An archeologist leaves the Pentagon

Katie Fine:
Going to the Starbucks in the middle of the Pentagon, super fun the first time. Then you do it every day, and you see people that are planning invasions in Venezuela, and I'm like, "This just doesn't feel good and it's not what I want."

Dave (introduction): 
Hi, I'm Dave Weich, and you're listening to Work-Shaped Life.

So much depends on timing.

I talked to Katie Fine on a Tuesday night in January from my home in Portland, Oregon. She was at home in DC. 

A few hours earlier, she left the Pentagon on her last day of work at the Department of War. That was all news to me though. When we’d scheduled this interview, a month earlier, she hadn’t mentioned plans to quit. She quit.

Clocking out of a job for the last time. Whether you quit or got fired, you’re in a heightened state. I remember leaving one job elated, closing the door behind me on a sunny summer day. At a previous job though, at a bar where I’d managed for years, the new manager made me clock out two hours early because, he said, pulling out the cash drawer in front of our staff and customers, he didn’t trust me with the till. 

And that was a bar. Katie walked out of the Pentagon. 

But wait: How does a person with a PhD in Archeology, who’s digging for antiquities in Greece, end up in DC at the Department of War? 


Katie Fine:
So, my name is Katie Fine. 

I currently live in Washington, DC. I, as of today, am a former employee of the Department of War. 

But yeah, my background, I have a PhD in archeology. 

I have lived and worked all over the world, and I'm kind of in a big career transition right now, ongoing for the past couple of years. 

I mean, I grew up in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. 

I went to college, went immediately to grad school, was in school for most of my life, finished my PhD during COVID, defended when I was 31. 

Nope, 33. I've just been working, trying to find my forever home, whatever that means, and now I'm in DC.

Dave:
What is the job you just left? What were you doing?

Katie Fine:
I was a fellow for the Department of Defense or Department of War, depending on how you feel about name changes. 

Dave:
How does a person with a background in archeology, what is the connection there?

Katie Fine:
I feel like, to answer that question, I have to kind of rewind a little bit.

Dave:
Yeah.

Katie Fine:
So, when I was finishing up my dissertation, I was in at Florida State, was where I was doing my PhD. 

A friend of a friend worked for the Department of Defense, in an agency called the Defense POW MIA Accounting Agency. 

That entire department within the DOD, what they do is they go out and they try and recover remains of service members who were lost in foreign conflicts.

Mostly Vietnam era, less so World War II, but that's an entire branch of the DOD. 

A friend of a friend worked there and said, "We're hiring a forensic archeologist." My PhD is in Neolithic ceramics from the Mediterranean. 

That's where I went to Greece every summer, excavated in Greece, super early stuff, was really interested in sort of social processes and things for the Neolithic period in Greece, but I also really am fascinated by World War II, and so my friend said, "This is super random, but apply for this job. I think you'd really love working here," and so I did. 

It all worked out. 

I ended up moving to Hawaii in August of 2020, and so I was already working for the DOD. 

I did that for two years, so I went out to Vietnam and to Laos, and was the only civilian, sort of the archeologist in charge of these groups of military teams that were going out, excavating, trying to recover the remains of American service members.

I did that for two years, and then I went back to Greece for two years, and I was the assistant director of a research institute there. Then, I decided I really need and I want to have some more stability. I had always kind of thought about foreign service as something. 

I knew that I didn't want to stay in academia. I found this fellowship. I think they really liked that I had a background already with the DOD, so I knew how to work with people within the military bureaucracy.

I think that was attractive to them, that I had that background, but also that I had been in academia for many years, and because we do work with a lot of academics in that office. 

The stuff I was doing had nothing to do with my background in archeology, but was more about the other experiences that I had cobbled together through my kind of funky career path. 

Dave:
Okay. A thousand questions, but what was your, I don't know, emotional and/or intellectual reaction to the idea of, "I have gone through a PhD program. I've been dedicated to this line of work, and now I'm not very old." In your 30s?

