Always the big picture thinker, Oliver Will navigated the tension between being drawn to the theoretical and needing to apply his knowledge and expertise to the real world. As a statistician, he found the realities of academia didn't quite work for him so looked to the business world. Find out how sometimes envisioning a future and living into what's in front of you are two different things.
Guest Oliver Will was always good at math and when he got to college he figured he would parlay that into a science or engineering degree. While taking the mathematics prerequisites for a number of majors, he realized he liked the theoretical elegance of the math itself. And yet, he was interested in real-world applications, too. A course in bioethics introduced him to the idea of the computational work involved the human genome sequencing and the idea of bio-statistics. He applied to graduate programs straight from undergrad and got a PhD in applied mathematics.
As other guests on Roads Taken have discussed, a tight job market for academic positions is complicated by factors such as timing, geography, and luck. Although he’d thought the life of professor would suit him, after a rather unfulfilling postdoctoral fellowship, Oliver decided that the business world might be better suited for his skills and expertise. Unfortunately, his first experience was with a start-up that ran out of its funding, so he made one more return to the academic world—halfway around the globe—only to discover industry was probably the better fit. He became a statistician for a marketing company and continued using both big picture thinking and his applied skills to tackle everyday realities at a number of companies in a variety of fields.
While he got better at pivoting from his expected outcomes to the newer opportunities available to him in a business context,it was somewhat harder when the circumstances were personal. In this episode, find out from Oliver how sometimes sometimes envisioning a future and living into what's in front of you are two different things…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Oliver Will is has been a research scientist in advanced analytics for primary research at a number of companies, most recently Cerner Enviza, an Oracle company. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Southern California. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and their cats.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Oliver Will: Talking to a few professors there, they're like, oh, you could go find another postdoc. It wouldn't be as good as here, but that was that. And I just thought, well, this hasn't worked out that well. I do have a good relationship with my parents. So I just packed up the car and drove back to Massachusetts and went looking for a job and went into the corporate world.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Always the big picture thinker, Oliver Will navigated the tension between being drawn to the theoretical and needing to apply his knowledge and expertise to the real world. As a statistician, he found the realities of academia didn't quite work for him so looked to the business world. Find out how sometimes envisioning a future and living into what's in front of you are two different things on today's roads taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today, I'm here with Oliver will, and we are going to talk about the changes in our lives and getting the support that we need and all kinds of things today. So, Oliver, thank you so much for being here.
OW: Hey, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
LJR: Well, before I start this the way I typically start this, I need to say that Oliver is perhaps our power user of Roads Taken. And I say that only because he was the dear one to give me my first review on a podcasting platform. And I've never forgotten that. And you're like my favorite fan. So thanks so much, Oliver.
OW: Yeah, no, that's great. I have given this podcast 20 stars: twice on Apple accounts and once on Spotify and once on another thing I can't remember. So yes, you are the highest rated podcast I listen to.
LJR: Well, it is made such by people like you. So we're gonna start this the way I know you know I start this every time.
OW: Mm-hmm
LJR: …with two questions and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
OW: Oh gosh, I'm so surprised. No, I've actually thought about these questions for two years now. So it always comes up that I wonder, cause for the longest time I had heard the first question is who were you as you entered college and who as you left, but then I realized the wording was wrong on it. So who I was in college…When I was entering college, I was coming from public high school in Massachusetts, but it was a very good public high school. And I had felt like I was missing out on a lot of social stuff. And so I was ready to sort of, to just sort of try everything, see what it was and see what was going on in college. When I got there, basically my two freshman year roommates, Sean and Tran were much cooler than anyone I ever hung out in high school. So that sort of solved that issue about missing out on stuff. We had fun and stuff, but we did go our separate ways in college as well, but I still consider 'em good friends. But who I was was someone, by the end, felt very comfortable doing out club stuff and just putzing around with friends. I've noticed lots of people sort of feel like they don't really fit in, even at the end of college. But I did feel like I fit in, at the outing club.
