Category: transition

#alt-ac · #post-ac · good attitudes about crappy possibilities · grad school · job market · mentoring · openness · PhD · reform · student engagement · students · transition

From the Archives: Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me During My PhD

melissadalgleish1 Comment

The new school year is well underway, and so is the work I do with our Career Development Committee, a group of graduate students, postdocs, and research associates (who are very much like the STEM world’s version of contract academic faculty). The CDC’s mandate is to provide career development education that helps students and fellows find awesome non-academic careers, and they’re very good at it.

Their big fall event, Career Night, is happening tonight. They bring in 10 alumni or other graduate-trained people in their networks and then do what is in essence a series of short informational interviews. This time, we have everyone from an assistant provost to an academic acquisitions editor, with people from regulatory affairs, government policy, small-business ownership, research administration, and industry science also in the mix. A small group of students and fellows chat with one of the invitees for 25 minutes about their graduate training, their career path to the present, and what advice they have for others looking to move into a non-academic careers, and then they switch, and switch again.

By the end of the night, each person has had a chance to talk with three professionals, and to mingle and network with as many more as they want during the open part of the event. I wish I had access to a similar event during my PhD, and that I had gotten some of the good advice I know my students and fellows are going to get during Career Night. I know I’m not the only one, so here’s what I hope people learn tonight that might also be useful to you, or your students.

***

1. Be Realistic, and Open, About What Comes After Grad School

In the recent America-wide survey by Duke University graduate student Gregory Brennen, the data showed that 83% of graduate students started their PhD expecting to become a tenure-track professor. This is in stark contrast with the current data on how many PhDs actually end up in tenure track jobs—most estimates suggest that fewer than 50% of PhDs end up in any kind of academic job (that includes contract teaching) and that only between 15% and 25% ever secure tenure track jobs. Given this reality, graduate students need to prepare for, and embrace, the multitude of possibilities open to them after they complete their degrees. And they need to remember that being an academic is just a job, and that the are tons of interesting, fulfilling jobs doing other things. Mine is a good example.

2. Make Strategic Decisions About What You Do During Your Degree

 

As a friend kindly reminded me after I kept claiming that I got lucky in ending up in my job, we make our own luck. What seems random is actually, when you look back, a series of strategic decisions that lead to a whole host of post-degree opportunities. In my case, that strategic decision was to take a research assistantship in lieu of teaching during the fourth year of my PhD. While many PhD students fund their studies by teaching, and that’s a wonderful opportunity for people who are looking for careers in education, that may not be the best choice for people who are looking to do other things and need a different set of skills. These other opportunities are also extremely useful academically. Research or graduate assistantships are a big one to consider, as is doing an industry-partnered internship with Mitacs. So might be going on an international exchange, or selecting a graduate co-op program (which UBC now has in English, and Aimee tells me Waterloo is going to develop.) In my case, the research assistantship, researching graduate student professional development programs, let me develop the skills, knowledge, and experience that got me my job as a Research Officer.

3. Take Advantage of the Resources Available on Campus

As grad students, it’s easy to believe that most of the student support services available on campus are there for undergraduates, but that is emphatically not the case. There are a myriad of resources available on most campuses to help graduate students make the most of their degrees, to help them navigate the academic job market, or to help them transition out of academia or into an #alt-ac or #post-ac career. The Career Centre is a great place to start, and they can provide assistance with academic and non-academic job searches; Advancement can often connect grads with alumni in the fields they’re interested in; most Canadian universities now have graduate student professional development programs that offer a whole host of workshops and seminars; Mitacs offers a full suite of free transferable skills workshops; and many faculty members can, sometimes surprisingly, provide guidance and support in the search for jobs in and outside of the academy. It can be scary talking to faculty about plans to abandon the tenure track–believe me, I know–but the culture of silence around #alt-ac and #post-ac transition isn’t going to disappear until we all start talking about it.

