"So What Are You Going to Do with That?": Finding Careers Outside Academia, Third Edition - Brossura

Basalla, Susan; Debelius, Maggie

Brossura

ISBN 10: 022620040X ISBN 13: 9780226200408

Casa editrice: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Riassunto

Graduate schools churn out tens of thousands of PhDs and MAs every year. Yet more than half of all college courses are taught by adjunct faculty, which means that the chances of an academic landing a tenure-track job seem only to shrink as student loan and credit card debts grow. What’s a frustrated would-be scholar to do? Can she really leave academia? Can a job outside the academy really be rewarding? And could anyone want to hire a grad-school refugee?

In this third edition of “So What Are You Going to Do with That?”, thoroughly revised with new advice for students in the sciences, Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius—PhDs themselves—answer all those questions with a resounding “Yes!” A witty, accessible guide full of concrete advice for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world, “So What Are You Going to Do with That?” covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to how to translate skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate. Packed with examples and stories from real people who have successfully made this daunting—but potentially rewarding—transition, and written with a deep understanding of both the joys and difficulties of the academic life, this fully updated guide will be indispensable for any graduate student or professor who has ever glanced at his or her CV, flipped through the want ads, and wondered, “What if?”

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Informazioni sull?autore

Susan Basalla received her PhD from Princeton University. She is a principal with Storbeck / Pimentel & Associates, LP, an executive search firm specializing in higher education. Maggie Debelius, who also received her PhD from Princeton University, is director of faculty development and an associate teaching professor in the English Department at Georgetown University.

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"So What Are You Going to Do with That?"

Finding Careers Outside Academia

By Susan Basalla, Maggie Debelius

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-20040-8

Contents

PREFACE, 
INTRODUCTION, 
1. Will I Have to Wear a Suit? Rethinking Life After Graduate School, 
2. How Do I Figure Out What Else to Do? Soul-Searching Before Job Searching, 
3. Asking the Big Questions: How to Figure Out If You Want Them and If They Want You, 
4. This Might Hurt a Bit: Turning a CV into a Résumé, 
5. Sweaty Palms, Warm Heart: How to Turn an Interview into a Job, 
CONCLUSION, 

CHAPTER 1

Will I Have to Wear a Suit?

Rethinking Life After Graduate School

Hearing that there is a universe of post-academic careers open to you can be more intimidating than reassuring. Following the academic track into an assistant professorship at least offers the comfort of a clearly defined path and plenty of fellow travelers. But if you venture outside academia, you are on your own. You may not even know anyone who works in the "real world." How are you supposed to decide where you belong?

While people in all kinds of professions wish for a clearer view of the career path ahead, graduate students and faculty members face some obstacles particular to academia. There's peer pressure from other academics, who think that leaving the profession means "failure"; there's personal and family angst over the large amount of time and money you've spent earning an advanced degree; and there's an annual job market that means long waits between job-hunting attempts. Whether you're 100 percent or only 10 percent sure that you should be in academia, taking a little time to explore what else is out there will help ensure that your choice is informed by desire, not habit or tradition.

We don't want to talk you out of an academic career—it may be exactly the right choice for you, and the professorial life has some wonderful benefits. But because there are few voices out there to support those who are a little unsure, a little curious, or just plain stuck, we want to be your guides to exploring other possibilities.

You might accuse us of glamorizing life outside academia. But, hey, we've lived there—we know perfectly well that some days are miserable, some bosses are unbearable, and some jobs are just plain awful. But instead of emphasizing the negative, we've chosen to tell you about people who've worked their way through a maze of sometimes boring, usually low-level jobs to land in careers that are just right for them. And if we tell you about people who've succeeded against long odds, then it should be all the easier for you to picture yourself landing a "not perfect but a step in the right direction" kind of job.

