From the Ivory Tower to the Boardroom
Marketing executive used doctorate to unlock door to business world
By Ben Hammer

FAIRFAX, Va.

Dr. Shahron Williams van Rooij, a marketing executive for technology firm Datatel, recently traveled to Nassau, Bahamas, to scuba dive and take slide photography of the colorful underwater marine life — one of her favorite hobbies.

Van Rooij thrives in uncommon surroundings. She earned her master's in international politics in Beirut, then returned to the City University of New York (CUNY) for her doctorate in quantitative techniques. She pursued an uncommon path after earning her degree, using her quantitative research skills to land marketing positions with the help of several headhunters.

Today, she occupies a spacious office at Datatel's corporate headquarters and oversees a team of managers and a half-a-million dollar budget. Van Rooij has advanced in a field once the exclusive domain of White men — and her story offers important lessons for graduate students considering what to do with their degree.

"A career decision is not a single decision," she advises doctoral candidates. "So if you decide today that you want to be a professor at a university, and that is the track you want to pursue, that doesn't mean if you evolve into something else that you have betrayed academia."

While pursuing her doctorate in the social sciences, van Rooij taught at Queens College in New York. Even before a city budget crisis sharply reduced the number of tenure-track positions open to her, she began to consider whether academia was where she wanted to be.

"I would read articles or hear professors talk about their work and the question that always popped into my mind was, ‘Who knows about this or even cares about this besides other professors in the discipline,' " she says. "Because it's nice to write about things and publish it, but if only four other people are going to read it, then so what."