University Affairs

I’m just back from my first conference of the season. It was in Boston so when I began talking with the person seated beside on the plane, it wasn’t surprising to learn he also was an academic. When I asked him what field he was in he said tersely “Mathematics – you?” “Communication and Culture” I responded and we both stared at each other, silenced by the seemingly incomprehensibility of each of our disciplines to the other. The conversation, having apparently run its course, died and we spent the rest of the trip in an amicable, but persistent silence.

Later that evening, I was catching up with my reading when I came across Daniel Drolet’s article in University Affairs admonishing social scientists to get better at ‘selling’ themselves.

His main point is that social scientists need to be more lucid and strategic when they describe the relevancy of their research to others, especially politicians and funding bodies. His point, I think, is well taken and equally applicable to academics in other fields. Apart from the pragmatic benefits of being intelligible to others, there is the simple social benefit of being better able to connect with people around us.

How many times have you seen “that look,” the one the mathematician and I shared, that people will give you when you try to explain what you do? Depending on who it is, and the context, “the look” can be interpreted as some combination of disbelief that anyone would want to do anything so mundane/irrelevant or just plain unpleasant (the mathematician probably gets a lot of those) for their whole professional career.

Taking Drolet’s point to heart, I revisited my conversation with my travel companion. Neither one of us handled that particularly well.  If I could hit rewind and do it again, I might have asked a couple of questions to drag the pertinent elements out of him (or, at least, pertinent to me). For instance, “Oh really, I know nothing about your field, what do you most enjoy about it?” Or, “Can you give me the Reader’s Digest version of your area of interest”? Either question might have opened the door to a really interesting conversation.

I faired no better than he, offering absolutely no explanation or even attempting to make my interests seem even remotely transparent to him. Yes, I was so exhausted from four days of intensively focusing on my field that perhaps I was a little slower on the uptake than I might have been otherwise, but that’s hardly an exceptional circumstance, and really no excuse.

If we actually believe, as we claim so eloquently on our funding applications, that our research is timely, significant and filling an important gap in our disciplines, than we need to get a lot better at saying so out loud. In a media saturated world, the oral tradition is more powerful than ever  – what you say matters. And, as Drolet discusses, in a cash-strapped economy, its important for our friends, colleagues and acquaintances to understand that what we do isn’t just an expensive hobby.

I have a proposal that I invite you to take up as you attend your conferences this season. Next time someone asks what you study, do not answer with the name of your program or discipline – those terms are largely unintelligible to people outside the academy and are conversation killers. Instead, try preparing a functional description of what you love best about your field, “I am really curious about how all those hours people spend playing video games affects the way they behave in the real world” rather than delivering the thesis of your last funding proposal, “I am deconstructing the technological determinist argument in a neo-liberal, post relativist milieu.” This not only humanizes what you do by foregrounding why you do what you do, but it also offers a segue for further conversation to the initiated. Generally speaking, it’s a friendlier thing to do.

Give it a go, and see what comes out of it – and take a moment to share your experiences on the blog. This is one situation we all face, and could, undoubtedly, be a lot better at handling.

I wanted to draw your attention to a recent post on the Inside Higher Ed website that explores, quite  accurately I think, many of the issues PhDs face when they are forced to leave academe rather then when they choose to leave.

The author, Christine Kelly, identities six fears that hold people back from taking the initiative to move ahead and seek out career alternatives with an open mind and positive attitude. This posting should be required reading for anyone in this situation, which in today’s economy applies to just about every grad student in North America.

I want to emphasize one of Kelly’s points:

If you feel like you are being pushed out of the ivory tower, rather than choosing to leave, this process may be very difficult for you. You probably feel anger, betrayal, and rejection by the system you believed in. You need to address these issues and examine any false beliefs that might be preventing you from being fully present in your non-academic job search.

Don’t skip this part under the mistaken assumption that feelings don’t count, or that your top priority is just to “get a job.” You do need to address what you are feeling before you will be able to shift gears successfully.

One of the most difficult situations I face as a graduate student adviser is helping doctoral candidates through this process because the flood of negative emotions you can experience by being forced out of your chosen vocation will make everything seem worthless and hopeless. These emotions will abate in time, but until they do, your ability to assess your options and priorities will be severely hampered.

This is why you need people around you who can help offer alternative perspectives to those you can come up with on your own at this time. Like just about everything else in academe, the career exploration process will be much less traumatic, and ultimately more successful if you build a community of support around yourself. Your mentors and advisers, people who have encouraged you along the way, friends and family are all good places to start. But at some point, you will probably need to find people with knowledge of fields and positions you want to explore.

