On Wednesday November 17th, 2010, I spoke to graduate students at Carleton University about careers after grad school. This post is based on part of what I said.
It is directed not only to graduate students but also to the faculty that advise them.
For most doctoral students, the tenure-track position is the daisy in this photo.
The focus on the tenure-track job informs a lot of advice they get.
- Advice about what kinds of part-time jobs to take to fund their studies.
- Advice about how they should disseminate their findings.
- Advice about who they should be networking with.
In some cases, doctoral candidates wonder if their supervisor will stop giving them the support they need to write a strong dissertation and get the PhD if they admit that they are considering anything other than that daisy of a tenure-track position.
There is a lot more stuff in the field in that photograph.
The focus on the daisy makes it look like so much green background but if you shift the focus, all sorts of different plants would be visible: grasses, other small flowers, even trees and shrubs.
In contrast, when we look at a box of chocolates, we don’t have the same impetus to focus on one and fade out the rest to background.
We don’t think there is one kind we are all supposed to like better, and anyone who eats the other stuff only does so because someone better than them got the good one.
Maybe you like the hazelnut cremes better than anything else in the box, but you wouldn’t think less of me for preferring the dark chocolate covered toffee.
In fact, most of us like the fact that other people have different tastes in chocolate. It means that we can avoid the hazelnut cremes and still feel good about it because we know that someone else absolutely loves them.
Shifting the focus
It is my strong belief that the purpose of a PhD is not to prepare the next generation of academics. A significant minority of PhDs have always gone on to non-academic careers. Some of them, like Benoît Mandelbrot, have even done ground-breaking, discipline-shifting abstract research in those non-academic careers.
In the current climate, it is downright irresponsible to treat students as if a tenure-track academic position is the only acceptable outcome of a PhD.
Being a professor is a really good option for some people, an okay but not great option for others, and a downright disaster for others. It has nothing to do with how brilliant they are.
Neither the student nor the supervisor is a failure if the student does not pursue (or secure) a tenure-track position after finishing the PhD.
This post was edited July 9, 2015.
I agree wholeheartedly!
And, as a current graduate student, I’ve been really wondering what can be done to change the perspectives of the advisors, directors, and chairs who DO think preparing us for the T-T is their only responsibility. In my experience, citing stats about the job market, etc. have done nothing. (When confronted with the fact that 50% of PhDs don’t have academic plans, my DGS said that it “just wasn’t true” — based on the people she knew.)
…Although I guess I’m assuming such change is even possible, heh.
One thing that could be done is to just leave them to the primary thing you need them for: ensuring that you do good quality research and submit an acceptable dissertation.
On one level it is none of their business what you do after you graduate.
Go talk to people in the Careers Centre (or whatever it is called in your institution). See what they have to offer. See if they have resources to organize events like the one I spoke at this week. Or events in which alumni in a variety of careers come to talk to current students.
Or use the resources of your graduate student association or the graduate student caucus of your scholarly association to organize events that address these issues. Or even to organize informal discussions amongst like-minded graduate students.
These are also good vectors for disseminating information about alternative careers.
Start rumours among the students that it’s really okay. And that these other people, outside the department, are helpful.
Ah, these are great suggestions — some of which I’m happy to report I already do, and others I will keep in mind.
I have definitely been trying hard to connect with other like-minded grads and “starting rumors that it’s okay.” (Such a great way to put it!)
Thanks for also pointing out the extent to which all this might be none of their business. I’ve been operating under the assumption that it WAS or, at least, SHOULD BE. But this is a far more liberating idea.
Hi Jo et al.,
As someone who has been both a PhD student and a PhD supervisor within the past 10 years, I want to say something here: professors aren’t career counsellors, though grad students often expect and ask them to be. My job is to help you get a degree. I can advise about the academic job market, because that’s what I know–at least I knew it when I was on the market (an important caveat). To get sniffy about the fact that we only advise students about getting tenure-track jobs and not other sorts of jobs, as grad students sometimes do, strikes me as silly. Would you expect a butcher to give advice about how to be a baker? If you want advice about jobs outside the academy, go to someone outside the academy for it.
Also, there is this prevalent assumption that we will be cross with our students if they don’t want academic careers. While I obviously can’t speak for all supervisors, frankly, I don’t care what PhD students want to be when they leave grad school. In fact, many of our grad students *shouldn’t* pursue academic careers and we struggle with how to tell them that gently. My students have told me I’m a good supervisor, but I can’t say I lose any sleep over my students’ career plans; I have a life of my own, a husband, a household, a child, friends, research, my courses, an administrative workload to worry about. Instead of realizing that my own PhD supervisor had a life of his own, all I did–along with my fellow students–was kvetch about my supervisor’s inadequacies and how little I got from him (I actually got a lot, but didn’t realize that until I had to provide the same service). If you think your supervisor will be upset if you pursue a tenure track job, you might be assuming you play a more prominent role in the centre of their universe than you actually do. Your supervisor is not supervising you because they love you as their child and want you to join them in the family business; they’re supervising you because it’s one *small* part of their job. The fact is that supervisors are far more important figures in students’ lives than students are in supervisors’ lives.
Moreover, I can *only* help a student get a tenure-track job. Perhaps the assumption that supervisors lose interest in students who don’t want tenure-track jobs stems from this. My connections and my knowledge may help you in your quest for a tenure-track job, if you want one. If you don’t want a tenure-track job, I can’t help you much. This isn’t me punishing you for wanting a different sort of job. I can only offer the resources I have, right?
So, for any students who are reading this and are thinking of pursuing a career outside the academy: please, be my guest. If your supervisors get really upset about it, they need to get their own lives–but chances are, they already have their own lives, and they’ll get over it if you want to be a baker. But don’t expect them to teach you to bake.
I think that’s a bit of a cop out Ms Whelan, because what you’re saying is that you can only teach your students to bake (to use your metaphor) and not anything else. I don’t think that’s really true. Also, that means you are unable or unwilling or both to expand your role as an advisor and see what else you might be preparing your students for. You must do some of that at the undergraduate level already when students ask what their degree will be good for (ya, I hate that too) so why not do it for graduate students?
Perhaps your department also needs to ask that question of itself and examine what it’s offering. This is not merely a foray into crass commercialization, but a reality check of where your graduates go when they’re finished and what they accomplish. That will provide faculty with a truer sense of what indeed they’re preparing their students for–academic careers, independent researchers, university administration (that would be me), publishing, hospital research, policy analysis, banking, coaching, etc. etc. etc.
And, I expect not everyone you know is an academic. While that might be your primary employement network, I bet you have a financial advisor, a friend in banking, contacts in university administration, perhaps a collaborator in government who can all be part of teaching your students more than baking…
I did receive some of this mentoring from my advisor who had several careers before academia, but did a lot of it on my own. Just knowing that I didn’t HAVE TO be a faculty member did give me permission as it were to see what else I could do with a PhD and I didn’t have to feel bad about it.
Hmm, it’s actually not a cop-out; it’s a fact. I only have so many hours in the day, and while I do what I can for my students, I would find the notion that I should be spending even more hours of an already overextended work day (when I’m not on mat leave as I am now, which is why I have time to write this in between feeding and diapering my kid) finding out how to advise students to do jobs I have no idea about positively laughable–it is wasn’t so infuriating. Do you have any inkling, “Stephannie,” just how many jobs professors are expected to do nowadays? How much work has been downloaded to us by the administration? How much effort we are expected to put into our teaching, our grantsmanship, our research? How many forms we have to fill out? How many e-mails we get on a daily basis? How little time we get to spend with our families? How much all of this has changed and increased in the past 20 years? And now you think we should be general career counsellors as well? Good luck with that. Jo has instructed me to focus on making my best contribution, the one I’m most talented at, and say no to the others. Advising students on how to be bakers is not my best contribution, so here goes: No! (that felt good) But I can tell students where the career counsellor’s office is, and she’s very good at pointing students at resources about how to be bakers. She does a session with my graduate seminar, as a matter of fact, and I have an academic colleague with a past in the field come in and talk about policy careers. I’m also good at encouraging the students to do their own networking, because chances are they themselves know “a financial adviser, a friend in banking,” etc. etc. themselves that they can talk to (I actually don’t have friends in those industries–and if I did, would you seriously expect me to refer every grad student who comes through my door with doubts about academic jobs to my personal friends for career advice? How long do you suppose I would have those friends if I did that?) I don’t take all this on myself, not being a superhero and all, and–this is important–not being one to make false promises to people. You now have research skills, which your supervisor has taught you–you can use them to find out about the career you want and the kind of people you want to be like, if it isn’t or can’t be your supervisor.
It’s true that students who don’t pursue academic careers fall off the radar, which I think is normal, and that some academics and departments denigrate students who pursue non-academic careers, which I think is terrible and irresponsible. Perhaps you need to choose your programs and supervisors carefully for these very reasons. But just as you got more attention from your professors as an undergrad when you signalled your intention to pursue graduate work, versus your fellows who decided to quit at the BA and get a job or go into a professional program, so grad students who plan to follow in their advisers’ footsteps will get more attention and generate more pride than ones who go off into another field that has nothing to do with the advisers. Of course. Perhaps one of the issues here is how graduate students can stop needing approval from and worrying so much about what their advisers think of them. As a PhD student, I found it troubling that we students so often seemed to court the approval of supervisors, to wait for them to talk to us at departmental parties, to laugh at their lame jokes (even as we bitched about them behind their backs). Grad students need to stop making heroes of their supervisors and expecting them to live up to completely unrealistic expectations of service. Supervisors need to stop getting their ego gratification from their students, and need to stop thinking they can teach a student to be a baker.
That said, I’m thankful that I have reasonable graduate students who don’t expect me to devote my existence to getting them a job in an industry I do not work in, but expect me to be the best graduate program supervisor I can be in the time I have available, to commiserate about the miserable state of the academic job market, and support whatever decisions they make as the capable adults they are! Which I do with pleasure, thank you very much. As one of the other posters said, career counselling should be left to the professionals; academics are bad at it. And as Jo constantly reminds us, academics can’t be expected–by ourselves or others–to be good at everything. Grad students shouldn’t expect us to be, either.
It’s true: our advisors are (probably) going to have limited experience with other professions or even alternative academic career tracks. And I agree that in this context, they are not a good resource for graduate students (like myself) who are trying to explore their options, since they just don’t have the first-hand knowledge.
My problem, however, is that these decisions (on the part of grad students to move outside of academe) are highly stigmatized; in my department, at least, it’s very much the case that anyone outside of the T-T is a “failed academic.” They are literally erased from departmental memory (i.e. they are not included on the website listing the jobs of PhDs from my program.) Stigmatization, failure, and disapproval is the clear message from both the director of the grad program and the chair of the dept. In my view, this is unacceptable — not only for the way it effects grad students struggling with these decisions, but also for the humanities as a whole. If even its practitioners find “no use” for the humanities beyond the relatively small sphere of the tenure-track, how can we expect others to see the value of our training and knowledge?
(Oops, sorry for the rant/tangent.)
I think that a supervisor is expected to provide guidance and mentorship as a student works to receive their PhD. The supervisor’s actual ability/resources to facilitate mentorship for non-academic career paths (in my experiences) largely depends on the kinds of research they’re doing, and the related professional/academic communities they swim in. Where a supervisor is regularly involved in non-academic activities (e.g. government report writing, independent auditing of corporate functions, working within community organizations, etc etc) then they can introduce their student to this broader non-academic community. Along with these introductions might include ‘if you’d like, student X, you can assist me with A and B tasks.’ They might also “just” be introductions, and the student gets to sink or swim on their own from that point. Either approach is acceptable to my mind.
This said, there will be some academics who do not operate in a wide community outside of the academy. Their research methods may intentionally limit interpersonal contact between the researcher and researched subject. They might be scientists working in a particular field that has limited corporate interest, social scientists who keep a remove from the objects of study, of members of the humanities who may spend less time ‘in the field’ and more writing alone somewhere. To expect that academics who are less invested non-university research environments and practice should be as helpful in finding non-academic careers as the previously mentioned socially involved academics is unfair to them.
Perhaps, then, students should be mindful of the following questions: What do I want my PhD for? What is the 5, 10, and 15 year plan for myself?
In thinking through both of these questions *before* searching for supervisors, students might better align themselves with appropriately resourced faculty. Are you entirely certain, no matter what anyone tells you, that there IS a tenure track job waiting for you somewhere, and that you’ll stop at absolutely nothing to chase it? Then find a supervisor who is going to encourage and nurture those skills, while introducing you to a cohort of hiring faculty to increase your chances when you’re job hunting. A little more on the fence? Then choose a top-notch academic who also is well known outside of the academy for work that sounds interesting. Then you can get assistance for career hunts in both worlds. Just want to apply your work outside of the academy? Then find a supervisor who can support that.
Some of this is hard – it involved asking hard questions of prospective supervisors before the supervision process itself begins. These also aren’t the ‘normal’ things that prospective PhD students look for in their advisor, but tend to only realize after the fact. It’s important that the students realize their own needs early on, and that they find faculty who can successfully guide them while providing for those needs.
I think degrees should include more career development elements, but we have to ask who could do it and how it could be done.
I believe that faculty are the least qualified to give ANY career advising. Very few faculty have had real jobs and they have little idea what current employers want from applicants. Furthermore, my experience is that professors aren’t even qualified enough to prepare students for academic jobs. Most profs were hired years or decades earlier and none seem to understand the current job market… e.g. there are no jobs….
The real problem is the misguided belief that faculty in fact can provide career advice and that they are asked for it, which they freely give. Faculty should stop doing this as they often end up giving career advise that is incorrect, outdated, and worse, given for ulterior motives, such as to recruit new advisees.
Instead, students should be encouraged at every step to make use of career centers. This needs to somehow start at the dept level – for example, appoint in every dept a position for career advising who, I’d hope, would make the effort to become a useful resource for students. Career advice really needs to be discipline-specific on some level.