Katie Fine:
Late 30s.

Dave:
Not very old. Certainly, still barely mid-career age, and you're taking a left turn. It obviously appealed to you enough to do it, but what did that feel like, that kind of question?

Katie Fine:
I mean, honestly, kind of devastating in a lot of ways. 

I think that my career path, when I realized that I didn't want to stay in academia, and I also knew that academia didn't want me to stay in it, the job market for archeologists is abysmal. 

This year, for example, I have friends that are on the job market. 

I have friends that have been on the academic job market for 10, 15 years that are brilliant, smarter than I will ever be, have really fascinating research, and just will never get a job because the jobs don't exist. 

I didn't really know what I wanted to do, and when I moved to Hawaii, I never thought I would stay there for a long time. 

It was just sort of like, "This is what I'm doing," and because it was archeology, I mean, it was straight up, going out and doing excavations, the research questions are completely different.

You don't have a research question when you're going out to look for a guy. 

The question is, "Can we find something to give back to his family, yes or no?" 

But again, because I was out there, digging in the dirt, having adventures, I didn't feel like I was kind of leaving anything behind in that way. 

When I decided to go back to Greece, it was like, "Well, I'm not going to be doing field work, but I'm going to be the assistant director of this overseas research institute," where I was a grad student, basically. 

It was a non-permanent position. It was two to three years, and so I always knew it wasn't forever. 

Then, when I moved to DC in the summer of 2024 to start this fellowship, I thought, "Okay. Now I really am kind of starting a career.” 

Then, of course, the election happened, and the federal government has been exploded in a way that we've never experienced in US history.

And this isn't the truth for a lot of people, but for me, I cannot stay even adjacently to this government, and I don't want to be super political, but I've just figured out that there's certain lines that I don't want to cross. 

Even though I had nothing to do with current events, really, but just the constant feeling. 

I mean, I worked in the Pentagon. 

That was cool for two weeks, walking in the Pentagon every day, and then you're like, "Oh, this is just life." Everything becomes sort of the mundane. 

Going to the Starbucks in the middle of the Pentagon, super fun the first time.

Then, you do it every day, and you see people that are planning invasions in Venezuela, and I'm like, "This just doesn't feel good and it's not what I want, because I think if you had asked me when I first started my PhD program, I'd be like, "I'm going to be a professor and I'm going to be at an R1 university, and I'm going to have graduate students, and this is what I'm going to have." 

Then, I think I just realized that that life wasn't what I wanted, and nor was it something that was attainable anymore. 

I mean, maybe in 1995 it was, but it's just not in our modern world. I guess I'm still, I think I said devastated when we first started talking about this, because I made a decision to kind of pivot away from archeology proper, and I'm still trying to figure out if I regret that or not.

Dave:
Right. Well, what attracted you to archeology in the first place? 

Maybe you thought that a career as a professor was more sustainable, but why archeology? 

What drove you in that direction?

Katie Fine:
I really like figuring out things about other people. I'm a nosy, nosy person.

Dave:
But you're talking about people who lived a long, long time ago. You don't mean like your neighbor.

Katie Fine:
Well, I think that that's like what's so incredible about the long draw of human history, is that at the end of the day, we're doing the same stuff. 

We're filling our hours, we're having babies, we're finding shelter, we're going to work, we're figuring out what happiness means. 

All of this has been happening since we were Neanderthals. It's the same thing, and it's just like, I love that feeling of connection, I think, is so magical and knowing, connecting the dots for things, answering questions. 

I think I grew up going to the Field Museum, and going to a lot of museums that had Egypt exhibits and really great collections of statues and stuff. 

I would look at them, and I would stare at them, and I would try to imagine what it was like when somebody was making it. I just thought it was so cool to try and be like, "Okay. Somebody sat there and painted this base 3000 years ago." 

It's just mind-blowing, and I just loved that, and I kind of got addicted to just thinking in that way of human action, I guess.

