From Academia to the Corporate Boardroom: A Greenie’s Story

This talk is a pilot for what we hope will become an occasional series of professional mentorship events presented by former Resident Members.

Arnie Guha writes: "In my first semester as a PhD student in the Department of English at UBC, a career counselor told us that the only corporate job available to us was technical writing. The suggestion did not seem particularly convincing, since I knew other Humanities and Social Sciences graduates who had started widely varied careers—from academia and diplomacy to banking and management consulting. And I wanted to understand how this might be possible for me and my friends. Now, 23 years later I find myself spending a lot of my time in corporate boardrooms in Canada, the US and the UK. I would like to share some highlights of my journey, and a few lessons learned along the way, in case they could be useful to anyone else who might be thinking of moving from academia to corporate life."

Arnie Guha was a GC Resident Member from 1996 to 1998 and serves as GC Society Member representative on the College's Advisory Board. At Green College, he met his wife Zoe, headed up the Social Committee, threw many parties, and worked towards his PhD in English, on how to present information graphically in a hypertextual environment. To the outside world, Arnie is known as Partner and Head of the Experience Design practice at Phase 5, a leading Canadian research-based consultancy, with offices in Toronto, Ottawa and Minneapolis, and corporate clients (mainly banks, insurers, technology and media companies) on both sides of the Atlantic. Arnie sits on the Board of the National Club, Toronto, and is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society.