This blog post continues our series, Scholar at Large, written by an academic on three guiding principles to recharge your job-seeking energy and efforts.

Those of us living through the job market cycle are in a tenuous place at the moment. We’re doing campus visits and waiting to hear news, all while putting out more applications. At this stage, more of us are starting to actively seek out different kinds of opportunities for PhDs. When one is so deep in the weeds of the job market, it can feel impossible to see the big picture of how we got here and where we’re aspiring to go.

I was able to recharge my job-seeking energy during a chat with Katina Rogers about her forthcoming book, Putting the Humanities Ph.D. to Work: Theory, Practice, and Models for Thriving Beyond the Classroom (anticipated publication in spring of 2020). Katina is the Director of Programs and Administration for the Futures Initiative and HASTAC at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Katina is invested in helping people think differently about their career and job search altogether. As she explains in her HASTAC blog post about the book: “Intended for graduate students in the humanities and for the faculty members who guide them, this book grounds practical career advice in a nuanced consideration of the current landscape of the academic workforce and an emphasis on reaffirming humanities education as a public good. It explores how rhetoric and practices related to career preparation are evolving, and how those changes intersect with admissions practices, scholarly reward structures, and academic labor practices—especially the increasing reliance on contingent labor.”

My conversation with Katina helped me identify three guiding principles that will keep me energized for the road ahead.

1. A PhD in the humanities is so much bigger than we realize.

Katina describes Putting the Humanities Ph.D. to Work as “an activist and an intellectual project” that encourages us to adopt a more holistic view of what it means to get a PhD in the humanities. She says that one of the things people tend to overlook when considering why people pursue humanities PhDs, and why that work might matter, is that this pursuit has as much to to do with method as it does with content. In order to take the deep dives on content that we all are doing when we go through a PhD program, “we exhibit critical thinking, analysis, an ability to grasp and synthesize many different viewpoints, historical contexts, and distill them into something meaningful. That skill alone is so valuable in so many different contexts. Every time I talk to employers—that ability to do research and write about it in a meaningful way is huge.” In other words, the methodologies we learn in humanistic study have as much value as the original scholarly “content” we produce.

Katina insists that it’s an urgent political and historical moment for those who are adept in humanistic study. “We need people who can engage in questions of ethics, have the ability to see patterns and imagine possible futures from a trajectory we might be on, who can parse statements that have varying agendas in a moment where truth is being questioned.” Whether in a corporate or public environment, Katina asserts that “we need people with that background and training to think about perspectives that aren’t their own, who can think about implications from a philosophical and ethical standpoint, then communicate and implement them.”

2. One reason job-seeking is so hard is that the academy isn’t set up to practice what it preaches about public impact—but my PhD gives me the capacity to imagine differently.

Katina knows that many institutions do provide resources and advice on job-seeking beyond the academy. At the same time, she encourages us to think about where departmental advice on job-seeking is coming from. Departments see that there aren’t enough jobs for people with PhDs; providing information for people on how to find jobs elsewhere should be seen as the solution. Putting the Humanities Ph.D. to Work seeks to understand how this crisis is actually one part of a larger, fundamental dissonance in the academy around what is valued as “work.”

In her book, Katina argues that the professional values upheld by our current scholarly reward structure are at odds with an investment in the public impact of the humanities. “This reward structure encourages us to keep our research focused inward. The research people have to do for tenure and to complete a PhD is not usually the work that has the highest public impact.” If departments do encourage their students and faculty to engage in public work, that work is usually only valued in addition to the standard criteria. “What I see happening now is there’s a stated goal of having a greater public impact, and growing institutional support for what that looks like. But the people who do that work end up having very divided attention.”

Katina hopes that “we can start to crack open the conversation about what we consider to be a successful and interesting scholarly pathway.” But our ability to imagine differently is directly related to who makes up the community having these conversations. Katina argues the question of how we place value on our work is inseparable from the ongoing problems our universities face in regards to diversity and inclusion—particularly as it plays out in graduate admissions criteria.

That criteria is further buffeted by the broad devaluation of teaching and the obvious dismissiveness of diverse career pathways that many programs still have. “The myth of the solitary researcher,” she writes, “casts a long shadow over what we do.” Putting the Humanities Ph.D. to Work addresses how this ethos yields a professoriate that doesn’t support in practice the values that our intellectual work is claiming, sustains the growing reliance on adjunct positions, and dramatically limits the diversity of those who may see an “academic” career as a possible pathway.

3. Finding and building communities to talk about these issues benefits everyone involved (and the health of the humanities as a whole).