4. Consider Creating A Shadow C.V.

One of the most important things graduate students can do to demonstrate to people outside of the academy that they have the needed skills is to have evidence that you’re capable of working outside of the academy. Especially for PhDs, the assumption that we’re overeducated and lacking in practical skills can be hard to overcome without demonstrated outside experience, and having at least one example of non-academic work experience to put in a resume can go a long way toward helping graduate students mentally connect the skills they’ve honed as a graduate students with those that crop up on job postings, and to help overcome the feeling that there’s nothing they’re qualified to do but be a professor. People have started calling experience developed alongside academic work, but not included in academic documents, a “shadow C.V.” In my case, I took a year off between my Master’s and my PhD to work in publishing and continued tutoring and editing throughout my degree. Other people I know have done summer placements, taken part-time jobs, done industry-partnered internships, or created web-based consulting and writing firms that allow them to work on their own time.

6. Learn How to Talk About Your Skills and Research to People Outside of Academia

Academese and English can sometimes seem like two different languages, and this is a major barrier to people with graduate degrees trying to make their qualifications and research make sense in contexts outside of the academy. It’s only natural. Communicating highly specialized research to non-academics isn’t a skill that most academics at any level practice all that much, other than the inevitable attempts to explain your work to your mother, or to someone you meet at a party. This is certainly changing, though. But opportunities to practice do exist, and graduate students should take advantage of them: compete in the Three Minute Thesis; take workshops on clear language writing; practice translating research into non-specialist language. Doing this can seem very non-intuitive for grad students, especially for those who have been academe for a long time, but once they learn how to do it, the relationship between what they do as academics and what shows up in job postings often becomes painfully obvious, as does the potential impact of their work outside the academy. This is, as a side benefit, and increasingly strong focus for many granting agencies, a number of which also now require clear-language or lay research summaries.

7. Think About What You Really Want to Do

Many PhD students are committed to being professors without actually knowing what the life, and the job, of a professor is really like. Our archives here at Hook & Eye can be pretty illuminating. Parts of it match up closely with the starry-eyed dream, but others definitely don’t. Meetings are endless and often frustrating. Grading is a slog. The pressure to publish and get stellar teaching evaluations can be debilitating. Students are disengaged. Service takes up far more time that people realize, and there’s never enough time for research and reflection. Graduate students should be figuring out what it is they really love about academia, and thinking about other jobs that might let them do those things more. The book So What Are You Going to Do with That? includes some fantastic exercises, ones that helped me realize that the things I love to do and am good at doing–coordinating, facilitating other people’s work and success, communications, writing, mentorship–are key components of all sorts of #alt-ac and #post-ac jobs, including my current one.

8. Think About What You Really Don’t Want to Do

As PhDs, we’re indoctrinated to believe that we should be willing to give up everything for a tenure track job. At some point, I shrugged that indoctrination off and made a list of the things that were more important to me than tenure: I didn’t want to move, wait until I was 40 to have kids, spend most of my life grading papers, spend multiple years as a contract professor, or write things that no one would ever read. For me, those were pretty convincing reasons to give up on the idea of becoming a professor, which requires total mobility, limits reproductive choices, requires far more teaching than research for most people, and mostly values journal and book publications that most people won’t read. The most important thing I had to convince myself of–and that we must tell graduate students, over and over–is that choosing where to live, desiring to have a child without worrying about compromising doctoral work or chances at tenure, refusing precarious employment, are totally legitimate life choices that are okay to voice aloud, despite the tendency of academia to suggest that if you aren’t willing to sacrifice your whole life, even your whole identity, to being an academic, you’re a second-class citizen. It broke my heart, in a good way, to have a whole gaggle of female Queen’s students come up to me after my talk and thank me for saying out loud that my desire to have kids before I was 35 was a factor in my decision making. It is for many people, and that’s something that should be discussed openly.

The other important part of this equation is to get graduate students talking to people they know in academia and outside, and find out from them what their jobs are really like. So long as we perpetuate the belief that academia is the only worthy place of employment, and that a professorship is the only truly fulfulling and engaging job, graduate students will ignore a whole host of career possibilities that might be a much better personal and professional fit.

