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Career Sense is a blog for academic job seekers.
- Read full bio: Carolyn Steele (formerly our “Dr. Jobs” columnist), is a career adviser of 10 years, and a PhD candidate herself.
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PhD Success Story #2 – Mental Health Therapist
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.
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