How does my experience and training as a graduate student matter?
This was the fundamental question addressed at the Humanists@Work conference in San Diego, a one-day event sponsored by the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). Geared towards UC Humanities and humanistic Social Science graduate students, the event provided guidance for those considering careers beyond academia. Through interactive workshops, panels, and collaborative activities, attendees sought to weld together the necessary skills of career preparation with their work as young scholars. Over 75 graduate students from all of the UC campuses – including 31 students sponsored by UCHRI – attended the event, which sought to foster frank conversations about the experiences of current graduate students.
Below you will find recaps of each part of the conference – Stories from the Field, Exploring Options for Humanities Ph.D.s, The Art of the Informational Interview, and Don't Call It a Template: Unraveling Your Resume's Purpose, Content, and Design – as well as links to related resources and videos.
This panel of recent UC Humanities Ph.D.s shared their stories as humanists at work in the world – in government, educational consulting, public humanities program management, and university administration. Panelists discussed their transition from the academy to other sites of work, reflecting upon the ways they integrated their doctoral training with their career interests. Here is a list of the panelists and some of the questions they fielded:
Adam Lowenstein received his Ph.D. in English from UCLA in 2011 and spent a year lecturing full time in the English Department before joining an education startup in San Diego called Summa Education. Adam is now the Vice President of Counseling and Enrollment at Summa, a position which allows him to work closely with middle and high school students as they navigate their idiosyncratic paths to college and career.
Sarah Rebolloso McCullough is the Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities at UC San Diego. Prior to this position, she received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from UC Davis and wrote about what the bike boom of the 1970s can teach us about the relationship between nature, technology, counterculture, and innovation.
Natalie Purcell earned her Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Sociology in June 2011, and she is currently the Patient Centered Care Program Director at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center – a full-service health care system serving over 40,000 patients in seven Northern California counties. Natalie is also a faculty member in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UC San Francisco.
Q: What conversations were you having in grad school that set you up for these post-Ph.D. opportunities?
Natalie: At UC Santa Cruz, there was a lot of openness and support. Grad students were not being channeled exclusively into a tenure-track position. I found many people who were willing to support me on my journey. However, opportunities like this [Humanists@Work] workshop weren’t available, and my committee members didn’t necessarily have the resources to support me to take a non-academic path. A lot of time you have to seek out where the expertise for non-traditional positions is located in the university. Adjunct faculty and lecturers can be a good resource.
Adam: As a grad student, I felt constrained by the lack of conversation about the state of the profession. The bottom line is, it’s about how you can translate what you do into a job. You’re not going to vocational school, so you have to evaluate your skills and your training yourself. We need to find other narratives to talk about humanities education and career paths, because the reality is that many of us do have educational debt and it does matter to have a paycheck. I wish professors would openly discuss alternatives. There needs to be more engagement with the ironies and realities of being in a graduate program.
Q: How do you develop your professional network since grad school can be so isolating?
Adam: Get everyone’s contact information here!
Sarah: Doors open when you remain curious. When you’re trying to curate the small amounts of time you do have, do it in the direction of things that drive you.
Natalie: You don’t always know what a job will be in advance, but you have to figure out ways to bring your training and experience to the job to make it more meaningful to you and those you work with. Make your own workplace as livable as possible and add value to your employer. Open up the space for conversations that didn’t exist in that environment before.
Q: How do you deal with an academic culture that looks down on Alternative-Academic (Alt-Act) or non-professorial careers?
Adam: It’s not like my committee wasn’t supportive, but they almost went mute on the issue. They may have no idea how to help grad students how to navigate this reality, so universities need to have more training for faculty mentors and advisors.
Sarah: By maintaining relationships with your colleagues, particularly those that go on to do work outside the university, you can help validate intellectual work that is more applied.
Q: How do you deal with bias outside of academia against those with Ph.D.s?
