This episode challenges the idea that the best career path for Humanities PhD students is one that leads toward the academy. Sure, becoming a professor is one of the career tracks for PhD students, but it isn't the only one. Join me as I talk with Dr. Juliet Shields, a professor of English at the University of Washington and Dr. Stacy Hartman, the Director of the Publics Lab at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Together, we unpack why it is so important to support PhD students who are interested in diverse careers, we think through some of the challenges of making the move from academic to non-academic career paths and we identify some great resources for PhD students interested in diverse careers.
This episode challenges the idea that the best career path for Humanities PhD students is one that leads toward the academy. Sure, becoming a professor is one of the career tracks for PhD students, but it isn't the only one. Join me as I talk with Dr. Juliet Shields, a professor of English at the University of Washington and Dr. Stacy Hartman, the Director of the Publics Lab at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Together, we unpack why it is so important to support PhD students who are interested in diverse careers, we think through some of the challenges of making the move from academic to non-academic career paths and we identify some great resources for PhD students interested in diverse careers.
Grad Share Podcast
Episode 1: Career Diversity for PhDs
Leah Rubinsky (LR): (music: “Anthem of Rain”) Hi there, my name is Leah and you’re listening to Grad Share, a podcast that examines the unique challenges of being a graduate student. I’m currently a PhD candidate at the University of Washington working on my dissertation. I don’t even have words, really, to describe how difficult my own PhD journey has been. But, I can tell you what has helped me...my fellow grad students going through similar struggles. And that’s the idea behind this podcast. My hope is that each episode we can center the perspectives of graduate students, provide information and support and help us navigate our graduate school experiences.
(LR) One thing that has been on my mind lately is: what comes next after I finish my PhD? I know I’ll be job hunting, but for what kind of job? There’s this assumption that you get your PhD because you want to become a professor - that’s what you strive for - but what if you don’t want to become a professor?
Dr. Juliet Shields (JS):I don’t think it’s healthy for individuals or for an entire profession to fetishize academic work to the extent that we do. To say...to put academic work on a pedestal in this way allows us to overlook the problems in the university in the way it is structured and in the way we treat graduate students as a form of labour…
(LR) (music “Waves,”) That’s Dr. Juliet Shields, a professor of English and the Director of Graduate Programs for the English Department at the University of Washington. When I spoke with her, we talked about how difficult but important it can be to really question whether you want to work in academia or not, and how that question is tricky because of the way that academic work is so often privileged above other kinds of work.
(LR) But there is another reason to ask yourself whether you really do want to go on the job market and become a professor…
Juliet Shields (JS):Yeah, the most obvious reason is that the number of tenure track jobs has been shrinking for years and is likely to continue to do so.
LR: Tenure track faculty jobs are becoming more and more scarce. According to an article for Inside Higher Ed, between 2008-2016 faculty job positions across the Humanities decreased by 31%. So - there’s a lot of graduate students graduating with their MAs and PhDs - and there’s not that many tenure track faculty jobs, so where are those graduate students going to work?
In our discussion, Juliet talked about how PhD programs really haven’t done a great job of keeping track of their alumni who have gone into non academic work because PhD programs really haven’t seen that as something they should do. If a PhD student wants to go on the job market and become a professor, I think that’s wonderful. And I also think that PhD students shouldn’t feel like that is the only career option for us. To learn more about alternative and diverse careers for PhDs I talked with Stacy Hartman, one of the facilitators of an MLA-sponsored boot camp for PhDs interested in diverse careers.
Stacy Hartman (SH) My name is Stacy Hartman and I am Director of the Publics Lab at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. I support public scholarship for graduate students and faculty. That’s what the Publics Lab does.
LR: Stacy generously took some time to sit down with me and talk about her own post PhD journey and alternative careers for PhDs. Here’s some of that conversation.
Stacey, how did you decide that you did not want to go on the academic job market to pursue a tenure track faculty job?
SH: I did my PhD at Stanford in German Studies. Part of it was geography and wanting to be near family, or at least wanting to feel like I had some agency over where I lived. The idea of throwing a dart at a map of the world and just going wherever it landed, did not sit that well with me. And then the other thing is that the tenure process looked miserable. And so I thought about going on the academic job market, which looked miserable, and then I thought about getting a tenure track job which is what everyone wants. And then I thought about getting tenure. And I just thought all of this seems miserable. And I really didn't want to do it (laughs). But about my third year, I started paying attention to the nauseous feeling I would get every time I would think about the academic job market and the tenure process and I thought, this is ridiculous. There's no reason to do something that makes you feel physically ill every time you think about it. And interestingly, there is not a single person from my cohort at Stanford that is in a tenure track German studies job currently.
LR: Acknowledging that there are a lot of PhDs who do want to go into the academic world and who want to be professors- what advice do you have for those folks?
