“When you wake up on a random Tuesday in February, do you actually want to do the things that you have to do? Not just do you like the topics or ideas you’re studying… the ideas themselves aren’t enough, because you actually have to do the day-to-day work.”
Matthew Coleman is the Executive Director of Giving Multiplier, a platform that encourages giving to highly effective charities through donation matching. But before this, Matthew pursued psychology both as a lab manager and then a PhD student, during which he took on a string of fellowships and collaborations with other researchers—including the founders of Giving Multiplier.
We were really excited to talk to Matthew about his career journey thus far. The interview covers many topics, like how to test whether you’ll actually enjoy a career beyond just finding the ideas interesting, the potential impact of psychology research, and advice on finding meaning in work while handling the mundane tasks that come with any role.
How did you end up pursuing psychology?
I was a neuroscience major in undergrad and then switched to psychology for my PhD, but I think my core research interests were always in social psychology and JDM (judgment and decision-making). I initially became interested in the psychological barriers that lead us to make suboptimal decisions when it comes to our own well-being. Essentially, why do we get in the way of our own long-term happiness, and what can we do about that? I was fascinated that this could be tested quantitatively via research experiments.
I knew pretty early on in undergrad that I wanted to go to graduate school for a PhD, which I learned once I started working in a research lab on campus. I intentionally didn’t apply to graduate school straight out of undergrad because I wanted to take a two-year position as a stepping stone to figure out more clearly which research questions I wanted to study, and build my credentials to be a stronger applicant. So after I completed my undergraduate degree, I took a lab manager position for two years before starting my PhD.
Did you learn anything during those two years that steered your decision to do a PhD?
I learned a lot. By the time I started my lab manager role, I was fairly confident I wanted to do a PhD. But my research lab in undergrad, which I loved, was a very small lab where I was working closely with the faculty advisor, and I wanted to try out a larger lab studying different topics to explore a bit more.
As the lab manager of an unusually large lab, I got a bird’s-eye view of a lot of the research projects going on and understood what the day-to-day looked like, whether that was grant applications, hiring and onboarding, or actually conducting research myself alongside my colleagues. I found the experience amazing and fascinating and really intellectually stimulating, which confirmed that I wanted to go the PhD route, so I followed through on my original plan from undergrad.
While there are tons of options for non-academic careers, what really stood out to me was this mix that an academic career involves. It involves both creativity, such as generating new research questions and carefully designing studies, and rigor by following the scientific method. I was really excited about that intersection where your days are highly variable, involve a lot of collaboration, and this great blend of creativity and quantitative approaches. I just thought that was a good mix for my interests and skill set.
It seems many people go into academia to pursue interesting ideas, and are surprised by the amount of other stuff that comes with it. But it sounds like you were well prepared for this.
I was certainly very fortunate to have gotten a lot of hands-on experience in research as an undergraduate, so I think I had a better sense of the day-to-day than many people do. But I do think it’s a very important point, and some related advice I like to give is: when you wake up on a random Tuesday in February, do you actually want to do the things that you have to do? Not just do you like the topics or ideas you’re studying (although that’s of course very important, too). Maybe you read a book, watched a TED talk, or listened to a podcast about some topic you found fascinating, and maybe you do want to pursue work in that domain. But I think the ideas themselves aren’t enough, because you actually have to do the day-to-day work.
So what are the actual responsibilities and tasks you like doing? For example, you may find neuroscience fascinating, but maybe you don’t want to spend a large portion of your workweek interacting with research subjects running brain imaging sessions, or whatever it might be. In such a case, even if you think the subject matter is fascinating, maybe that’s not the best career fit for you. Or maybe you do also enjoy most of the regular responsibilities associated with that career, in which case it could be a great fit. So I think a combination of enjoying the topic itself plus the day-to-day responsibilities is important. I was lucky that, early in my career, I was able to test it out and experiment with which responsibilities I liked more than others.
The ‘random Tuesday in February’ test feels like a great idea for any career path.
