PROFESSOR MELISSA WILLIAMS

DANIELLE RUBENSTEIN

Each issue, we select faculty or staff members, current or retired, to “have coffee with” and gather insights and perspective on a topic of interest to alumni and friends of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. If you have a favorite faculty or staff member you would like to “have coffee with,” please send your suggestion to GBSmag@emory.edu.

If you haven’t yet met Danielle Rubenstein, you should. In short, she’s delightful. She’s exactly who you hope to meet when you need guidance on big decisions—like your career options. For many years, Rubenstein has sat at the head of alumni career relations, guiding former students through career transitions and helping to facilitate the ever-growing alumni network. She’s now taken on an even bigger role as director of career management for alumni and working professional students, which expanded her purview to current students’ career planning needs.

In her new role, Rubenstein helps others find their footing and begin to shape—or reshape—their futures. She’s just begun the work of bridging those two worlds in ways that will help both groups benefit and connect in meaningful ways.

“My vision for the future is to increase utilization, bringing a greater awareness around our services and expanding our connections,” she said. “We aren’t a placement service, although we do have career fairs and offer an abundance of resources for people to gain the knowledge they need to plan the next step in their careers. But what we do holistically is teach lifelong career management skills.”

So, whether the need comes from working professionals in school or alumni seeking to discover their next fulfilling opportunity, Rubenstein can help. Her team is diverse and offers the type of coaching that helps students and alumni figure out what’s next, what’s possible and how to get there. Virtual appointments provide the flexibility needed for bustling professionals.

“We help people understand who they are, what they want in their next career step and then how to build a roadmap to get there,” Rubenstein said. “We do that through research and exploration, while reminding everyone not to compare themselves to others. Everyone has a different path.”

Rubenstein is keenly aware that her own transition to this leadership role involved the same types of questioning and preparation she advises others on. Understanding this correlation, she said, will only make her more effective.

“It was the opportunity for me to merge my love of working with both alumni and students,” she said. “There are so many synergies that work together. I saw how I could build a bridge between the two populations— they have a lot of overlap in what they need.”

In addition, her own career journey has informed the need for bold moves—something she can now share during her coaching sessions with students and alumni. This job process has “solidified my courage to seize what I want, and I want to help others do the same—to get on the path to their dream job,” Rubenstein said. “To be ready to say yes when opportunity comes knocking.”

Rubenstein keeps her own life lively by spending time with her husband and two teenage sons. She also has a love for animals and rounds out her family with her faithful companions—her dog and bird. She enjoys hiking and soaking up the restorative powers of nature. Reading is also a favorite pastime, and she likes to attend author speaking engagements. “I was really excited to hear Tara Westover speak about her memoir Educated at Emory last year, because I’d just finished it. It was really a fascinating story.”—Jennifer Corbett

MELISSA WILLIAMS

As a teenager growing up in Phoenix, Arizona, Melissa Williams can remember wanting to understand why people do what they do. She was constantly observing others and wondering, “Why did that person say one thing when they really meant something else?” In high school, she remembers questioning students’ social allegiances, seating preferences and status while watching them in the cafeteria.

Fast forward to today, and the Goizueta associate professor of organi zation & management continues to think that way. “You can think of a big company as a high school writ large,” she said. “Some of the same dynamics are still playing out, and I’m still interested in them.”

Since she came to Goizueta in 2011, after completing her PhD in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford, she’s been investigating the intersection of conscious and unconscious behaviors and the ways social identities like race and gender influence actions. That’s in addition to teaching undergraduates about organizational behavior.

Recently she’s been studying “how people see the face we present to the world—literally—and how that’s related to career outcomes.” This research has attempted to find out why minorities drop out of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) majors in greater numbers. “About half of the people who start out in STEM switch majors before graduation,” she said. “It’s a much higher rate for underrepresented groups.”

She found that African American and Latino students who had a more typical appearance—darker skin—were less likely to persist in STEM majors. In follow-up research, she discovered stereotypes that assumed minorities with darker skin have less STEM ability. She hypothesizes that darker-skinned minorities receive messages suggesting they don’t belong, and they come to believe that STEM careers are not for them.

She thinks it’s likely these stereotypes persist in the workplace, so she’s focusing further research there.

Williams says the corporate world is particularly interested in this topic because over time, diversity, especially in leadership roles, has become a priority.

Likewise, companies are interested in gender diversity, and her research into women in the workplace is addressing questions around parity in leadership roles and pay. “The C-suite might be the final frontier,” she said. “There remains a gap in whether we see women as capable of leading the whole enterprise.” She’s working on uncovering the obstacles to achieving gender diversity across the hierarchy.

For both areas of research, Williams says companies are taking the issues seriously and are committed to a fair, equitable workplace. “I see a lot of momentum and a sincere desire for change, and that does give me hope. It’s where we need to start.”

Her passion for her work is so strong that even on a self-described perfect day, she’d find time to analyze a data set or make progress on writing a paper. She’d also get some extra sleep, go for a run or hike, see a play or visit a museum and top off the day by going out to eat. Many of these are pursuits she has little time for in her roles as a mother of two teenagers, a wife and the owner of a retired greyhound named Maple.

Williams says one of the best parts about her job is getting to answer the questions that help people and organizations have an impact on society. “These are the big questions everyone is trying to solve, and we get to play a part in that. Goizueta is a hotbed for all that exciting, highimpact research.”—Mary Ann DeMuth