Professionally. I came in, I was very strong in mathematics in high school, and I thought that was the way I was gonna go. I had originally wanted to do something that was science or engineering that wasn't mathematics, but you always take the math prereqs as you go along.
So fresh and fall, I took chemistry. But then chemistry, I I dismissed physics. I went through that. I thought I was gonna do physics. I found the second semester of physics to be wildly boring. I couldn't stand electricity. So I moved on from that. And then I went to engineering. So I did the big engineering class where you had to design a product my sophomore fall. That was really cool. But then I was like, well, I wanna do something more theoretical. I don't really wanna, I thought engineering was going to sort of train me to be a machinist. I know that's wildly wrong, but it was what it was. But I wanted do something more theoretical. And I took this course; it was in the social sciences. I still hadn't given up on science and this course was it's come up before it was on bioethics. And I took it my, I had to have taken it my sophomore fall. And this course it covered a lot of the fertility stuff, but it was really interesting. And I can't really remember the sequence of what happened, but from the course, it led me to this book. It wasn't assigned in the course, but it was this book called The Dreams of Reason, which is just a horribly pretentious title. And I read that and I saw that. There was new stuff coming out in biology that looked interesting for mathematics. We were sort of getting into the realm of sequencing the genome project.
So I decided after that, well, I had a bunch of math courses, so I was gonna do math and then I was gonna fill in a biochem minor. And I did the biochem minor really backwards. First biology course was the one our sophomore fall that you all took. And then I took organic chemistry with the 99s. And I backed out the two intro bio classes my senior year with 99s. So that was interesting. It was also hard. I didn't do exceedingly well in the those courses because that hit right into the pre-med majors. And I didn't really have a desire to be a doctor. And I don't know if that motivation you—I know you always wanna win—I don't know if that motivation was lacking, cause I didn't wanna be a doctor. So my, those weren't that good. But after that, I mean we come into our senior year and we have to find something to do after Dartmouth. I decided I wanted to go to grad school, try to find a place. I was gonna do math and biology at. Not the traditional biostatistics, but I wanted to try to do something that was gonna bring me into the contact with like the genome project.
And so that course from sophomore summer, the biology course, the professor was really into math and biology. And he had brought up this algorithm that a professor had come up with. And this professor was at the University of Southern California, and I just emailed him out of the blue one day and he responded. He was like, Just apply. And so, okay. I'm like, okay. I think this guy is probably the best one working in the field. He responded to me. And so I, I did the applications like I did the undergraduates: I found seven graduate schools to apply with. I put him in a range of most desirable, to least desirable, like safety schools. What was weird about it was that I got into the top three that I was most interested in going to, and didn't get into my safety schools.
LJR: Was this guy one of them?
OW: Yeah. So you applied to the department and USC was, I think was my top choice in a math PhD program. You should get funding. USC was weird. I had the funding offer first, before I was accepted. There was a joint program down at Rice, University of Houston, and Baylor medical school. In the end, I was just like, this guy I think is the best I'm gonna go work was the best. I don't really have many other plans beyond that. And I remember thinking back then that I don't know if I'm gonna be a professor. I don't know what that is, but my next step is go to grad school, go get my PhD in math and biology. And I was going to go to LA. So a common theme real early on. I'm surprised at the number of my classmates that have gone through LA. I wish you have stopped by, but nevertheless. It was exciting. Like, I was sort of sad that people were gonna be in like New York. And I sort of felt like I missed that after experience in New York and Boston, but it was immediately to head out to LA.
LJR: And so Oliver, you had talked about how in finding your way at Dartmouth, you wanted something theoretical?
OW: Yes.
LJR: And yet I would say the genome project, there's lots of theory built in it, but it is very applicable and applied.
OW: Yes.
LJR: So, was there a struggle. There was there a, you could put those things together and make sense of it in your head? And, and what path really were you taking as you were starting that PhD program, more theoretical or more applied?
OW: It was gonna be applied. My PhD is an applied mathematics. And so basically I was a pretty good computer programmer. So computers you do applied stuff. Also, my weakest math course at Dartmouth was algebra. And so the pure direction, you have to sort of focus in on algebra and just the pure problems just never, they were interesting to talk about and think about, but I just never saw myself doing that. I was more interested in just the application of stuff and more interesting algorithms. And it has always been that way.
