail in your role.”

 At the end of the day, all panelists emphasized that this field is primarily about dedication and commitment to the work at its core. “If you’re in this work because it’s “noble,” eventually you’ll crash because this is not about ego, it’s about people. I always have to remind myself that the arc of the road is long, but bends towards justice,” Charlie said. “That’s why I’m still here.”


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Julia Eger, ’14

Digital Humanities Across the Spectrum

Studies of the humanities give students particular habits of mind, a way of posing questions, and a certain rigor in dealing within climates of diverse opinions that are helpful in the outside world and job market. With the arts and humanities going digital, now is the time to find creative jobs that can combine your love of humanities and technology—jobs that revolutionize the way we absorb and deliver knowledge.

With mostly graduate students in the audience this past Wednesday, Harvard professors on the Digital Humanities panel discussed their experiences with the changing nature of research and entrepreneurship in the digital age.

What exactly are the digital humanities? Jeffrey Schnapp, a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Faculty Director of the metaLAB, defined it as an “emerging set of experimental scholarly practices that shakes up the establishment that has valued the monograph as the gold standard of scholarship.” A career in the digital humanities involves the exploration of a universe in which traditional genres still exist, but there’s also a much richer ecology of media. Even the form of the dissertation itself is undergoing changes. The world of digital humanities allows scholars to become engaged in a design practice as well as traditional research questions: what are the new genres? How can you iterate a genre? They are being forged with a new combination of tools and innovative models. 

Where the challenge with research historically has been limited access to documents, this problem is shrinking as work is being digitized; now, the problem is that there is almost too much data out there to quickly analyze texts. With the digital age, we must develop skills for dealing with this massive amount of data. It used to be that publishers were the most important tool to getting published, but now the emphasis lies in the community and network. Everyone has their niche, but most people start out asking the question “how do I do this?” We all learn by doing, and the digital humanities are all about doing. The boundary line is no longer limited to studying—humanists need to get out into the world. The panelists emphasized that professional opportunities come out of learning.

Beth Altringer, Director of the Behavior for Better Innovation Group and a visiting lecture at SEAS, reassured humanities students that the skill-set developed in humanities classes is actually applicable to a wide variety of careers—from venture capitalists to entrepreneurs. Some examples of companies or websites that exemplify the digital humanities are Pandora (a music genome project), Artsy (an art genome project), Artsicle (an art rental website), Paddle8 (an art auction website), and Rap Genius (a website that analyzes rap music as poetry). For these jobs, it’s really about marketing yourself based on the skills you can offer, and finding a company that can complement your qualifications. Social media skills are crucial with these kinds of startups, because even if you’re producing the most beautiful work in the world, if you can’t market your project then you’re not going to get very far. You need to build a community to build hype around your project—getting your hands dirty is key.


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Julia Eger, ’14

Creative Careers in the Live Event Industry: TAIT Towers

Have you ever been to a sold out rock concert and wondered how their extravagant set came to be? It’s likely that it came from TAIT Towers, a stage-building and designing company that prides itself in “building enormous stages in impossible time.”

While visiting OCS, TAIT president and CEO James “Winky” Fairorth said that the live event career field is a “quiet industry that offers huge opportunities not necessarily known about.”

TAIT started out as a company focused on packaging and intuitive, clever design. Since their clients range from lesser-known bands to headliners, each stage is built specifically for the artist—and sometimes it takes 20-30 trucks of equipment for an artist’s set. Although the industry began with light designers, it has grown to need more and more architects to better facilitate the elaborate set designs as crowds are beginning to expect more from their performers. “Music is not enough anymore,” Winky said. “We are all so much hungrier now. James Taylor singing on stage is not enough for us. The crowd wants a big show, a spectacular show, and we are working to accommodate this.”

Winky explained that working in the live event industry is rewarding because you get to solve a new problem every day in a new way. Because TAIT builds unique sets for each artist, the designers get to build incredible machines that are all essentially prototypes; they are constantly faced with the puzzle of figuring out the most efficient and intuitive design for a stage that will expedite assembly and disassembly on the road. “There are ten ways of building everything, but it’s our job to figure out the best one,” said Winky. “Your reputation is based on every single show you do. It’s not about skimping money. We’ll talk about a show for twelve weeks, and then we’ll have four weeks to build it flawlessly.”

The stress of the industry comes from trying to manage everything in what seems like an impossible amount of time. But because TAIT does not like to render anything “impossible,” they maintain the mentality that everything is possible, it’s just a matter of cost. In order to make sure their shows are bigger and better than the last, TAIT has done something clever with their business model: they rent the shows to artists rather than selling them, so they can retain the parts. The fun of the set happens especially with the “gags,” which are the mechanical moments of the show where the sky’s the limit—where they fly acrobats across the arena or get to build toys that act as machines during the show.

How do you land a job in this untapped field? Like many others, the live event industry is a lot about who you are, who you know, and where you are at the right time. Winky said that they take a lot of paid interns each year, many of whom come from schools like Carnegie Mellon and the Pratt Institute. “In the end, the only common denominator of our employees is that we are all passionate builders and artisans,” he said. “If you think you fall into that category, get in touch with us.”


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Julia Eger, ’14