I think it’s important to emphasize that it often takes time to get a sense of your fit. So this is not a rule of thumb for your first day of work, when you’re likely extremely excited and eager—it’s more a typical day where you’ve adapted to the novelty of the role. Do you enjoy a reasonable proportion of the tasks that might be called mundane, or a typical day? Because our minds adapt fairly quickly to new experiences. So once you feel settled, does the day-to-day feel sustainably enjoyable and meaningful? And importantly, if you progress in your career, will you feel similarly about the day-to-day of your future roles?
For example, in many disciplines, the daily tasks of a graduate student often look quite different than that of a professor. So there’s also a bit of forecasting about your future job prospects that could be quite helpful, and the best way to gauge this is actually talking to people who have the job you may want (while being somewhat mindful of selection effects, meaning the people in a given profession chose that career path, so they may have different interests and motivations than you).
For me, when I’d briefly considered, as another example, a career as a therapist, I think many parts of that job were attractive to me. What I was less excited about was a day-to-day that was more consistent, generally seeing patients for a majority of the day with less overall variability (at least from what I understood). I wanted more variability, whereas some people may be averse to that and prefer more consistency in their hour-to-hour or day-to-day tasks.
During your PhD, you took a few fellowships outside of conventional academic research. What did you learn from these?
When I started my PhD, my plan was to be a tenure-track psychology professor. That was my clear Plan A and my ultimate goal. But I wanted to use the PhD as an opportunity to explore—both to build my credentials in case I pursued that career or another career, but also to take the freedom I had as a PhD student to try different things. I was extremely fortunate in that my PhD advisor was very flexible and generous with me trying summer fellowships and working with different collaborators.
Each summer of my graduate program, I undertook a different fellowship with the idea of still doing academic-like research but in different settings. At the Happier Lives Institute after my first year of graduate school, I had my own independent project and spent the summer reviewing and synthesizing the research literature. Then the Behavioral Science Fellowship at Fidelity the next year was trying to test whether I wanted to work in a larger, more established corporate environment, still doing behavioral science, psychology-related work, but in a very different setting with different end goals. And then the next summer, I did a fellowship at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, where I was able to continue some of my graduate research but get to spend time around economists and philosophers and see how they were thinking—basically, have a more interdisciplinary environment where I got to learn from a lot of cool people and get a sense of how they were thinking about the impact of their research. Each of those summer fellowships was instructive in its own way.
How did you get involved with Giving Multiplier?
I had been a long-time fan of Giving Multiplier since it launched right around when I started graduate school, because it was basically an applied research project solving the exact question that I wanted to study in graduate school, which was: how do we align our motivation and emotions with the amount of good that we can do in the world? And more broadly, how do people think and feel about addressing really important global challenges? Giving Multiplier is essentially a tool that leverages psychological science to help inspire people to have more positive social impact.
I had been a massive fan of the research and the platform since it came out, and I had been collaborating on a few different research projects with the co-founder, Lucius Caviola, who’s now a professor at the University of Cambridge. We had been talking a lot about my career after graduate school and what I wanted to do. So I ended up applying for a position where I was able to work part-time on Giving Multiplier during my last year of graduate school, which fortunately turned into a full-time position after I graduated.
I really consider it an immense privilege and honor to lead the platform. The opportunity to help scale something that I believe in so deeply is just something that I remain grateful for every single day, and it was a really ideal opportunity to apply my background in psychology and behavioral science in a more direct way, even if I’m not doing as much of the direct research myself anymore. That’s the direction I wanted to go after graduate school–leveraging my background in a more applied manner, and being able to lead Giving Multiplier was basically just the perfect fit for me.
It sounds like going into Giving Multiplier after your PhD was a relatively easy decision. Were you worried about closing the door to academic research, or did it just feel like the obvious option given your goals?
I wouldn’t say it was entirely obvious, but it felt like an amazing option because I’d been so drawn to the platform and the work, plus I had already been working there part-time, meaning I already knew what the day-to-day was likely to be like. I was fortunate to have basically a lower-stakes trial run where I was able to get a feel for it.
More generally, I think internships, fellowships, and part-time work can be invaluable for dipping your toes, trying out different paths, as low-stakes ways to get a sense of your personal fit, as long as you don’t overindex too much on the specific organization/program/lab you’re in, because there’s often a lot of variation in structure and interpersonal dynamics.