LJR: Got it. Got it. Well, that's good. And you have to know that theory and think theoretically and theoretically in that social science way too, of the bioethics, like what is the right thing to do and all of that stuff. So there you go, PhD in applied math, living the Southern California life, if you ever saw the light of day outside of your lab,
OW: Yeah, I, I just, I, I did get my come up early at USC where I had difficulty on the first set of exams. They were written; they were time tests. It's interesting. It was like six hours to do six problems. And I was right on the borderline and they were looking to, they were wondering if I could continue on or not, but they decided I could continue on. I had started working pretty early with a professor, not the one I had emailed the separate professor and he was really good. And I ended up, he ended up being my advisor. And then I got my act together at University of Southern California. For three years, I lived by the university. It's down sort of on the border of south central and downtown. It was a little worse, but it, it was fine. But by the end, I was able to find an apartment out in Venice Beach, lived three blocks on the ocean and could afford it on my salary. I couldn’t believe that now when I look back there. And yeah, I was really happy at the end. I was dating someone that I really liked and wrapped up my PhD. And so then it was the next step. So the next step was to undertake a postdoc. I hadn't published enough and this will become a common theme to go get a job right afterwards. And also we've seen other people that getting a professorship: here's luck involved with it. There's location involved with it. There's time involved with it. So I got five offers for postdocs and I got one offer up at the University of Washington in Seattle. I was gonna be tied to a professor. So I thought that was gonna be the way to go and the best option of it. My girlfriend at the time was really into establishing herself in LA. We were gonna try the long distance and see what happened. And yeah, so I headed up as a postdoc in the statistics department at the University of Washington and it was a three year position. So I hit up to Seattle.
It didn't work out that well, I didn't publish much. I tried to work was the genome group that was there. Even though I was in the stat department, there was a heavy genome group. This was 2001 to 2004. So the genome project was coming to the end. I got the one paper was my advisor at while I was up there. It didn't help. I horribly procrastinate my advisors, a horrible procrastinator. The two of us together are massive procrastinators. So that was never good. But yeah, it just, I didn't publish. I did work with one of the people at the genome center, and we got a nice group paper out about a knockout experiment, where we were trying to figure out the functions of genes and pseudomonas aeruginosa. So I didn't have much publications. It came to an end, my relationship with the girlfriend was no more. And so the time was up at Washington. Talking to a few professors there, they're like, oh, you could go find another postdoc. It wouldn't be as good as here, but that was that. And I just thought, well, this hasn't worked out that well. I do have a good relationship with my parents. So I just packed up the car and drove back to Massachusetts and went looking for a job and went into the corporate world.
LJR: Yeah. The real draw of academia for you really was the research. It wasn't, I wanna go be a professor to teach. And, and any of those experiences, weren't things that fired you up, Right?
OW: In grad school, I did really well teaching. I enjoyed it and I got awards for teaching or just one award which was cool. But at Washington, I did have to teach as part of my postdoc. I had to do two courses and the stat department stuck me with statistics for non-majors that would meet Monday, Wednesday, Friday at eight 30 in the morning. [LJR: Oh.] And I had to use this awful book from the seventies as well, real. No, it's not awful. It's it was a really good introduction to statistics if you knew statistics. And so that didn't help my students at all. No one liked being there. I got mediocre ratings from the students.
LJR: Yeah. But I think your, the draw really was the, the research and kind of.
OW: Yes. It's always been the big picture stuff. And so…
LJR: Yeah, so it's hard to figure out, you're gonna shut down one avenue. But you did it and you packed up the bags back home. And what was intriguing enough about the business world to let you exercise the big picture thinking that you kinda were desiring?
