As a graduate student at the Harvard Divinity School, Andy Martinez never imagined they’d one day work at Harvard Business School. Now almost three years into their role as coordinator for the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Andy talked with us about their academic interest and its surprising overlap with their work, what they love about their job, and their favorite way to enjoy nature in New England.
What does your work look like day to day?
My days often look very different—I wear a lot of different hats as the coordinator. I provide direct administrative support to Terrill [Drake, CDEIO], and I also work closely with all members of the team. I have the heaviest involvement in our web and communications work. I manage our internal and external websites—we’re currently redesigning and relaunching the external site, which is exciting. And I work with Alex [Hirs, senior advisor] to help develop and draft a lot of our office’s communications, which include our heritage month messages, announcements of key initiatives, and responses to various email inquiries. I'm starting to do more work with expanding our office’s community engagement efforts, building out a religious observance calendar and thinking intentionally around resources and programming for heritage and identity recognition. I also recently helped support the staff LGBTQ+ affinity group as they developed Pride month programming. One week will be different from the next, which means it's very exciting. I'm never not busy.
What was your career path to HBS and this role?
I started at Harvard as a graduate student at the Harvard Divinity School in 2016. I initially thought I’d get a PhD, but realized I wasn’t ready for that yet. I liked the higher ed environment and ended up working for the Harvard Chaplains for a few years. I was working on diversity, equity, and inclusion work from a religious inclusion perspective, and found it really energizing. I got a certificate degree for diversity and inclusion to build out my resume, and looked for jobs in that field. This opening came up, and the fact that it was a new office was really interesting—I liked that it was all-hands-on-deck. It was exciting being in at the ground floor and getting to see the team built out. It feels like my contributions have meaningful day-to-day impact. I'm enjoying the work I'm doing and the people I'm doing it with, which I'm very grateful for.
What's your favorite part of the job?
The team—I just love the people I work with. Terrill has a very strong and clear vision for this work and our team, and is personally a meaningful mentor to me. I'm relatively early on in my career so it’s invaluable to connect with him and work closely together. The whole team is amazing to work with—they’re deeply committed to this work and are also fun to be around. This work can be really taxing because it’s meaningful to the School as well as to who we are and how we show up in the world and workplace. When there are work pressures or challenges, it can feel like it's challenging my personal identity and understanding of myself—having coworkers to laugh and sometimes cry with is a wonderful thing.
Tell us more about your graduate school work—what was your focus at the Divinity School?
In early college I thought that I might have a future in ministry—my older brother is a pastor. My major was religion and philosophy with a minor in English literature—humanities all the way down! By the time I graduated I realized that ministry was not in my future. I floated around in an unhappy job for a year and then one of my former professors suggested I apply to grad school. I’ve always loved school and am someone who always wants to find spaces to ask the big questions about things. Grad school was where I could take these meaningful questions, think seriously about them for a long period of time, and listen to very smart people weigh in on them.
The Divinity School is doing some very interesting work around a burgeoning group of people who identify as religious nones—spiritual but not religious folks who are looking for a meaningful community that does not organize itself around what we would traditionally think of as religion. I ended up becoming more broadly interested in communities that organize and form in online spaces like Reddit. From there, I focused in on how gender identity and gender expression are mediated by different technologies and how that impacted how members of these online communities interacted with each other. I thought that I’d want to be an academic in that area but realized I was much more interested in the practitioner side. I'm still very interested in technology and gender, but now more from an organizational behavioral lens. Outside of work I still love to read and think about those things, but I don’t want to do it full time.
I love being in higher education and adjacent to that work—I feel very privileged to be at a place like Harvard, where some of the most interesting research in the world is happening. I would never have predicted that I’d be at the Business School, but it’s been fortuitous to see the interesting way that research plays out and is relevant in a different setting.
Where are you from?
I'm originally from Wisconsin near the Milwaukee area, in a smaller suburban town. I went to college in Wisconsin as well. The first time I meaningfully left that state was when I moved to Boston for grad school in 2016. I’ve been here for eight years and I really like it. The seasons are beautiful, and I really appreciate the pace of life out here; just a little bit quicker than life in the Midwest. This area, and the connections I’ve made here, have given me the opportunity to more openly be my authentic self. I also really like hiking, so I appreciate being in the New England area and close to so much beautiful nature. I feel like I have access to nature in a way that I did not in Wisconsin.
What else do you like to do in your spare time?
One of the main things that makes me happy is my Australian shepherd border collie, Tifa. She’s four and I like to do a lot of my hiking and outdoor activities with her. She’s wildly smart, full of energy, and just a delight. I got her in June of 2020, she was a COVID puppy and truly a lifesaver during that time.
I participate in an LGBTQ+ intramural sports organization called Stonewall Sports. I'm in a weekly dodgeball league and they have a lot of different volunteering opportunities throughout the year. It’s a fun, exciting way to be connected with the LGBTQ+ community in this area.
Most recently I started taking tennis lessons. I don't love a ton of sports, but I've always enjoyed watching tennis and playing it for fun with friends. There was a class offered through the Cambridge Center for Adult Learning in Harvard Square, and I was like, “Why not?” I ended up making a lot of friends, and we now meet up regularly to play.
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