Dave:
I'm curious, because what you're describing is a sense of connectivity, a sense of like, "We are all, this is one big long procession of humans," and yet is there an element in that for you of escapism too? 

I wonder, I mean, you are at the same time living it, and you're like, "No, we're not going to talk about anything that's going on right now. We're going to be in Greece."

Katie Fine:
Oh, absolutely. 100%. That's such a good point. 

I love that, because I've just been talking to my friends recently about escapism and about how, because of course all of us have been watching this gay hockey show, and we're like, "Why are all of us having this mass psychosis event of like every single person I know, is just like..."

I'm like, "Oh, because we're all just trying to escape the horrific world that we live in, and it's like this comfortable, great thing that we can just go wrap ourselves in." 

I have never thought about archeology as that, but that's exactly what that was for me. 

I mean, it's the way, the thing that I wanted to keep wrapping myself in so that I could kind of not have to think about math or whatever the hell other subjects in school I didn't want to do.

Dave:
Right. If you're agreeing to go to Greece or Hawaii, on the one hand, those are very kind of romantic destinations. 

On the other hand, there is a great amount of uprooting in that. 

There is a sense of, you are not entirely in control of your life. Did you just think, "I'm young. This is the time to do it"? How did that factor into the whole equation of, this is what you chose to do?

Katie Fine:
That's a great question, because I actually was such a homebody when I was a kid. 

I used to have terrible separation anxiety, even going to summer camp. I would be away from my mom, and I would be fine once I got there, but it would just be like this period of like, I hated being away from home. 

Then, I did my first excavation, actually just at a Native American site in Southern Illinois, so I didn't travel very far, but I was out there. 

Then, the summer I was in college and I went to Greece for the first time, and it was actually really scary and really difficult. My mom was really sick while I was gone, and I remember just thinking, "I'm going to go be in this thing, in this challenging environment for me."

I think other people might not have had the same reaction to it, but I went to college in my hometown. 

I went to Northwestern. 

I never really went very far until I went to Greece. 

Actually, this is very interesting, because I've never really tried to pull apart, but the summer after I went to Greece for the first time, my mom died, and so I had this period where it was like the worst thing that I could think of happened. 

I wonder if I kind of used that as a, I don't know, a catalyst to just kind of go and go see other things and go be like, "Okay. I was so scared to leave her, and now I can do this." I went to France for six months after I graduated from college, which was about a year after she died. 

I'd always really loved to travel, but I was always sort of tethered back to Evanston, tethered back to my home.

I think not having that tether really let me be like, "I love this. I want to see everything," and I think there's probably some escapism in it. 

I think there's this incredible sense of adventure of going and doing this thing that not everybody gets to do, and just being like, "This is what makes me happy, and I'm going to keep trying to do it." 

Archeology also, I should say, is extremely, it's very problematic in a lot of ways, and especially limited to people who can afford to go abroad, and so it's like another aspect of archeology that I think is really frustrating, and I ended up taking on a lot of student debt for that, which is another reason that I kind of wanted to pivot careers, is because I'm like, "Well, shit. I'm 38 years old, and I have so many student loans now."

I guess, it's just sort of like choosing what made me happy in this way when I was pretty young. 

I mean, I was 21, obviously graduated college and started thinking about grad school. 

I almost feel like I had this period where I was almost addicted to just going out, finding new things, going on excavations, trying to travel as much as possible. 

I did my MA in London. When I was doing my PhD, I was attached to a couple of digs in Greece and Croatia. 

I think there's a lot more of an emotional component for me. 

I wonder what other archeologists would say, but definitely, for me, I think it's a sense of freedom and excitement that I was kind of chasing for a long time.

Dave:
I mean, it's a heck of a lot more adventurous than most people's work lives. 

You were working, I presume, in Hawaii with very different kinds of people probably, right? 

And what was that, just on a personal level? 

Did you easily make friends? Were you lonely? What is that like, to shift so radically and move to a completely different part of the world?