OW: The first thing I was surprised at was that the job in Seattle ended. In June, I was surprised at the difficulty I had applying to stuff and not hearing from stuff. LinkedIn didn't exist, but I think Monster did. So I posted my resume to monster. Never heard anything. I was just surprised, like I thought that it would been more attractive for it. I had done some programming and stuff, but not nothing structured that you need in a professional programming thing. So eventually in the fall, I got a job at a startup company outside of Boston. They were doing internet surveys. Very different than biology, but at some point you need to make money. It was a startup and they had really interesting technology. They would run people through surveys. It was for packaging, it was for consumer package goods and the surveys were very graphical. And you would ask people like you like this packaging or you like that packaging, and it would actually change and it would become more and more what you actually liked, like if you liked the purple band across the Christmas packaging of the Hershey kisses that was shaped like a Christmas tree, that purple band would follow you to the wreath-shaped thing. I found it really interesting. I mean, it was very, very micro into package design after it. And, and I started to learn more about business.
LJR: And what was your role in that first business environment?
OW: Oh, statistician. The internet surveys would come to me. I'd have to analyze 'em. We would turn 'em into the weighting of the different parts of the packages would be regressed out against regression equations. So I was turning the crank on that. So I had a lot of projects that were out in the field and just turning the crank on equations and assembling reports for our clients about what parts they like the best and how they interacted with each other. It should have been artistic, but we were really…but marketing people really like numbers.
LJR: Like a marketing quant, if you will.
OW: Yeah.
LJR: And is that the path that you thought, okay, here I am in business. I'm learning by osmosis, everything that's going on around me, but I'm a statistician and applied mathematician at heart. This is the role I'm gonna find. I just need other businesses or, you know, what's your thinking of your role in business?
OW: Well, yeah, what happened? It was a startup and so the first six months were good. And then we started spending more money than we were bringing in per month. And that's actually a pretty miserable situation if you've ever been in it, you think it would be good because. You don't really have. Yeah. I mean, you work on improving the technology and stuff, but it is, it's rough on everyone. And so everyone started leaving the place. There were really smart people at the beginning that just weren't being replaced. Yeah.
So what I did was I burnt the last on my academic cred. My youngest sister, she was doing a PhD out in New Zealand and was really struggling. But there was a professor there that did sort of evolutionary tree work that I had done and, and statistics like I had done. So I wrote to him and I said, I'd like to get back into academics. Would you take me on his postdoc? And he agreed to, he gave me a year position to go out to New Zealand. It was the university of Canterbury and Christ Church. And my sister was there, too, my youngest sister was there. Hmm. So I head out there very early on. It became clear that the postoc was only gonna be one year. I had to teach one course. It was stochastic processes. So I wasn't gonna be doing an intro course, which was nice. I did try to do some stuff with him. There was a lot of stuff left over from Washington that I hadn't written up. So I actually got around to writing it all up. I submitted it all and just got a bunch of rejections for it. Which was fine, but it brought closure to that. And I had weekends. I saw my sister, we ate dinner once a week. It was a lot of fun and I got to tool around the South Island. it was nice, but it, in the end it wasn't structuring anything in the future.
LJR: So there you have this, another taste of academia. It doesn't go exactly. As you were hoping it would. So is that kinda, when you put closure on that potential?
OW: Yes, this, I finally put closure on this. And so what happens is that this finally puts closure on it. It was pretty clear. I wasn't gonna go back able to go back unless something significantly changed, I wasn't gonna be able to go back to my advisor for recommendations anymore. This guy, he was a very nice guy in New Zealand, but it wasn't worth it. And, and so it was time to get serious about the working world and being in corporations. And so one thing that did come up in New Zealand is that in the fall I flew back to LA for good friend’s birthday party. I mean, I'm single, I had money from the startup. You could do stuff like that. And it was, and I didn't really have to be around the department much in New Zealand by the end, anyhow. And so I was at a really good friend's birthday party in LA, and I met my future wife there. And so that was just one weekend there and with her, but then I went back to New Zealand because I wanted to finish out and do more traveling and stuff. Finished that out, but I went back and so there was this idea in LA, but I went back to my parents’ house and I got a job much quicker in Boston.