Whatever you decide to do with your future, we want you to make a conscious choice. Former Columbia University English professor John Romano points out that while academic careers are considered to be the "safe" road to take after graduate school, the traditional approach carries more consequences than most PhDs realize. "Following tradition and taking that job at a small college in rural Nebraska is as risky as anything you do outside academia," he explains. In his own career, Romano turned down a job at a well-respected university because he feared its rural, small-town environment would cut off his escape routes to other careers. Romano advises current academics to remember that "it's too easy to drift into academia, but at the same time, drifting into it is also making a choice.... The fact that you are good at one thing doesn't mean you have to do it for the rest of your life. You may be good at other things, too, and never know it."

* * *

HOW CAN I EXPLORE OTHER CAREERS WHEN MY PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR OWNS MY TIME?

Every time we give a talk on campus, we inevitably hear from one of the biology or chemistry grad students in the audience: "You say that we should take a few hours a week to explore other careers, but that's impossible for me. My principal investigator (PI) is my employer and he owns all my time." We turned to Samantha Sutton to address this myth. Sutton earned her PhD in neurobiology from MIT and then decided to put her skills to work as a life coach for the Handel Group, where she works with graduate students, postdocs, and principal investigators at places like Stanford, MIT, the National Cancer Institute, and the Scripps Research Institute. Here's her response to this perennial complaint:

Every grad student claims that the PI is policing the lab. They don't. I talk to PIs all the time. They are so busy, they have no time to police the lab. They are giving talks, teaching, traveling, serving on search committees. How often do you even see the PI in the lab? It's a myth, like alligators living in the sewer. Everyone says, "No, mine really checks that we're there," but they don't. Try it—stay home sick one morning. Does the PI notice? When you sign up for grad school, you really aren't committing to every waking hour in the lab.

Still not convinced? Alice Ly, former Associate Director of Postdoctoral Affairs at Yale and a developmental neurobiology PhD, agrees that your PI is not paying as much attention to you as you might think. She discovered that once she told her PI that she was thinking about careers outside academia, her PI offered to help her network with contacts at pharmaceutical companies. But yes, some PIs are more reasonable than others. Ly advises testing the waters with your PI by, for example, mentioning that you're thinking of attending an upcoming talk about post-academic careers and seeing how he or she responds. Ly also suggests thinking of your evenings as your personal time to explore other activities, whether personal or professional, to help you figure out your strengths and interests outside the lab.

Ultimately, however, it's up to you. "It all depends on how motivated you are," says Shaohua Zhou, a consultant for Gallup Consulting who earned his PhD in developmental and cell biology at University of California–Irvine. "Nobody ever has enough time. It's true whoever you are. Nobody does. If you want something, you sleep less." Zhou is living proof of what can be accomplished during graduate school as he launched several start-up companies while earning his degree. It took him longer to finish his doctorate, he acknowledges, but the tradeoff was intentional because he knew that he wanted to build up his entrepreneurial experience along the way. No matter what your goals are, the excuse of not having enough time just doesn't hold up, according to all the scientists we interviewed. If you want to find the time, you can do so, but the decision is yours.

* * *

Romano himself took a big chance when he decided to leave Columbia to try a screenwriting career in Hollywood. Instead of writing the book that he needed to get tenure, Romano wrote a screenplay and began sending it out to movie studios. While the move was risky both personally (he had a wife and young child) and professionally, Romano's gamble paid off; he made it to Holly wood, where he's written for both movies and television. He credits Charles Dickens—the subject of his dissertation—with helping him understand how to write the modern version of popular serial fiction. Some of his career highlights include writing and producing such shows as Hill Street Blues, Party of Five, and Monk.

Getting Your Head Ready

We've given talks to graduate students at a dozens of universities since this book was first published, and in doing so we've learned that the greatest obstacle to a PhD's employment outside academia lies inside his or her own head. The emotional and psychological issues that leaving academia conjures up for most graduate students are a far greater barrier than employer indifference or lack of relevant skills. Leo Simonetta, a PhD in social psychology and former faculty member who now works outside the academy in survey research, explains that the very nature of academia makes leaving difficult. First, the path from graduate school to a professorship seems clear, but the tight job market means only a few PhDs will reach that destination, which is extremely frustrating. Second, many graduate students fear that searching for a post-academic job is a tacit admission that their years in graduate school have been wasted. And finally, Simonetta notes, academics tend to stereotype those who work outside the academy as greedy and materialistic, making a difficult decision even harder for those contemplating a change of career.

