Nicolas Navas
Master’s in Cultural Sociology, graduated in 2024
coming from Colombia, currently working at Thermo Fisher Scientific as a multimedia designer and cultural sociologist
interviewed by Sonia Isotta Sevastano, December 2025
1. Many people would ask how is your job connected to Cultural Sociology?
I'm part of the Learning and Innovation team. What we do is to create educational materials and learning solutions for the training of engineers who repair electron microscopes.
Since we’re a global company and we train engineers from all around the world, we need to adapt the products we create to different regions. So, for example, when we translate something into Chinese, we need to consider the way Chinese people prefer to understand information. This ensures that engineers can understand complex matters in a much simpler way. For instance, people from Asia prefer to read more than listen, but people in the United States prefer to listen more than read. Because of this, we create podcast-style tutorials for engineers in the Americas and Europe and image- and subtitle-based products for engineers in Asia.
This approach makes more efficient our learning solutions. At the same time, it helps us to understand whether people are actively learning what they need to know, so that they can perform as well as expected.
2. What's your favorite memory about the Cultural Sociology Study Program at Masaryk Universty?
My favorite memory are the classes with professors Werner Binder and Nadia Jaworsky. Usually, when you go to a class you know what you're going to expect, more or less, because you’ve read the text or the article beforehand. But their insights and their way of driving you towards a new perspective actually changed my life.
Many times, we would leave class thinking we didn’t see a phenomenon the same way as we did before. This happened so many times that it became a favorite thing of mine. It was really nice to learn through a conversation more than having to deliver things.
Even though we did a lot of writing. For example, in Writing Sociology class with Nadia we wrote a lot, but the subject was a nice exploration. Each time we had to write, we were discovering our own style. Discovering that is what breaks the barrier of thinking “I have to write something” and instead makes it feel more like “I want to write something”. I feel this experience really helped me a lot in overcoming the master.
And with Werner Binder, I will say that Advanced Methods of Interpretation really changed my way of seeing things. It's about how we interpret things, and it helps to understand that we always have bias. As social researchers, we want to overcome these bias somehow. Not completely, of course, but at least to be aware that there's a way to approach them. After taking those classes, just seeing normal life became really interesting.
3. Do you have any advice for students and future students of Cultural Sociology?
I would say that discipline is really important. Actually reading the articles, even if they can be long, helps a lot. Then, the exams and the classes by themselves are not that tough, becuse by the time you’re there, you already more or less know what they thalk about.
So I would say that the biggest advice I can give is this: before starting the master, be aware that you're going to spend a lot of time writing. So, search for a comfortable place where you can read, chill, and actually try to understand what you're seeing. And if you struggle, no worries, that's why the professors are there.
Another tip is to write things down by hand. I know it sounds weird, but having an actual notebook and being able to make drawings and conceptual maps helps much more than just typing on a laptop.
I tried both, and I think I’ll stay with the notebook, because it helps to grasp the depth of what I’m studying