I landed a job at one of the big consulting firms that is in Boston. And I thought I had figured it out. I did really like for my previous position, like doing the statistician, that was on all the projects. I thought that our group at the consulting company was gonna be like this, where I'd come in, do the statistic work and move. I thought I was gonna be able to avoid the grind that the consulting world. My compensation, I thought, was a little low compared to what was going through the standard thing, but I was like, okay, I'll, I can take the cut against the compensation if I could avoid the general grind of the consulting. But no, the head of the group was a partner. He had promised our group to help out on a project where the project was in stage two for an electronics company. Everyone from stage one had resigned. There was five people in our group that were under him and he assigned three of us to it. And we got no support from the…I wish I knew the levels in consulting, I guess, the, the fresh out of undergraduate. So we were the fresh outta undergraduates on this project. I felt bad because someone I knew from my previous company had asked me to come over to it and I was struggling against just the amount of work. I remember one weekend, it was very clear that we had to fill in 150 page PowerPoints and all three of us were in the office all weekend. And after being in grad school, and maybe the business world needs someone to read a 150 page PowerPoint, but it just seemed dumb.
So it was only six months. I last there, I had a recruiter call me, I have jumped around jobs and most of the times it's through recruiters. And this recruiter called me is like, I have a job. It's in L.S. Would you like to apply for it? And I'm like, oh yes. And so I wrapped up the consulting firm after six months and I moved out to a company that was a late stage startup that eventually got by bought by Ipsos, which was a large market research firm. I was back into the consumer package goods world. The big thing we did there was we outsourced some technology to build a virtual shopping shelf. So someone had commandeered Doom and made it with a shopping cart and you could go into the grocery store and pick stuff. And we sold it to Pepsi to be like, oh, we're going to show the people on the internet the survey. And we're gonna show 'em a bunch of bottles and bunch of Pepsi prices and, and say, go shop and fill up your shopping cart and tell us what your standard shopping thing was. And then we would vary stuff. So the whole goal of it, they were really interested to drop the size of their bottles down to 16 ounces. That hasn't worked. But then they were also interested in price elasticity. So how many more units you could move at different price points? And I spent my time just going through all of the Pepsi verticals. We started off with the soda. We went to Gatorade; we went to Tropicana. It was really interesting. I also had a boss that was really interesting there that was really into the cutting edge of statistics. He was into things that have become much more popular these days like neural networks. And so I did hear from him and we would try to fit stuff with neural networks, not pricing curves, but other sort of attitude surveys we would do there. Unfortunately, he wasn't very technical and I completely missed the boat. There was a lot of exciting stuff happening in the 2000s for neural networks that we're dealing with today that we just missed, but we tried it, it was interesting.
LJR: Yeah. And that brings that big picture, thinking back into your world a bit.
OW: Yeah. Yeah. Got to live in LA again. We rented an apartment up in west Hollywood and it was really nice. It was a fun time.
LJR: Your wife to be that you'd met at the wedding.
OW: Well, and we married. And so, I mean, I moved in with her right away. I had gone out to LA a couple times while I was in Boston. And so, yeah, so, and, and, and it, it was great. We had a really nice wedding in California and that was, that was that. But then after five years, what always happens is that—just in general, I've been very impressed on the show about how people move up through corporate structures—but I've had to improve compensation and positioned by changing jobs. And so eventually we had wanted…our, my parents are retiring into the house. I grew up in or have retired into the house. I grew up in her parents have retired to upstate New York. So we wanted to get back to the east coast to be closer to them and potentially start a family. And so I always take recruiters’ calls. And so another recruiter was like, oh, I have a job in Pennsylvania. Do you wanna apply for that? And this was after five years, I enjoyed it, but I'm like, Ooh, Pennsylvania would be great. Outside of Philadelphia would be great. And so yeah, so I applied for it. This job just was really fascinating and I had never heard of the company before I, it was a company called IMS Health. They go out and buy prescription records from pharmacies. They go buy health records from insurance companies. And then they take all the data. They anonymize it and they attach it all together so you get trajectories of people and what their prescriptions are through time. And then they repackage it and sell it back to pharmaceutical companies.