It may come as a surprise, but the job search process is actually something you will find you are quite skilled at because it utilizes essentially the same skills used when conducting primary research.

In fact, PhDs across the disciplines are probably more adept in the abilities required to integrate well in today’s’ workforce than any other graduate from a program not geared to a specific career path. It is my belief based on observation and personal experience, that there is actually not much that a motivated, focused PhD can’t do.  The biggest thing holding them back is not an unwelcoming job market, nor a lack of transferable skills, but rather, as Christine Kelly explains so well, their own fear.

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Career Sense is celebrating the many thousands of PhDs who have gone onto successful non-academic careers. If you know someone who has a PhD success story they’d like to share, please contact me. For more PhD success stories click here.

Position: Mental Health Therapist in a city hospital

Program: Sociology

Year of graduation: 2002

Previous experience: 10 years as a psychiatric nurse

Point at which a non-academic path was chosen: Beginning of dissertation

Primary Reason behind this decision: She found the endless benchmarking – comps, defence, jobtalks, and the whole tenure-track process to create a general atmosphere of stress and anxiety that she did not see as a healthy environment to spend the later part of her career. She also found the apathy and sense of entitlement in many students to taint her enjoyment of teaching.

She had left the field of mental health feeling a little burnt out and bored, but after an unpleasant experience in academe, she returned to mental health where she found her skills and strengths were both recognized and appreciated. She has also rekindled her enjoyment of teaching through facilitating educational workshops for health care professionals who are engaged and genuinely interested in what she has to impart.

How she found out about relevant positions: Through job postings found online and in newspapers.

How many positions she applied for: 3 to 4

What she likes about her job: She loves her work and feels privileged to work with her clients and other practitioners. Her clients are not dealing with chronic, permanent issues, so she is able to see a real impact of her interventions and feels a strong sense of pride and satisfaction in the contribution she is able to make to the lives of others.

Her strengths in the selection process:

• 10 years relevant work experience;
• A strong understanding of her strengths and the value she could bring to an organization;
• Being able to demonstrate her intellectual potential by virtue of being in a PhD program may have helped her stand out on paper from others with similar backgrounds but without that level of education on their resumes.

Advice to others:
Make sure there is a connection between what you study and what you want to do. This connection will not only make it easier to find alternatives to an academic job, but will make it easier to step into a position that builds on your PhD. Also, make sure you clearly understand the reality of academe before you commit yourself to that career path. You will lose several years of income and pension by pursuing a PhD so make sure that is a worthwhile investment in your situation.

“The university is responsible for providing graduate students with the best possible preparation for their future roles whether within academia or in other sectors. This responsibility extends to developing professional skills.” (CAGS 2008, p.2)

When’s the last time you heard something like that come out of the mouth of a graduate dean?

This revolutionary statement is from a an important document currently posted on the website of the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies, entitled Professional Skills Development for Graduate Students.

This document takes as given that graduates of Master’s and doctoral level programs have  important roles to play in society, not just in universities. It states that,

“… funding agencies, universities, employers of highly qualified people, researchers, and graduates themselves recognize the importance of professional skills that complement their disciplinary expertise. To be competitive then, graduate students increasingly need to engage in ongoing development of their skills in areas that complement their academic programs and enhance their employability. The knowledge economy demands a high level of professional skills from all of its participants if they are going to increase the economic and social benefits for Canadians and for society in general.”(p.2)

Focusing on the broad categories of academic, private, public, or not-for-profit sectors, the paper identifies four areas of skills development that are considered to have a ‘likelihood of success in implementation in the university context: communication, management, teaching, and ethics.” (p. 6)

It goes on to define these areas and implementation principles for ensuring that all graduate students are provided equal opportunity not only to acquire disciplinary expertise but also these complementary, professional skills. The hope is this document will provide a catalyst for universities across Canada to develop a core set of professional skills that all graduate students will be able to master as they complete their studies in any field.

I want to highlight a point made in the report, that most, if not all the skills inherent in the categories listed above, are those usually acquired during the course of many graduate programs. What is revolutionary here is that not only are university administrators are being called to normalize the diversity of post graduate careers paths. They are being asked, to an extent, to accept a degree of responsibility in ensuring their graduates have educational experiences that can be explicitly applied to nonacademic contexts.