Natalie: I don’t think that having a Ph.D. is ever a bad thing in the job market. It’s all in how you’re describing what you’re capable of and what your skill set is. You bring this set of skills that’s really desirable because you’ve done research, teaching, analysis, and public speaking. These skills are widely marketable.
Q: Did any of you mourn your academic career?
Adam: I didn’t feel much grief about not landing an academic job. But there were lots of peaks and valleys and uncertainty along the way. It was helpful to have a supportive network. There is an element of luck to it, but you have to be open to and actively looking for opportunities. Persistence is key. Maybe also shredding your dissertation in some ritual of extradition.
Natalie: My mourning happened later because I was initially excited about going into the public sector. Once I realized that I didn’t get to set my own research agenda and ask my own research questions, I wanted to find a way to re-engage with that, and I am still searching. I negotiated with the VA to drop down to part time and got a research position at another university. Maybe this bridge didn’t exist before but I’m going to try to build it.
Sarah: You will always be an intellectual. Keep coming back to that, and you’ll find that even the most mundane tasks can be reframed in research-centered ways.
Related Resources:
Presidential Management Fellowship Program
National Association of Independent Schools
EXPLORING OPTIONS FOR HUMANITIES PH.D.S
Workshop with Dr. Debra Behrens
Work Values Inventory (PDF) – Values are an important part in the career decision-making process. It is important to select career options that best fit your values. Use this worksheet to discover your core values as well as your ideal types of work environments, interactions, and activities.
Related Resources:
Pathways Program – Program for recruiting students and recent graduates into federal service
Idealist – Job listings for non-profit organizations
The Ladders – Career match service
THE ART OF THE INFORMATIONAL INTERVIEW
Workshop with Dr. Debra Behrens
DON'T CALL IT A TEMPLATE: UNRAVELING YOUR RESUME’S PURPOSE, CONTENT, AND DESIGN
Workshop with Jared Redick
(Video from 2014 workshop in Berkeley)
Some takeaway points from the workshop:
- The first step in the job search process is to do career research without preconceived notions. This is where informational interviews can come in particularly handy, but most of this research will be done online through websites such as Google, Indeed, LinkedIn, and GlassDoor.
- Be your own advocate and stay open to diverse possibilities. Some people take degrees off their resume and that really goes against the grain of what Jared was trying to do because you’re trying to build and display your body of work through your resume. You have a story to tell; it’s just a little bit harder to tell it and you need to find the people that will value it.
- Organize your resume into core themes that connect with the job ad. Draw these categories from your job description analysis (link to materials below) and put them into “buckets” that organize your experience and skills.
- Get specific when describing the core skills you have demonstrated in your prior experience. Instead of saying “I am a great communicator,” say “I have presented X number of times” or “I have taught X number of classes/workshops/etc.”
- Quantify when possible. How many years? How many people? How many languages? How much revenue?
- Pro-tip from converting CV to resume: Put all the important/relevant things that won’t fit on a resume on a resume addendum and/or on your LinkedIn profile.
- How can we make visible (and valuable) the often-invisible work of being a grad student? Some ways to account on a resume for the hard work of dissertating:
- Source compilation, integration, and synthesis
- Grant writing
- Committee coordination/team management
- Data collection, annotation, and analysis
- Field research
- Travel to different communities/countries
- Clearance and compliance management
- Conduct interviews
- Applied quantitative and/or qualitative methods
Job Description Analysis Materials - As a career planner/changer, you’re looking for the intersection between your experience and what the market wants. You’re looking for unifying ideas or common themes that appear in the various descriptions. An analysis of job descriptions you’re interested in will give clues about what to address in your job application documents (i.e., your resume and cover letter), and how to focus your talking points during your job search. You will eventually build your story around these keywords and phrases.
Author’s Note: I would like to thank UCHRI and UCSB’s Graduate Division for their support of my trip to Humanists@Work. I would also like to thank Kelly Anne Brown for her insight and collaboration.