My advice to graduate students interested in a nonacademic career is simple: learn as much as you can about survey research methods. My request of the political science community is equally simple: do not ignore those who pursue nonacademic careers. We’re part of the discipline too. My path from political science PhD to senior editor at The Huffington Post running the Pollster site wasn’t so simple.

I’ll start with that last part, since my journalist colleagues tell me that human interest makes a story better. I basically tripped and fell into a career in survey research, and now specifically in political polling and election forecasting.

Ten years ago, I was a 21-year-old who had graduated from college in three years and had no clue what to do. So I decided to go get a PhD. I was assigned as a research assistant to the Public Opinion Learning Laboratory when I started in the University of Oklahoma’s doctoral program. Throughout my time in the program I kept trying to leave for a teaching position or to do a different type of research assistantship, but my mentors kept encouraging me to stay where I was and keep learning the process of survey research. That’s the best thing that ever happened to me career-wise, because that experience got me a second break.

That second break was getting a postdoctoral position at Duke’s Social Science Research Institute before I finished my dissertation. I almost didn’t apply because I didn’t have the degree yet. Again, though, my mentors encouraged me, and by some stroke of fantastic luck I was hired. I spent the first semester finishing my dissertation. I spent the second semester thinking long and hard about what I wanted to do—and ended up looking for jobs in survey research and polling. I never even went on the academic job market.

I came to two conclusions that drove my decision. The first was that I love data collection. Admittedly, that sounds a little crazy, but a few weeks into my postdoc I really missed doing the hands-on data collection I had done in the survey research lab. The other deciding factor was my somewhat impatient and easily bored personality. I realized that I hated the idea of having a “research agenda.” I wanted to work on what I found interesting without having to worry about whether I could turn it into a journal publication. Plus, it’s very difficult for me to get things done when being “done” means sending it to a journal and waiting several months for feedback. I needed a faster-paced work life with structure, deadlines, and clear expectations for my work and for others’ work that affects mine. It was clear that an academic job wouldn’t be the best environment for me.

Within a few months of this realization, I accepted a position as a senior analyst with the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion (Marist Poll) and spent 2012 doing battleground state polling for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal. My wish for faster-paced work was granted; we would poll for 3-4 days, and then crunch the data overnight as soon as the polling was finished so that it could be released to the media as quickly as possible. Sometimes our polls were up on television within 12 hours of data collection. If a major event occurred to shift the race, we could be in the field polling within a few hours.

Then, in 2014, I got another break: an opportunity opened up to expand my skills and take on the challenge of election forecasting with the Pollster team within The Huffington Post. I had been reading Pollster since graduate school and jumped at the prospect of working on the team. I designed the 2014 Senate and gubernatorial forecasting models from Pollster’s existing models, and was in the thick of working on the 2016 model when Pollster’s founder left the company. I now have responsibility for the Pollster site and am considered “management” within a large media organization. It’s a great fit for my personality—media cycles are very fast.

Despite working in media, I don’t feel like I’ve “left the field” because I never really tried to enter the field in the traditional sense. What I do now is in part very academic, and I certainly consider it political science. I rely on academic work to inform the methods we use at Pollster and to add context to election events and trends. I spend a lot of time immersed in journal articles and R code. My end goal is different—I need to produce information for the general public, not for journal articles—but my work and my process rely heavily on academia. I need to remain active in academic political science.

Sometimes it’s awkward to be a nonacademic among academic political scientists. People are either intrigued by my career path, or seem to deem me irrelevant and not worth their time. If academics think I’m a reporter, some become extremely condescending. When I explain what I actually do, some are still dismissive, but others want to know more. I engage those who are interested and ignore those who are not. But as a whole, I think the discipline is far too quick to assume that non-academics are not real political scientists and don’t contribute to the field.