In Carolyn Watters’ Dean’s podcast, she discusses this paper with the outgoing president of CAGS, Martin Kreiswirth. At one point during the interview, they express concern that funding may well prove to be the deal breaker that prevents the professional skills concept from being adapted.

I think that  in this case, ‘funding’ could a red herring diverting attention away from what is likely to be the real obstacle to the implementation of the professional skills initiative – a fear that this will open the door for graduate programs to become nothing more than advanced workplace training programs. This is a real and present danger – but not a new one, and not one that will be exacerbated if these principles are followed. Market pressures realized through changes in what research is funded has a far greater influence on the structure of graduate education than this program will ever have.

Imagine, if you will, being able to get professional presentation coaching, not only for academic conferences and job talks, but also for job interviews in a range of sectors as a normal part of graduate level education. Or what if we followed the suggestion made in another podcast by Dan Russell, the Google guru, that universities begin to routinely do post-mortems at the conclusion of team research projects to identify more explicitly what worked and what didn’t. That knowledge is critical both inside and outside academe, and would fit relatively seamlessly within many current academic practices. Shifts like these would only improve the quality of graduate education, and maybe even the career transitions of its graduates.

Right now the CAGS paper may be just a good idea, but it has the potential to be a revolutionary one, and boy, could we could use a revolution in our universities right about now.

What about you? Take a look at the paper (it’s only 9 pages) and let us know what you think.

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Career Sense is celebrating the many thousands of PhDs who have gone onto successful non-academic careers. If you know someone who has a PhD success story they’d like to share, please contact me. For more PhD success stories click here.

Position: Senior analyst at the Bank of Canada

Program: Economics

Year of graduation: 2008

Previous experience: This is his first position.

Point at which a non-academic path was chosen: Beginning of dissertation

Primary Reason behind this decision: He loved research but didn’t have very positive teaching experiences. He found academic life too isolating and preferred a more collegial atmosphere where he could discuss issues that interested him with people committed to similar interests.

How he found out about relevant positions: Through the American Economic Association. He found professors in Economics helpful in this regard as many students in this field plan on non-academic careers.

How many positions he applied for: Over 80

What he likes about his job: The majority of his job is research in areas that he is genuinely interested in and that build on the expertise he demonstrated in his dissertation. He is also able to publish in his field. He enjoys working with very intelligent, capable and happy people.

His strengths in the selection process:

• the ability to communicate and interact with others well;
• proven competency in relevant areas demonstrated through his dissertation and publication record;
• his supervisor was well known and respected by a researcher at the Bank of Canada.

His advice to others:
Cast your net broadly and be clear about what you most want. He turned down several good jobs, including academic positions, during his job search. Because he much preferred research to teaching he held out for the “right job” which he loves and which suits his personality and strengths very well.

My jumping off point for this posting are the two comments made on my April 2nd rant.

First Grace wrote: “I wonder how many of those graduates who don’t become teachers and researchers with universities will actually “permeate other sectors of society” in some way that fully uses their knowledge. ”

To which Andreas replied: “I agree with Grace: it’s not easy to get a job outside the academe when you’ve devoted your whole life (assuming people get their degree at 28-30) to precisely continuing inside the academe.”

Andreas and Grace – your perspectives are prototypical of those I often hear from grad students concerning their career prospects outside of academe.  The frustration and anxiety evident in your posts is pervasive in grad departments. I know all too well what it is like to feel that cold knot of panic from my time as a PhD candidate in the early 90s — those were dark days in Canadian academe. But before we give up in despair, I’d like to extend the conversation a bit in hopes of providing an alternative approach to all the uncertainty, and yes, depression.

By now, we all know, there are systemic problems in the culture and structure of graduate education that are contributing to the difficulty Grace and Andreas, and many of you have experienced in trying to conceive of, let alone find a reasonable alternative to a tenure track position. Nonetheless, there are many thousands of graduate students who do morph successfully into satisfying, well-paid positions that provide opportunities for growth and challenge on par with that of the average academic. We are just not very good at documenting these stories, so we tend to think such possibilities simply do not exist – not really – not for us. This skepticism flourishes in the absence of evidence countering it, exacerbating the situation considerably.

This is where we can all help each other out. As we move ahead I will be archiving profiles of  PhDs I find or linking to articles about people I have already written about in my time at University Affairs under the “PhD success stories” category section in the right hand column of this page.