And so the group that I was went into was their media group, where we would get like prescriptions of what people were getting. I did a lot of work on the big anti-inflammatories, the Enbrils and Humiras and we would get stuff like what kind of Google AdWords they would see attached to their prescription records. We’d get TV viewing that they were looking at that was attached to their prescription records. And I'm like, I didn't even know this stuff existed. It was wildly fascinating to do this kind of stuff.
LJR: Yeah. And with so much data on everybody all the time. There there's a huge need for you, but we don't really think of you back there figuring it all out. So that was to get you back east [OW: Mm-hmm. Yep.] And is that the company that you stayed with?
OW: No, I, I made one more transition. I could have stayed there. It was also very flat. Like I, like, I was only four people removed from the CEOs. I, I didn't really know how to move up there. I moved one last time to where I'm currently at. I went back into doing survey work. We do health economics. So we do models of the impact of what, how much does depression cost employers? The big thing I do now is a lot of patient-reported outcomes. The FDA has a real concern to hear like patient voice within the products. We do a lot of work on oncology products for pharmaceutical companies. There's just so many products that we're trying to sort out like what people think of 'em. I don't know how they're all gonna be tested. We just don't have the sample out there to go run enough clinical trials. They want to run or run combos on everything. I do spend a lot of time now talking to the physicians and trying to tell 'em what's in their clinical trials. That never goes well. I always get beaten back.
LJR: But you've found a, a place where kind of hearkening back to those college days of the intersection of biology and mathematics. [OW: Yeah, Mm-hmm.] So a little bit full circle, keeping the on the ground. You're applying what you know, to things that are real world and people need desperately like good cancer treatment. And yet keeping a bigger picture frame in mind. So this seems like a good place for you to have landed over time.
So Oliver, when you think back to your 20 something college days’ self, and if you were to tell him where you've landed and kind of the meandering path that you've taken, what would his response.
OW: This question I hadn't thought about that much. He would've been very interested that the working world has been as interesting as it actually is. He would've been surprised. I didn't really touch much on it, but he would've been surprised on family situations and stuff.
LJR: Making the move back to the east coast was partially driven by this recruiter call, but mostly driven by wanting to be with family. [OW: Yeah.] And you'd alluded to kind of your desire to start a family. Mm-hmm this feels like another example of thinking things are gonna go one way and then they go another. Talk to me about how that panned out for you?
OW: Unfortunately it just hasn't worked that well. My wife and I, we suffer from infertility. We don't have any kids and we we've gone in for treatments and it's just led to four miscarriages.
LJR: Ugh. So, and is this something that, I mean, you have perspective on now being kind of around the medical field?
OW: I don't know. I, I wish there was. I wish it was a better diagnosis. Like it's, there is no diagnosis. Things seem to be normal and we've been able to get embryos and stuff, but so it's unknown and it's, it's, it's frustrating and yeah, I don't have much insight into it.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. And yet there are, you know, I'm sure still benefits of being your family and all of that.
OW: Oh yeah. No, it's great. I go up to see my parents quite a bit. I would go up to see my in-laws quite a bit, so yeah, no. And my middle sister not the one in New Zealand. , you know, we have a really great niece and two really great nephews, so, yeah.
LJR: Excellent. Excellent. And it strikes me Oliver, as another example of your kind of big picture envisioning the way things will go on one hand and then realizing actually reality is something different and it's maybe meant to put you in a different path or have you experienced the world in a different way, but I do think you've found the place that at every stage you needed to be to learn something or to figure out how your strengths can be useful in the world right now. So thanks so much for sharing this path with us and we wish you the best.
OW: Oh thank you very much. This has been a lot of fun.
LJR: That was Oliver Will, who has been a research scientist in advanced analytics for primary research at a number of companies, most recently Cerner Enviza, an Oracle company. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Southern California. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and their cats.
As I mentioned, Oliver is a power listener and active support of Roads Taken. We invite you to join him by following and leaving a review on your podcast platform of choice. It helps attract listeners and grow our audience for our fantastic guests shring their stories of twists and turns, with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley on each episode of Roads Taken.