Katina observes that “conversations about these issues tend to occur in silos.” She cites some ways that like Humanities Without Walls and the Scholarly Communication Institute have been cultivating conversations about these issues, but the existence of these kinds of initiatives tends to be contingent upon grants. Furthermore, they don’t always reach those who are currently on the job market, wanting to explore opportunities beyond those recognized by strict reward structures, but work in a place that isn’t equipped to help them.

Katina has a couple of great suggestions for building communities around finding different ways to put the humanities to work.

• “Having open conversations with advisors from as early in the process as possible is one part of it. Looking around your university a little helps too. There’s so much that grad students have to do and balance—it can be hard to take a step back to see what’s going on in other departments and spaces of the university. Look at Centers for Teaching and Learning, for example. Some departments may have a speaker or workshop series that will connect you with others thinking about these questions.”
• “Looking outside of the institution is also a really good way to find support around questions that might feel delicate. Apply to the HASTAC scholars program, or simply create a HASTAC account and start blogging. Places like Humanities Commons and #academictwitter are also great for finding community and solidarity.” (And I would add the MLA Connected Academics initiative as wealth of information on how to find and build supportive career communities.)

Katina hopes that her book will help make sure these conversations are happening early for prospective humanities PhD’s. “I’d love to see the book show up in faculty reading groups so that they can advise students more effectively. I’d love to see a dean of graduate students encourage faculty members to assign this book to first year students as they are coming in. If students are thinking about this from their first year of study, it can change the way that they’re approaching their work to think more creatively.”

Katina’s work makes me hopeful for a brighter, more expansive future for the academy. In the meantime, these insights can be guiding principles for all of us in the midst of seeking out the next step in our career in the humanities.

***

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Author bio: Dr. Molly Appel is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Penn State University. Her research explores how literature works a space of teaching and learning for human rights and social justice in the Americas. You can find her on Twitter @mollyappel.

This blog post continues our new series, Scholar at Large, written by an academic exploring both the traditional tenure track, and the not-so-traditional alternative academic job market.

In my first post about broader career exploration, I discussed three things I would do to get in touch with the non-academic job market. One of those items was setting up an informational interview. To wade into the waters of informational interviewing and get myself comfortable, I started with more familiar spaces: an institution of higher education and the education-focused non-profit world. What follows is an account of how I approached this interview, as well as how I think my takeaways can help me on both the traditional academic job market and the more expansive job market for PhD’s.

I thought about who and what I wanted to talk about.

This past summer, I worked for the Center for Talented Youth (CTY), a Johns Hopkins-affiliated non-profit focused on gifted education. While there, I met Sean Watkins, who earned his PhD in Media and Communication, with a focus in cultural studies, in 2013. Sean took on a job as an assistant program manager shortly after he defended his dissertation, and has moved into the role of program manager during the past five years. Sean shapes and manages some of CTY’s many summer programs. His job involves a range of tasks, including:

• Curriculum development and teacher training
• Facilitating Hopkins research studies
• Turning new research on child development into summer programming
• Gathering information from and responding to student and family concerns
• And managing full-time and summer staff

Some of this work sounded very familiar to the realm of traditional academia; some of it seemed farther afield. I was interested in hearing more about the extent to which his preparation as an academic translated to this work, and how he managed the transition. Unsurprisingly (given our training as scholars), we ended up talking far more broadly about trends he’s observed in how academia graduate programs prepare graduate students as young professionals.

“You can’t continue to have that number of folks in your programs and not train them how to get the jobs that they will end up getting. It’s a disservice to not only their experience but also to the world, because us PhDs actually have really great things to contribute outside of academia.”

I spent time preparing for the interview and what I wanted to learn.

I used my baseline familiarity with Sean’s work to develop some questions that would help me understand his trajectory, and how that translates to the work he’s doing now. I developed questions related to:

• His educational path and work experience prior to CTY
• His job search process and experience
• His transition to working at CTY
• How the work he trained for translated to the work he does now
• What graduate students, and graduate programs, can do to better account for non-academic or non-traditional academic careers

I had four major takeaways after talking with Sean.

These are a just a few of the insights I gained during the course of our conversation. I’ve included an edited version of Sean’s comments with each point.

1. The work you do in graduate school—and more importantly, the work you love to do—can translate to the impact you can make in the world more broadly.

Much of Sean’s work draws from the same interests that drew him to and through graduate school. He emphasizes the difference as a matter of impact. His interests have complimented the needs of CTY: “One of the things I valued in my graduate programs was being in an environment of folks wanting to learn, to push themselves, to do the research and have discussions about it. I’ve recreated some of those experiences here at CTY.” Related to his work on diversity, Sean has run film series, reading and discussion groups. “Today,” he says, “I’m looking at research on summer camps and supporting LGBTQ students. But I’m doing so while knowing that I’ll be implementing that research for thousands of students. So I’m using my Critical Marxist framework for thinking about the world; but I’m not just thinking with that framework, I’m doing something with that framework.”