I think my main hesitation with taking my current role was my background as a researcher, and knowing a lot of my day-to-day responsibilities would be quite different. So despite wanting to take the job and feeling very excited about it, there was of course some amount of nervousness and uncertainty about my personal fit with certain aspects of the job.
There is this narrative—I don’t know exactly how true it is—in academia that there’s a one-way door of sorts, where you can leave easily, but once you do, it’s much harder to get a job back in academia. So that was definitely also something I considered, knowing that if I take this role and end up wanting to go the tenure-track professor route sometime, am I precluded from doing that? It’s not clear to me if I am, especially because I’m still employed at a university, but I felt confident enough that I didn’t want to go that route, at least in the interim for the foreseeable future, that I really couldn’t turn down the amazing opportunity to lead the platform that I was so excited about.
How does your current day-to-day compare to academia?
In terms of similarities, my job is largely independent, and I think being a PhD student is a great way to learn how to do independent work and complex project management—managing many different ongoing projects and tasks at the same time. I think I was very well-prepared to balance a lot of wide-ranging, competing responsibilities. Some specific tasks also overlap, such as presenting research at conferences and other events, data analysis, and some writing, as well.
But there were, of course, many key differences. I should say I am still involved in some academic research. But a lot of my day-to-day now includes working on growing Giving Multiplier—trying to identify new media opportunities or partnerships, improving the platform itself, whatever it might be. There’s also a lot of marketing, such as our email newsletter and social media. There’s a lot of admin and upkeep and data analysis to generate impact reports and to make sure that we’re on top of our budgeting.
There’s also fundraising to make sure that we can fundraise not only new donors through our platform, but also raise funds to keep our operations going. There’s collaboration, so I work closely with our co-founders as well as our web developer, who are all fantastic, and sometimes with occasional volunteers or contractors. And so many more responsibilities that I’ve learned along the way through direct experience, just through trying things out and learning from others who have been very generous with their time to provide guidance.
So, zooming out, there’s media, marketing, partnerships, data analysis, stakeholder management, fundraising, web development, strategic planning. There’s so many elements to it that it’s almost impossible to summarize what a typical day is like for me, because they vary so much depending upon the day of the week and the month of the year. But it’s been fun to try to tackle all these responsibilities head-on.
Is there anything you’ve learned specifically from psychology that’s helpful in your current work?
I would reiterate what I said before about the broader skills of independence and project management, as well as collaborating with teams. But in terms of the content of psychology itself, certainly it’s useful to know the research, at least in my case, on the psychology of charitable giving—to learn how donors tend to think about their charitable impact and how they make giving decisions. I think that’s been relevant when giving presentations about the research in the space, working with potential funders, or just trying to understand what messages might resonate with certain audiences.
Because I’m doing research-based presentations, I think I’m still applying a lot of the research that I’ve learned, well beyond the studies I’ve conducted myself, and synthesizing that for broader audiences. At Giving Multiplier, we think of part of what we do as educational and informative, so being able to present some of the research that inspired me in graduate school to others has been a highlight for me.
For someone interested in studying psychology to pursue an impactful career, what do their options look like?
First I should say that I think academic careers in psychology can have a ton of social impact, at least at their best. For me, I wanted a role that was more direct—where there were fewer degrees removed from the actual “real world” impact. But I think producing academic research papers and generating new ideas can have a lot of positive social impact, for sure. An academic track is definitely worthwhile, even though it wasn’t the best fit for me at the time. I don’t want to dissuade all bright, interested, social impact-oriented psychology students from pursuing an academic career. I think it can be a good fit for many.
I also think you can do awesome research outside of an academic setting, like at a think tank or some sort of research institute that’s not at a university. There’s, of course, psychology-related work in the philanthropy and nonprofit world, whether that’s working at a donation platform like I do or working at nonprofits themselves. You could do quantitative research, or even qualitative research, at charity evaluator organizations, where some psychology and broader statistics and data science background could be quite useful.