SH: So one of the things is I never discourage anyone who wants to from going on the academic job market. You know, I tell my students, you don't have to because I think so many of them get the message from their departments that they do have to but if you want to, I always say: decide ahead of time first of all, what you're willing to take, you know, I'm willing to do a one year visiting assistant professorship but only if I can stay where I currently live. I'm willing to do a two or three year postdoc that I have to move for, but only if it pays a certain amount. I'm only going to go on the academic job market three times and then I'm going to call it you know, make those choices ahead of time for yourself so that you don't get caught in a cycle of temporary positions and going on the job market just one more time because I think many people have enough success on the job market, they get phone interviews, or they get, they get a couple campus visits, they have enough success that it keeps them coming back because they think this time, it'll work out, this time it'll work out. And I think that's a very insidious trap for a lot of people. And you can spend a lot of years doing that while working in fairly miserable conditions and I think more people should decide ahead of time how much they’re willing to take and when they’re going to call it.
LR: What are the biggest challenges that people who want to go into diverse careers will face and what advice do you have for them?
SH: So you need to really change how you think about your work and figure out what in my training is going to be most valued by people outside the Academy. Teaching is often one of those things. And the second thing that I think is really tough is mostly mental. And I think of it as being too deferential. I think many graduate students have been trained to be very deferential. Your advisor is not in charge of your life, you are in charge of your life. Most PhDs are in their late 20s or their 30s. But the PhD process has an infantilizing effect. And you really need to resist that. And to think of yourself as a professional with skills and experience, because you are.
LR: What are some resources that you might suggest for PhDs looking at diverse career options?
SH: So the first one I would say is Imagine PhD. Imagine PhD.com, which is totally free and confidential. It's a web based resource and they have a bunch of self assessment tools, and then a lot of tools for career exploration. If you have Career Services at your institution that work with graduate students, you know, going in and setting up an appointment there to talk about your results is great. But if you don't, you know, sitting down with a group of two or three colleagues who have also taken the assessments, I think that's also really, really valuable. Folks on your campus who have PhDs who are not in teaching roles. You know, this is where I started doing a whole bunch of informational interviews, which is basically when you sit down and you ask someone about their career path, and you ask them about their job and how they got there, and you ask them for advice. I did a whole bunch of informational interviews with folks with PhDs at Stanford who were not in teaching roles. And I got so much information from that. People often say start with alumni, and alumni are a great place to begin. But, folks at your university who have PhDs who are not in teaching roles, they are right there. I can almost guarantee that they’d be happy to get together for coffee for 20 or 30 minutes and talk about what they do. I really, really recommend that. And then the last resource I wanted to say is job ads. Job ads are a great resource. You can start with organizations that you're interested in. You can start with LinkedIn, there are tons of jobs posted to LinkedIn now. You can start with highered jobs.com, which is an aggregator site for jobs at universities. And just start reading job ads and ask yourself what appeals to me about this? What doesn't appeal to me about this? Don't skip straight to the list of qualifications and decide whether you could apply or not. Firstly, do the imaginative exercise of can I imagine myself in this role? Because it takes a fair amount of research and preparation to even decide what you're really going to want to do.
So I just want to say...that I'm really glad that this is so much more a part of the conversation now than it used to be. There's really been a sea change. I've been out of my program for five years and I think people are speaking much more openly about this than they used to. And I just want to encourage people to find their community. Find the people who will support you. I think graduate school can be very isolating and can be very competitive. And the job market is part of that, the terrible state of the academic job market makes things more competitive, because people are often competing directly for the same jobs. I really encourage people to think broadly about what they want to do and to look at it not with this mindset of scarcity that I think we've all had inculcated into us, but with a mindset of abundance, right? We can all succeed, but success is not going to look the same for all of us. For some people, it's going to be a tenure track job. For some people, it's going to be working at a nonprofit. For some people, it's going to be a successful freelance writing career. For some people, it's going to mean starting their own organization. And so I think thinking of it that way lets us have a mindset of abundance and generosity. And that's really what I want to see in the profession.
LR: Thank you so much, Stacey. This has been a wonderful conversation.
SH: Well thank you so much, I really enjoyed this conversation as well, thank you.
LR: That’s it, we’ve come to the end of our first episode of. For more information on diverse career options for PhDs check out the show notes for this episode located at gradshare.buzzsprout.com. All sources cited in this episode are listed in the transcript. This episode featured CCBY music including “Anthem of Rain” by End of the Road. A big thank you to Juliet Shields and Stacy Hartman. And thank you for listening. If you have comments, questions or episode ideas email me at gradsharepodcast@gmail.com, that is gradsharepodcast@gmail.com...That’s all for now, thanks again for listening, see you next time.
Written and Produced by:
Leah Rubinsky
Gradsharepodcast@gmail.com
Music:CCBY (credit to artist)
“Anthem of Rain” by End of the Road
“06” By Waves
bluenotes by airtone (c) copyright 2021 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/64427
blackSnow by airtone (c) copyright 2021 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/63513
Resources
Stacy Hartman, “What Problems Do Humanists Solve?” https://publicslab.gc.cuny.edu/what-problems-do-humanists-solve/
Anthony Grafton and James Grossman, “No More Plan B” https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2011/no-more-plan-b
Leonard Cassuto, “What Do You Mean, ‘Job,’” https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Do-You-Mean-Job-/240951
Imagine PhD https://www.imaginephd.com/
Informational Interviewing, from UC Berkeley’s Career Center https://career.berkeley.edu/Info/InfoInterview
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Photo by Jaeyoung Geoffrey Kang on Unsplash