Another major concern for graduate students is a fear of losing one's identity. An anthropology graduate student from the University of Michigan, Karen Rignall, describes herself as "terrified and tormented" at the thought of leaving her program:

I was afraid that I was quitting, that I was weak, that I couldn't finish anything. I loved Morocco and feared that I'd be giving up my relation to the place since I was supposed to do my field-work there next year. I was studying for generals at the time, and feared that I was copping out. I'd built my identity around these books I'd read, these people I know, and I thought that no one else would understand me—I'm unique. I worried that I would no longer know what the newest development in theory is, and I wouldn't be able to talk to anyone.

Rignall's fears were not realized. After a year outside academia, "I got over my elitist sensibility and learned that I don't have to talk through theory books to relate to someone," she says.

A former graduate student in philosophy, John DeSanto, worried that he didn't have the skills to get a post-academic job. Combining his story with Rignall's illustrates how graduate school teaches us simultaneously to overestimate and underestimate our abilities. As DeSanto sees it: "You get used to feeling like a nothing in grad school. You don't realize you could do more. A friend who left my department two years before I did tried to tell me that it was okay to leave, but I just didn't hear her." DeSanto left his program to work for Cycorp, a Texas-based artificial intelligence company founded by a former philosophy professor and staffed by dozens of former philosophy grad students. Happy in his new career, he found that "I talk about philosophy at work these days more than I ever did in grad school."

For others, the decision to leave academia revolves around less dramatic, but no less painful, questions about trading quality of life for a long shot at a tenure-track job. Anne-Marie Cziko was only two years into her neuroscience PhD program at the University of Arizona when she began having serious doubts about pursuing a tenure-track position. "I started meeting people who were on their second or third postdoc. That worried me. And then I met a postdoc who was so brilliant—he lived and breathed science—and had several publications but struggled to land a job. And then when he finally did get a tenure-track job, he lost his funding a few years later." Cziko decided to finish her degree even though she knew she wouldn't become an academic: "I love science but I wasn't sure that I wanted to give up everything for it." Cziko ultimately created her own position with a Los Angeles nonprofit focused on K-12 education by offering to help them incorporate basic principles of neuroscience into their enrichment programs.

Faculty members who decide to leave tenure-track or tenured positions for post-academic careers face a different set of concerns than grad students, of course, but many of the emotions are similar. Alexandra Lord, a British history PhD, found a tenure-track job with an ideal two-two teaching load at Montana State University soon after finishing her dissertation. Although she was lucky to find a job in her field, she went on the market again immediately as the isolation of living in Bozeman (made worse by the fact that she did not earn enough to afford a car) caused her to question whether the sacrifices academia required were worth the rewards: "Gradually, I realized that I had given up all the things which had made me want to be a historian (museums, bookstores, archives, theater, etc.) simply so that I could be a professor teaching kids who were, at best, only marginally interested in British history." Lord, who now works as a historian for the National Park Service, says, "I should have acknowledged that I didn't like academia earlier, and I should never have listened to people who told me that only losers leave academia."

Whether you are a faculty member or a graduate student, some of your concerns are unique to academia, but others are common to most working adults. Absolutely everyone has to make tradeoffs when they accept a job. Maybe the hours are too long but the pay is good. Maybe the commute is short, but the work is not that interesting. Maybe the work is wonderfully satisfying but pays too little. And once you think you've got it all figured out, you have to do it all over again because your much-beloved boss has been replaced by a hard-headed tyrant and now your dream job is a nightmare. Ultimately, we can't give you any simple answers on how to avoid having to revisit these big life questions from time to time, because we haven't figured the final answer for ourselves (and neither has anyone else).