Whether you are a grad student, a faculty member, an administrator or a career adviser, you can help to develop this most desperately needed resource. Think: who do you know about who has made this leap? Ask them if you could refer them to me so I can add their profile to the Career Sense “PhD success stories”. Be prepared for rather startled responses initially. Such people aren’t used to having their successes acknowledged, let alone celebrated by academe.

I will contact them, or if they prefer, they can contact me through this site. I will ask them to describe their “alternative” career and how they transitioned to it along with anything else they may want to share on the topic. It won’t take much time, and I will respect all privacy requests.

Imagine what a valuable resource this could become for all of us. Students would benefit from the many examples of other things they could be preparing to do upon graduation. Faculty and career advisers would be able to point their students to this site for both inspiration and a realistic introduction to the postgraduate workforce. Over time, with all of us contributing, we could produce a pretty fantastic resource that would be able to counterbalance the negativity that surrounds us now, especially these days.

This is an open call – I’ll be posting profiles as they come in so you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed on this blog so you’ll know when there has been a new addition. If you’ve never participated in a blog before, this would be a quick but significant way to get your feet wet just by making a referral. All it takes is a few minutes of time and desire to start doing something positive when so many are convinced there is nothing they can do.

I’ve been watching with interest the poll from last week that asks if readers would still pursue a PhD if they didn’t think it was leading to a tenure track job. As I write this, 74% of respondents have answered “no”. This represents a potential crisis for universities. What would happen if 74% of doctoral students decided to opt out of graduate education? Would it be possible for undergraduate courses to continue without a steady supply of cheap labour? Yet, if grad students were told the truth about their academic job prospects, the survey results of this admittedly small sample suggest that that supply would quickly dry up. I can’t help but wonder what a huge disincentive this scenario poses for universities to actually come clean with doctoral recruits about their career outcomes.

Now before I am accused of being a naysayer, let me emphasize that I do not mean to suggest that a PhD has no value other than leading to a professorship – nothing could be further from the truth. Quite the opposite I would claim. Based on my interactions with doctoral candidates over the past 10 years, I firmly believe that a PhD is a bit like a “get out of jail free” card in the knowledge economy. That is, there is not much you can’t build on with a doctoral education as your base — good news in a rapidly fluctuating economy. The skills and knowledge acquired after 10+ years in the academic context, along with the sheer level of ability the average PhD possesses, are  immensely transferable to many other contexts.

That is perhaps one of the least acknowledged aspects of a doctoral education — and one of the least understood. Provincial governments sort of get it, but for the wrong reasons. They have been pushing to expand enrollment in graduate programs for the past few years, which I would provisionally applaud. But they have, erroneously I believe, justified this in terms of market demand in specific fields. Given the timelines involved in obtaining a doctoral degree in particular, basing policy decisions on current trends is always a gamble. The current paucity of family doctors is a good example of such policies run amok. This misguided thinking is further exacerbated, as I argued recently, by the failure to also fund the professional development support these students will need to enter the workforce at levels higher than undergraduates.

It would have been better,  revolutionary, in fact, if politicians acknowledged that in an economy built on innovation, rapidly shifting knowledge and unpredictability, the need for people not only to able to function in this environment, but to lead the way, is imperative. That will be the primary contribution of graduate level education in the 21st century – to produce the visionaries and policy makers who will help rebuild a strained society on some other basis than avarice.

Inevitably, some of these graduates will become teachers and researchers with universities, but most will permeate other sectors of society where they will develop and implement radically new approaches to a sustainable economy, social reform, knowledge management and technological advances. While some will bring expertise in particular fields, many more will morph into areas far removed from their disciplines, but closely aligned with their unique and highly developed abilities.

We can no longer afford to keep our brightest minds tucked away in disciplinary cloisters of the ivory tower while our society crumbles. Nor is it fruitful to force those who do forge a “non-traditional” path to do so surreptitously (in most departments, a graduate student who openly discusses an interest in a non-academic career all but closes the door on their own academic career prospects because they aren’t considered “committed”).

Our governmental agencies and industry recruiters would do well to develop mutual connections between themselves and graduate programs. Graduate students, with the support of their programs, can jump start this process by demanding that they have access to the same level of career resources and support afforded to undergraduates. Employers,  in concert with graduate faculties and university career centres, can provide multiple venues to develop realtionships with graduate students before they graduate. Governments can increase the number of internships and other experiential learning opportunities for graduate students early on in their degrees. Most importantly, graduate faculty can stop talking about an academic career as if it is the only viable option for serious students. It’s time to put that hoary legend to bed.