Katie Fine:
It was really wild, and it was during COVID. 

I moved, and I had to immediately do a two-week quarantine when I landed in Hawaii. 

It was just me. Thank God for modern technology, because I was just on FaceTime with people all day for two weeks when I moved there, but I had never been to Hawaii before I moved there. 

I worked on the Pearl Harbor-Hickam Joint Air Force Base, so that was wild. I'd never been on a military base before. 

The work environment was, again, because it was COVID, it was super weird, because there weren't very many people in the office.

I was going in, I think, two or three times a week, but we had staggered things, so I didn't really meet very many people right away. 

I think deciding to up and move your life, which I've done several times now, is really hard, especially as a single person. 

I did it when I went to grad school a couple of times, but when you do an academic program, you have a group of people that you know you're going to know them, you're going to be in classes together, whatever. 

When I moved to Hawaii, it was just like, "Well, here I am," and it was tough.

It was really lonely for a lot of the time, but once we were back in the office more, and especially once I started, we were able to go on mission, so I was able to go to Vietnam and Laos. 

That was incredible, because especially when I was in Laos, we were base camping. We were just intense for two months with each other, with people. It was mostly people in the military and all the branches.

Like any kind of mixed group of people, there's lots of conflict, there's lots of crazy things, but I had a blast. 

It was an amazing experience, and I still keep in touch with a lot of them. Being in Hawaii, though, was tough. 

At the end of the day, you're in a rock in the middle of the Pacific. The closest family I had is in Portland, and it would take five, six hours to fly there, so it was crazy. I felt pretty isolated out there.

Dave:
Right. What is that like? I mean, I have to imagine the emotional investment in, actually, there are families that are going to be meaningfully affected by the outcome of your work, it's a little different than digging for some, again, antiquity.

Katie Fine:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that was very different, and that was something that I hadn't anticipated as being so different, because I just didn't really think about it. I was like, "It's archeology. I'm going to be going out." 

Then, the first time we go out, when I was in Vietnam, and we were digging in a rice patty, so the circumstances of the loss was that a plane had crashed during the Vietnam War and there was one loss, this guy that we were looking for. 

Enough time has passed that his parents had died, but I think his siblings were still alive, and we're waiting for answers, that kind of thing. 

It was such an interesting experience, because we're looking for our guy. 

We're literally digging up this rice patty, which was in itself such a different environment than I've ever had to work in. 

We had to figure out how to dam a rice patty so that we could drain it and stuff. So, there's that.

We're disrupting the whole ecosystem of this tiny little village by doing this. 

We're in a tiny little village that was, itself, bombarded during the Vietnam War by the enemy soldiers who were Americans, so there's all sorts of social issues that we were dealing with that I've never experienced when I'm in Greece, obviously. 

There's local interest whenever you're doing an excavation in Greece, but people find pottery constantly in Greece. 

People find stuff. It's not the same thing as this event that happened 50 years ago that people who are around there, and they would come out and sometimes they would watch us dig, and we had a lot of local people that were volunteers and would help us go through back dirt, because you're literally sifting through. 

The circumstances of loss were such that we're looking for pieces of crania because an explosion, and that's what we were kind of finding, but you're asking these people, these local Vietnamese people, yes, they're being paid, but we're asking them to basically help us dig up somebody who was actively trying to kill them.

Dave:
Right, and it killed them. I mean, so this might've been like a child at the time.

Katie Fine:
Yeah. Like you'd see, we had these two guys that would come by, these two older Vietnamese guys that would come and kind of stand and watch us. 

One of our translators went up and talked to them one day, because we asked, "What's the deal with those guys?"

They were like, "Oh, they remembered the plane crash."

I was like, "Oh, okay." Yeah.

Dave:
Yeah.

Katie Fine:
That part of what I was doing had definitely a different emotional toll. We were still trying to have a good time, but there is this sort of overarching, "We're out here to find our guy," and that's heavy.

Dave:
How long would you spend looking for that one person, for instance?

