Better Than an MBA: Julie Newman’s Pull, Don’t Push Became Her Strongest Career Lever
“Writing a book and working with Scribe was better than me getting a master’s. It was better than me getting an MBA, way better than me going and getting a PhD.”
Julie Newman, Chief Engineer, Impulse Space
Julie Newman builds satellites. She is the chief engineer at Impulse Space and has worked at Boeing, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and SpaceX. She wrote Pull, Don’t Push to fix the way the world talks to girls about engineering, and she did not expect it to do much for her own career. Three years after publishing it with Scribe Media, she calls the book one of the strongest levers on her career and credits it with an ROI she describes as “absolutely absurd”, including a single job move that raised her salary by more than $60,000.
The event that set her off
By 2019 Julie had spoken at more than 50 girls-in-STEM events. One keynote was the final straw. While a polished speaker told a room of girls, in effect, that the world did not think they belonged, Julie filled eight pages with notes. Those notes became Pull, Don’t Push, written not for the girls but for the educators and outreach coordinators running the events. The title is the whole argument.
“There’s all this messaging that’s really trying to push girls into STEM [...] When in reality [...] engineering is so inherently attractive to many, many girls that just explaining that to them is enough to make the event effective.”
Julie Newman
The hardest thing to write
The book’s core message is that well-meaning educators are getting it wrong. Saying that out loud, in print, was the part that scared her.
“In writing this book, I was really scared that I’m coming in and saying, hey, you’re doing something wrong. That’s a very hard message to write a book towards.”
Julie Newman
The reception was the opposite of what she feared. Educators, she says, have been “so, so uplifting”, and the most common response is some version of, “this is all so obvious now that you just wrote it”.
Why she chose Scribe
Julie first heard of Scribe years earlier, when it was still called Book in a Box and its founder was speaking at a conference. The idea of getting a book out of your head and into the world stuck with her. When she finished a year of keynote research, her husband, also an engineer, handed her the Scribe book and told her this was the one. She wanted the help.
“I only talked to [Scribe]. I went straight to [them] [...] I want the handholding [...] there’s no gold medal for it being harder and taking longer. The point is to get the book out there.”
Julie Newman
What the book produced
Clip · Julie Newman on the $60,000 career jump · 31s
Julie did not write Pull, Don’t Push as a business move. It became her calling card inside the industry anyway, the proof point that an engineer can also communicate.
“As I’ve progressed through my career and made a few different job jumps, it has had an absolutely absurd ROI [...] it has turned into probably one of the strongest levers on my career success.”
Julie Newman
The clearest number came on a job change. Before the book was even published, she listed its anticipated publication date on her resume.
“That alone was one of the most popular lines on my resume [...] I had multiple offers and they fought over me. And so in a single jump, I ended up with a salary bump of over $60,000 [...] which was more than I invested in writing the book.”
Julie Newman
Two more job jumps followed, each with a bigger title, and eventually the chief engineer role at Impulse Space, where being able to explain hard topics is core to the job. She went and did the math.
“I have averaged a year over year return of a 15% raise [...] for about the last six to eight years.”
Julie Newman
The book also put her on stages she never expected, and in rooms she had only ever studied.
“The book itself, it really did open a lot of doors for speaking [...] things like the National Science Teachers Association National Conference [...] also got picked up for some aerospace conferences.”
Julie Newman
One of them was the Navy recruiters forum that visits high schools, a group she says had sharper instincts about messaging than most, because they are actually accountable for their outcomes.
Better than an MBA
Clip · Julie Newman on why it beat an MBA · 13s
Asked what she would tell the 2019 version of herself, Julie did not reach for a degree. Her reasoning is about standing out.
“If I just went and gotten a master’s in electrical engineering, that’s not really a big bump on having an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. But if I go have a degree and then I go write this book, that’s very different.”
Julie Newman
Her advice to anyone sitting on a book is the same thing she tells the kids: you do not have to be at the end of the road to help the person behind you.
“You only have to be a few years ahead of other people to really help them.”
Julie Newman
The proof it is working
The career numbers are the easy part to measure. The part Julie cares about is harder to count, so she keeps the few stories that close the loop.
“I got a LinkedIn message from a girl [...] “I’m just starting my mechanical engineering degree at Berkeley. And I wanted to say thank you.” [...] I just immediately started crying because it’s like, OK, that was the whole point.”
Julie Newman
She hears the other side of it too, from women her own age and older who read the book and tell her they would have become engineers if someone had explained it to them this way as kids. Julie and her husband are now writing a second book, on applying an engineer’s mindset to family life. She wrote Pull, Don’t Push to change how one teacher talks to one room of girls. It did that, and it rewrote her own career on the way. You can find her at JulieJNewman.com.
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