There are surely many more that I’m missing, but I would say broad categories would be academia, non-academic research, and then the philanthropy space. But there’s also probably a lot of work in policy—you could work with governments, for example, to inform key decision-makers by understanding how the public tends to think about certain issues. Those are a few that come to mind.
There are also behavioral science consultancies that do really great social impact work, like the Behavioral Insights Team and ideas42, The Decision Lab, and others. So there are organizations where you can apply behavioral science research while working with stakeholders that do social impact-minded work.
And I should also say that my perspective is from an experimental psychology background, but if you go the clinical psychology route, I think you could do a lot of great work in clinical psychology, both in a research setting but also in a more therapeutic setting, as well. I think there are many different areas within psychology, and each of them have their own different routes to having social impact-minded careers.
Is there any other advice you want to share that we haven’t touched on?
A couple things come to mind. One is that I think it’s important when thinking about your career to think about building career capital via connections, skill-building, self-exploration on what excites you and what you find meaningful, and also to consider what doors you’re leaving open and closing. We talked about the narrative of a one-way door once you leave academia. I think there’s value in maintaining optionality in the future, but I also think there’s a tendency for people earlier in their career to pursue options that optimize for optionality—a sort of risk-averse approach of pursuing something that closes as few doors as possible. I think there’s some merit to that, but I also think it’s worth considering building skills with a plan A, trying to think about the ultimate steps for your interim goal. That is to say, choosing your next career step not just because you want to kick the can on making your actual decision of where you want to spend most of your career, but doing so in a way that’s intentional given the information you have now. Of course it’s very difficult, but I think it’s important to be intentional about how your next career step serves your future goals beyond that.
Another thing is that, like I said, academic psychology research can be amazingly impactful at its best. Yet for me, I wanted to do work where there were shorter reward feedback loops from what I was doing to seeing the “real-world” impact in a more clear and tangible way. At Giving Multiplier, I just find it unbelievably gratifying and meaningful to see people who are interested in what we do and want to support highly cost-effective charities in ways that actually save lives. Working with our major donors, seeing the feedback that many of our donors write, and just interacting with them—it’s so rewarding to see people who genuinely want to make the world a better place with whatever resources they’re able to commit.
I think those rewarding moments of my day-to-day are just so positively reinforcing. The lesson there is that it’s important to find a job where you can identify where you think you’ll find that meaning and reward on, if not a day-to-day basis, at least a week-to-week basis, and ensuring that there are outcomes that you think will really sustain your motivation, especially if you’re pursuing a career with a long-term trajectory in mind. All that is to say, it’s important to actually feel the meaning and purpose of your work in order to be productive and protect against burnout to have a sustainable career. And also, of course, for the social good you’re hoping to achieve in and of itself.
When working on those more routine operational tasks that seem far removed from actual impact, do you have any advice for staying motivated?
This is something I’m definitely still working on myself. And of course, it’s unrealistic for all aspects of your day-to-day work to be highly rewarding and exciting. There’s always going to be admin work, staying organized and whatnot. You’re going to have to do tasks that are quite removed from direct impact, and that’s okay and expected. I think it’s just important to feel that a high enough proportion of your day, or your week, or your month is comprised of tasks that you can find meaningful, and that you intentionally take time to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. That is to say, you might have mundane tasks that you simply need to do where you can’t really connect the dots clearly to the positive impact it’s having on the world, but if you can intentionally create space to reflect on how your career as a whole is improving the world, I think that can be a nice exercise to maintain motivation in the long term.
Additionally, I’ve found it helpful to remain pragmatic and realistic that no job, no matter how much of a dream it might seem, is going to have 100% of your time dedicated towards work that you find completely and utterly amazing and fun and meaningful. While that may not seem like an optimistic framing at first, I think it ultimately is. It means that in your daily work or broader career pursuits, you can loosen your grip on the steering wheel a little bit and instead think more about, from a broad level, what your work is doing, and not get too hung up on making sure that every little micro-task you’re doing is maximally enjoyable and of clear social value, as long as you find joy and purpose in the aggregate, with rewarding tasks that can keep motivating you over time.
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