Katie Fine:
The one in that circumstance, we did one excavation shot was about seven weeks, and they sent out another team after us to try and get more. 

There's a lot of talk about, "Should we really be spending time and money, especially taxpayers' money to go and be looking for these guys?" when a lot of times, especially World War II losses, there's nobody still alive. 

They'll do honorable carries for their great nephew, who had no connection to this person. 

Vietnam is still a little bit closer, but the reason that DPAA, I mean, acronyms on acronyms in the military, exist is because the mothers and wives of Vietnam casualties and MIA POWs demanded that Congress fulfill the promise of bringing them back, that no man left behind is the thing. 

I think it's still an important mission, but it is something that we think about, that I thought about when I was there, that was like spending millions of dollars to find one person, because often there's nothing to find.

Dave:
Right.

Katie Fine:
But in the grand scheme of things, I think it's a very important thing that we do given how much money we spend to Kill other people.

Dave:
Did you know when we made this date, that you were going to give notice? Had you already given notice at your job?

Katie Fine:
I had been offered the job, and I hadn't given notice yet, but I was like, "Yeah. I mean, this is my career in work and something that I've been thinking about 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the past couple of months," so yes, when we made the date, I knew that I would be giving notice. 

I didn't know that today would've been my last day of work.

Dave:
Right, and so do you know what you're doing next then? You've taken another job?

Katie Fine:
Yeah. So I'm going to be working for Yale University in New Haven, helping them to coordinate government policies to make sure that their researchers aren't going to get dinged for anything and that they'll still be able to get grants and things like that from the government, but also teaching them the importance of research security and why it's a thing, why it's a bipartisan effort, why it exists in our world, that kind of stuff. 

Again, I mean, because I accepted this job, I kind of have been having a lot of really long, difficult conversations with myself about, "I'm getting farther and farther away from archeology, and I feel like I'm kind of closing the door on one part of my life as I'm going into another," and that's been difficult.

Dave:
You were in a position where you actively, it sounds like, wanted to leave this job. 

But how did you think about, like was it like, "I'm taking any job I can get"? 

What were the qualifications that were going to be meaningful to you in finding and choosing a new job?

Katie Fine:
I was terrified that I would never find another job, and I thought, "I have such a niche set of skills." 

I felt like I didn't have very many options. I had top secret clearance, so that's helpful, but with what the government was doing, everybody on the job market in DC is clearance. It used to be something in normal times. 

It's like, "Oh, you can get another job," but then I was like, "I don't know if I want to be somebody that has a job that requires clearance anymore. That sucks." 

And so, I was going through things, and I was like, "What do I want?" 

I've been in therapy for a very long time, so this is something that I've talked about with my therapist a lot, about defining things, defining who I am. If not an archeologist, what are my career goals? 

I don't know if I really have answers yet.

But it was something that I've been struggling with every day, of when you're in an academic field, especially one like archeology, it's been my whole identity since I was like 20 years old, 18, whenever I started, declared my major. 

It's been really scary and difficult to be even asking myself those questions, of like, "What am I looking for in a job? Is it all about salary? Is it about work-life balance?" 

I'm a single woman in my late 30s with a cat. 

The things that my friends, for example, have as important check marks are just not applicable to me. 

Then, my friends that are still in the academic world and still in the archeology world, I feel like I also don't relate to anything that they're looking for, because that's just not the life that I'm in anymore. 

So, I felt like I've kind of been in this weird, liminal space of like, "Who am I? What do I want out of my life?"

I've kind of decided that I want to work for a place that I don't hate, that I don't have a moral objection to. I want to have good benefits, like financial benefits, but also retirement, healthcare, and stuff, which in academia you don't get. 

Until I got my first job, working for DPAA was the first time I had ever had a 401k, because when you're a grad student, you just don't have that and it doesn't even enter into your mind to push in that. 

I guess I wanted to be able to have time to pursue things that are important to me, like traveling and spending time with my friends and my family, which is one of the reasons that I wanted to come back to the States when I was living in Greece. 

It felt very far away from people. One of the major things that I've been dealing with is this sense of regret about my decisions, jobs that I've taken, and jobs that I've left especially.

At the time, I left those jobs, because all of the reasons made sense to me. 

It's just, maybe this is just part of growing up and understanding that things change, your feelings about things change, and I'm making decisions with the best, with what I have the best tools to make the decisions, but I don't know. 

I feel a lot of the times I'm kind of flying blind, because I don't have like a checklist.

Dave:
You've had, I think, a lot more highs and lows than a typical person does in the first whatever phase or two of their career. 

I mean, people have highs and lows, but they don't necessarily spend years in Athens or in Hawaii. 

You have had the adventures, and whether those adventures sort of fulfilled your vision of them or not, it's almost as if the question is like, what do you need? 

Can you be satisfied without adventure?

Katie Fine:
I don't know. That's a great question. 

I realize I haven't had a job-job for more than two years at a time. 

I've moved every two years for the past 10 years and moved continents. I was in Florida for grad school. I was in Greece for two years during my dissertation. 

I went back to Florida. I went to Hawaii. I went to Greece. I came back to DC. 

I am tired, but also, I am afraid. There's a part of me that's afraid that I'm never going to be satisfied unless I'm just running around.

Dave:
Yeah. Do you think that's common? 

I mean, again, when you're out with, I think more of Greece, because I'm guessing that the crew you were with was a little bit more aligned with your background. 

Do you feel like you fit in there? 

Do you feel like you were among your people, or was it still there there that, did you feel a bit of an alien?

Katie Fine:
I think, no. Definitely, those are my people. 

I think other archeologists especially, not even just archeologists, but people that study the ancient world, we have the best conversations. 

I have wonderful friendships like that. I think that where I didn't feel like I fit, not fit, but I didn't have the patience to do adjunct positions. 

I didn't have the desire or, really, the means to make that work. When you think about the happiest you've ever been at work, what day comes to mind?

Katie Fine:
Oh, God. I got to give a tour of the Acropolis and the Agora to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Dave:
Wow.

Katie Fine:
That was incredible. The stuff that I've gotten to do like that, where it's like, "What?" I found a really cool floor once from the Roman period. It was mosaic. That was pretty cool.

Dave:
So, this was like you had unearthed some sort of structure that was actually, you'd gone to the floor?

Katie Fine:
Yeah. It was part of a large Roman villa, and we were like, "Oh. There's the floor." 

I loved teaching, because when I was a grad student, we were the teachers in order to get paid, but I don't know if there's one moment. 

I mean, I guess my dissertation, like finishing my PhD was an incredible moment that was also kind of stolen by COVID, because it was all on Zoom, but I guess those highs of where I've worked so hard for something, and can check it off and can be like, "Yes, I am a doctor of archeology," or I am explaining the Parthenon to a Supreme Court Justice. 

I never felt that level of connected excitement in the past two years, like a DOD at all. 

It kind of begs the question for me of like, is that just what work is if it's not somebody's whole identity? 

Because I think people find fulfillment from other things, other than work, and that's what I'm working on, is finding fulfillment in my life when I'm not an archeologist.

I wonder if what I'm doing now is going to scratch the itch or if I'm going to end up leaving again in two years, but we'll see.

Dave (outro):
Work-Shaped Life is produced by the team at Sheepscot Creative. It’s hosted by me, Dave Weich, edited by Bailey Cain and Michael Nipper, with production support from Benna Gottfried, Rosie Struve, Amelia Lukas and Kate Sokoloff.

Next time, on Work-Shaped Life:

David Gutterman:
I have yet to encounter a student in the last 10 years who is satisfied with the world. And looks out at it and feels comfortable and anticipatory and hopeful. So a big question is, what do I do with all this fear? And what do I do with the question of, How do I, small person, figure out not just how to navigate in these conditions, but change these conditions?

Dave:
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