Beyond implementing his research interests and methodologies, Sean has been able to draw from his experience with teaching as a graduate assistant. “I happen to be working at an ed nonprofit,” he says, commenting on how that work prepared him. “I’m the chair of the humanities and writing committee, we develop curriculum, I’ve developed a bunch of new classes over the time that I’ve been here. Being the lead instructor in a classroom has really helped me here think about the needs of our instructors and students.”

2. But… academia can teach you some bad habits for being a professional.

Sean explains, “I was a person who went straight through grad school. There’s a benefit to that – I was 28 when I got my PhD. One of the things I wish I’d had more experience doing was having real jobs. I got too many bad habits in academia.”

The truth is, he says:

“I had these expectations of myself and others that came down to feeling full of myself because I’m a PhD. When I first began my work here, I felt like I was in a position where I could be the leader when I really wasn’t. I didn’t know anything.

You get a lot of good things from your PhD program – you learn to articulate complex thoughts, to argue for what you believe in. But this doesn’t translate to using Excel in a job, and doesn’t translate necessarily for how to manage people. When you’re an academic, you can basically do your own thing. I developed bad habits for how I communicated with my students that are standard for academia, but that don’t translate to how you communicate with colleagues. I can’t be like the busy professor sending one-word answers over email; I have to set a conscious model for how professionals communicate with each other.”

Sean also remarks on how his work now has led him to reflect on what his graduate training missed, as well as helped him continue to grow the skills he began honing in graduate school in new ways. “It’s been a mutual relationship,” he explains. “I wish I could go back and redo some of the teaching I did as a graduate student. My pedagogy would be more differentiated, less elitist, and more understanding of students and the competing priorities they juggle. Now part of what I do is teach people how to teach, and I help them think through how to modify what they do for our population. The things I now train teachers to do, I wasn’t good at because no one taught me how to teach.”

3. There are a few things graduate students can do to more holistically prepare themselves for the professional world.

Sean encourages folks with PhDs or training for PhDs to let go of their elitism about how and where they apply their skills and knowledge. “We can use our knowledge to do different things and that’s okay, it’s not the end of the world.”

He mentioned a few pragmatic ways grad students and recent PhDs can make themselves legible within the professional world (and enhance the impact of their work at the same time):

• Capitalize on your summer work. “Take summer gigs seriously. Use them to develop yourself as a professional in a way that your PhD program is incapable of doing.”
• Build a broad network of people. “If you want to get a job that pays well in an area that you want to live, you have to know somebody who can help get your resume in the right hands.”
• Branch out and dabble in things, or connect your research to something that could be translated into a job. He gives an example from his own field of cultural studies: “I’m going to focus on health communication, and use a survey of a hospital as part of my research. You can then say, ‘I spent all of this time working with administrators and health professionals – I know how to talk to them.’”

4. Grad programs can do a better job of helping students with this.

Sean observes that many of the people in the primary position of mentoring undergraduates into grad school went to grad school themselves or experienced the job market back in the 90s. Folks who are charged with admitting and training graduate students (and now, preparing them for other potential options in the glut of the job market) haven’t been outside of academia in decades. This makes the crucial shift in mentality about academic careers very difficult.

“There should be value given to whatever path someone’s career takes them in,” he urges. “As grad students are told to be data-driven; programs also need to be transparent with the realities of what comes next.” Sean suggested bringing career services into departments: “It would have been nice to have a class on professional training, or even on exploring jobs outside of the typical academic track.”

After this conversation, I’m convinced that informational interviews are great, low-stakes opportunities for growth.

Aside from a rich and thoughtful conversation with a colleague, I gained two tangible things from my interview with Sean that I can leverage on the academic and non-academic job market:

• Insight about what kinds of soft and technical skills I may have developed through my research that I can be more aware of.
• An ability to speak very specifically about how the work of the humanities enters the world – something that goes beyond the “critical thinking” pitch we so often throw at undergraduates to take our classes. I can bring my knowledge of this to any department invested in recruiting students as well as equipping their majors or graduate students to enter the the broader career world.

I’m optimistic that continuing to do a variety of informational interviews will only add to these outcomes. These interviews will prove to be rich and thought-provoking conversations about how to be a holistic practitioner of the humanities, whether within or without the academy.

Have you taken steps to explore the alt-ac market while on the academic job market? Share your insights with me on Twitter (@mollyappel).

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Author bio: Dr. Molly Appel is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Penn State University. Her research explores how literature works a space of teaching and learning for human rights and social justice in the Americas. You can find her on Twitter @mollyappel.