As John Romano told us, academics who ask him for career advice "seem to want answers as institutionalized and direct as academic life. But the world isn't that clear-cut. You must improvise." Alice Ly, who advised doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows in her role as Associate Director of Postdoctoral Affairs at Yale, agrees. "Science students need to sit down and derive their own answers based on their own wants and needs, not on external factors like what others are doing, or what is expected of them," she said. Graduate students often wanted her to tell them what to do with their lives, but she would say, "I can't decide for you. While you might not know all the possibilities that are out there for you yet, you do know what you like and what you don't like, what you do well and what you don't do well." Ultimately, whatever your field or stage of career, these life decisions are deeply personal. It's your life, and only you can decide how to live it.

Should I Finish My Dissertation?

Among the many fears that can keep a distressed graduate student in the humanities or social sciences awake at night, the biggest one is usually: Should I finish my dissertation or not? (And sometimes the question emerges even earlier: Should I quit before even starting my dissertation?)

Sean Boocock struggled with the question of whether to finish after completing a year in the philosophy doctoral program at Notre Dame. It slowly dawned on him that he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in academia, and the realization was traumatic. "For most of my life I had identified with a tenure-track academic career. I was so focused on the academic career path that I had lost sight of possible alternatives after graduate training, and more importantly what made me happy; there was always the next rung of the academic ladder to focus on," he recalls.

He learned that philosophy was not what he thought of every morning when he woke up, that it wasn't what motivated him. He had a "growing realization that school felt more like an obligation" than a satisfying endeavor, he explains. Eventually he left Notre Dame for an MA program in Computer Science at the University of Southern California where he focused on video game design. He has since launched a successful career as a game designer with Electronic Arts and looks back on leaving his doctoral program without regret.

While we can't tell you the right answer about whether to finish your degree, we can tell you that you don't have to torture yourself by trying to decide on an absolute "yes" or "no." Instead, concentrate on taking control of your progress in the short term. This may sound like we're calling for some sort of grad student revolt; we're not. We're just trying to correct the over-inflated idea most grad students have of their adviser's investment in their progress. Admit it: you've probably had nightmares in which your adviser has wreaked Godzilla-like havoc on your tiny studio apartment. As a young civil engineering professor told us: "It was a surprise to me when I became a professor to see how wrong I was about my adviser's level of interest in me. I wish my grad students well, but I don't stay up at night worrying about them or calculating how fast they're working."

Many graduate students we interviewed talked about feeling held captive by a slow-moving or indecisive adviser. One humanities student described how his adviser's behavior caused him to leave his program A.B.D. ("all but dissertation" completed). Although the grad student was writing steadily, his adviser took a year to read each chapter he produced and then things got even worse:

After two years of work on my dissertation in one direction, my advisers pulled the rug out from under me. If graduate school were a company and they were managers, they would've been fired long ago. I was in my seventh year—it was awful. When they told me I was going to have to start over, I thought, "I'm going to have a nervous breakdown and I don't even have health insurance."

Based on his experience, he advises other grad students to beware of "letting sluggish advisers pull you off track." If he did it all over again, he says, "I'd be smarter about it, tougher about it. I'd treat grad school more like a job—work nine to five and meet my adviser with some pages every Friday."

Maybe such time-clock discipline is unrealistic for you. The key here is to unfold that road map for yourself and not let your adviser do all the navigating. Asserting yourself may cause a little friction, but in general your adviser does not have as much interest in you, or power over you, as you imagine. For example, one professor confided to us that she feels relieved whenever one of her grad students announces that she or he won't be going on the market for the third or fourth time. "It's a tough market," she acknowledges, "and I'm glad that they have decided to escape the cycle."

And ultimately, your life is your own. As Katja Zelljadt, a PhD in history who now works as associate director of the Stanford Humanities Center, puts it: "At 30 years old, you're an adult in any other context. It's frightening to me how infantilized graduate students can become. It's your life and you have to make yourself happy. It's remarkable how hard it is for some people to come to the realization that they don't have to live their lives to please their adviser. If you feel you don't have control over your life, then that is the issue you need to address."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from "So What Are You Going to Do with That?" by Susan Basalla, Maggie Debelius. Copyright © 2015 Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 022620040X
• ISBN 13: 9780226200408
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 3
• Numero di pagine: 161
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile