It’s not uncommon for me to hear from my former students that are now pursuing graduate degrees. They often contact me to ask for help with the same issues they faced as an undergraduate staring down graduation. They have questions about career plans, PhD programs, finishing projects, and applying to jobs. Unfortunately, finishing a graduate degree can be just as stressful as finishing an undergraduate degree. I want to end this book with some guidance for those students. This chapter is certainly not exhaustive, but is built around some the biggest challenges facing graduate students at the end of their degree programs.
The Only Good Thesis is a Done Thesis
The same applies to a dissertation. Most of grad school is a band aid. It hurts while it’s being pulled off, but the pain immediately stops afterward. Your major project will hurt, but you’ll be fine as soon as it’s done. Many, many, many students get lost in the thicket of the major project and never end up finishing their degrees. This point never quite sticks for beginning students. They are thinking “impossible! There’s no way I wouldn’t finish this degree!” Of all the potential pitfalls in a graduate program, though, this is the most common and severe. It also (typically) has nothing to do with a person’s intellectual ability or work ethic. The major project ends up becoming something very different to each writer.
Finishing the major project signals the end of the degree, and, for many, the end of the student life. When that part of your life is ending, it can be very uncomfortable. For many graduate students, school is the one thing they are good at, and has perhaps been the one stable aspect of their lives. After many years of doing great work in school, that performance can become a cornerstone of identity. At the cusp of completing the major project, it can appear as though that part of a student’s identity and self-worth will disappear, leaving them with nothing. A lack of appealing job prospects can also make this transition seem unappealing. Many students are reluctant to give up the life of a graduate student where your only expectations are to teach, attend classes, and write. There’s a lot of freedom in graduate school, and transitioning into a traditional work environment can look like a major step backward. These are all legitimate feelings, and they are all justified, but it’s important to finish your project. Don’t reinvent the wheel. The only good project is a done project. Write that on a sticky note and attach it to your monitor.
Keeping Up with Colleagues
At this point, you have experience soliciting letters of recommendation from faculty for your graduate school applications, but now is the time to shift your thinking towards the long term. You will possibly need letters of support in the future for a variety of reasons. Immediately, you will need them to get jobs, but it’s also a good idea to think about cultivating some long-term relationships with colleagues. Notice that I didn’t just say faculty here. The people I met in my graduate program have become life-long friends, and often colleagues. These people might be able to clue you in on job opportunities, write you letters of support for promotion, or share the costs of a hotel room at a conference. Students tend to think of their graduate programs as being “finished” as soon as they submit all the outstanding paperwork, but I urge you to adopt a longer view. These relationships can benefit you professionally and personally. Take some time as you are finishing up a degree to celebrate within reason. Go to a few parties, talk to your cohort, talk to your professors. These relationships need attention, and it’s easy to sacrifice them to the goal of completing your program in a timely manner.
Navigating the Job Market
Whether in a masters or doctoral program, you will face two basic choices when leaving a graduate program: academia or industry. I would sub-divide this further into academic vs. Non-academic work. What really matters is the approach to positions. If you are seeking an academic position, your cover letter and CV must adhere to those standards. Any job that isn’t instructional/research in nature will adhere to more conventional rules about cover letters and resumes. You might be interested in both kinds of positions, and that’s fine. Just know that academic job search materials are their own particular beast. Expect to put quite a bit of time and energy into the job search process. If you are interested in pursuing work in academia, I recommend reading Karen Kelsky’s The Professor is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job. This book is written toward PhD students, but the sections on job documents (which are the strongest sections in the book) will apply to anyone looking for academic work. There are also some useful resources on looking for work outside of academia. There is a small collection of books on the subject, but I would recommend starting with Kelsky and then working your way on to others. As always, there is a ton of mostly-reliable information scattered across blogs, but I think there’s enough in one or two academic job search books to begin serious work.
If you are interested in non-academic work at a university or other kinds of jobs, you would need to produce a traditional cover letter and resume. Your career services department should provide some assistance there, but also look for help in other places like a university writing center. The key here is to get your materials evaluated by a wide range of professionals.
The alt-ac (alternative academic) industry is growing rapidly as individuals choose non-academic forms of employment. As these people exit academia in greater numbers, the amount of resources devoted to making this transition increase. My own field has several popular blogs that give real-world advice for locating a range of jobs post- graduate degree. These resources are often geared towards the private sector (which moves much quicker than academia), and can help you to draft a range of job documents quickly and easily. There is also a growing trend of alt-ac coaching services where and individual can pay for help with career counseling and the production of job documents. There is an ongoing debate about the usefulness and ethical dimensions of these services, but I think they are worth exploring. The key is to locate resources geared towards the kind of positions you are interested in pursuing.
Finding Your Own Path
When I entered graduate school, there was a kind of “professorial” narrative, a story about how people found their way into an academic job. The great majority of professors that I met shared a similar story. They pushed through graduate school, found a dream job, and then remained in that position for their entire career. I’ve met an astounding number of academics that have only had a single full time job in their lives. A great majority of those people have done one formal job search across their career. Survivorship bias colors these narratives. Many professors, over time, begin to view themselves as geniuses that were able to negotiate the process of getting an academic job with ease. Over time, they attribute their success to their own cleverness, hard work, and innate ability. I’ve been on enough search committees to see the ludicrousness of those beliefs. The whole process of seeking employment is often a numbers game, and that’s especially true in academia. After being surrounded by these narratives, though, it can be easy to believe them, to think “I’ll surely get a job! I’m super smart and dedicated!” I began to assume that my life would look like the lives of my professors, that I would interview at several schools, but quickly find my own dream job.
During the last year of my PhD, I applied to over 100 positions. I spent 4 hours a day for the better part of 12 months working on applications. Fairly quickly in my job search year, I had a Skype interview with one school that went very well. The whole interview became more of a conversation, and, by the end, we were all joking with one another and swapping teaching stories. The search committee chair called me about an hour after my interview to set up a campus visit, and the search chair finished the call by saying the committee had a great time talking with me, and they knew immediately that I was going to be a finalist. This is about the most encouraging result one can hope for after a first-round interview. I traveled to this campus and had a strong interview. My job talk went over extremely well, and my teaching demonstration was competent. The search chair drove me to the airport (a 45 minute drive), and we discussed the courses I would be teaching in fall. When I got out of the car at the airport, he extended his hand and told me to expect a job offer in a week. I remember thinking that this was my path, and that I had found my way into that professorial narrative.
One week became two, and two became three. Finally, the chair called to say their top choice had just accepted the offer, and my reality was shattered. Months later, when the dust had settled, I googled to see who they ultimately hired: it was an individual already working as a professor. They were moving from a well-known program to a smaller teaching school. This candidate was well-published, and had an excellent teaching record, not to mention 3 years of experience working in one of the best programs in the country. In retrospect, I never stood a chance.
I interviewed with several schools during that period, but I saw many red flags and bad working conditions. On one particular search, a member of the committee told me that I should not accept a job from this institution (“turn and run for your life” were their exact words). At another school, I noticed a disturbing trend: faculty members had nothing in their offices. Empty book shelves in an English faculty member’s office is a rare, unusual sight. Finally, one faculty member confessed that people there hated being in the office, and only came in when absolutely necessary. At yet another interview, only one person showed up for my job talk. Customarily, these events are well attended by a broad cross-section of a department. In this particular case, the lone search committee member told me that it was just too early to expect a good turnout (it was 8 am), and they would communicate the quality of my presentation accurately to the rest of the team. At still another interview, I settled in to answer questions from faculty. The first question was “what kind of dish would you bring to our semesterly potluck?”
Options were quickly moving from bad to worse. I also didn’t have any offers and graduation was approaching. The emotional roller coaster of that search process was enough to drive me to some alt-ac options. After struggling through graduate school for years, I was done. I started sending applications to a variety of places, and was gearing up to enter the non-academic job market. At that point, any option seemed better than enduring this nonsensical system. I finally interviewed with one program that I liked. The people were nice and the program was competently run. With barely a week until I was unemployed, I received a job offer. This isn’t to say that everyone in grad school that works hard will end up with a job offer. They often won’t. What I do suggest here is that the academic job market is hell, and many people I know that simply walked away are now perfectly happy, only rarely expressing regret that they didn’t secure a full time position. Distance from that process has brought me perspective. If my university shut down tomorrow, I would likely be done with academia. I love what I do, but I also know that I can find work doing what I love in a variety of industries. The professorial narrative, for me, was more legend than reality.The recession has irreparably harmed higher education in the United States. I’ve seen barely any reversal of course in most states in regards to funding and support. As a Dean once told me, there is no light at the end of this tunnel (I am editing this chapter at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, and this observation seems doubly true). This is the new normal of higher education. If you do plan on pursuing labor in higher education, know that there is no longer any such thing as a typical journey. Your own personal journey might involve any number of steps, cross country moves, and positions. Your story is your own.