9. Don’t Conflate Who You Are With What You Do

This is an obvious one, and a hard one to avoid–but if graduate students can avoid the trap of believing that they are academics, and that if they don’t get to continue to be academics they’ll be nothing, they’ll save themselves a horrible and painful identity crisis if the time comes that the professoriate becomes an unobtainable dream. A professorship is just a job. It is not a vocation, or an identity, and graduate students are so much more than the single career option the academy tells them is worthy.

10. Enjoy the Ride
 

Getting paid to read for comps. Taking classes totally outside of your area because you can. Auditing things purely for interest. Debating theory over far too much wine. Style-stalking your favourite professor. Choosing conferences based purely on location. These are some of the best parts of grad school, and they should be relished, and they often aren’t because PhDs are too busy conferencing and publishing and professionalizing and shadow-CVing and comparing themselves to all of the other PhDs they know. Yes, those things need to get done (minus the last one) but statistically speaking, the chances of getting to stay in academia on a permanent basis are slim. Enjoy the ride while it lasts.

***

So, dear readers, what do you think? What advice would you give to current graduate students facing the reality of a terrible academic job market? What advice do you wish you had gotten during your PhD?

#alt-ac · #post-ac · learning · transition

I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, and I’m Okay with That

melissadalgleish

I’m nearing the end of the second week of my new job at the SickKids Research Institute, and I’m starting to feel a little less like I know nothing. I’ve scoped out a great place to eat lunch, I’ve figured out the coffee situation, and I don’t get lost anymore on the walk between the hospital and the Institute. I understand the acronyms most of the time, and the way that the Institute is organized mostly makes sense, and I’m getting a pretty good sense of all the things I need to be keeping on top of.

The view from my favourite spot on the 19th floor. Better when it’s not pouring rain.

But I still feel so strange.

Despite my vast experience with impostor syndrome–which, funnily enough, almost completely disappeared once I moved onto the administrative side of academia, but plagued me on the scholarly side–I’m generally used to feeling like a competent, knowledgeable person. At York, I was the go-to girl for information and policy clarification and getting stuff done. I was very good at my job, and I left with lots of success under my belt. But now, I feel incompetent, unknowledgeable, not at all on top of my game. I have to check with my admin assistant on the answers to basic questions. I need to ask for context and the history on just about every program and initiative our Centre currently has running. Every face is new, every system just enough different from the ones I was using before to trip me up, every action deliberate and thought out rather than automatic.

It’s really good for me.

Aimee wrote awhile back about becoming a student again when she entered yoga teacher training, about the doubled-consciousness that comes from remembering what it’s like to be on the other side of the desk. There’s lots to be said for experiencing what it’s like to be the new person, especially when a good part of my job is figuring out how we can make the transition to SickKids a more seamless one for our students and postdocs. Trainees, as we call them in science (and living in science world as a confirmed humanist coming from a humanities-focused university is a whole other level of new that I’ve yet to fully process), have to figure out how to negotiate all of the various structures and policies of SickKids when they come over to work at one of our many labs. And those structures and policies are just different enough from the ones they’ve already learned to negotiate at their university to trip them up. I know, because they’ve tripped me up, despite having successfully figured out how to navigate four different universities since I first started in higher ed fifteen years ago. Understanding what it takes to figure out the complex structures of the Institute and how to effectively work within them is going to make me way better at identifying and responding to the needs of the trainees, especially the need to make all of this more transparent and easily navigable.

Aside from letting me serve our trainees better, feeling like a total n00b is just plain old good for me. I come home every day feeling completely juiced up about all of the new information I’m learning, whether it’s mundane or a big deal. So much so that after about ten meetings on Tuesday to meet and hear from various people with whom I’ll be working, I came home and almost immediately fell asleep–my brain needed to process that badly, despite the fact that it was my birthday and I quite wanted to do something fun. As a gal who loves to learn, I’m in heaven. And not knowing quite where to step makes me step carefully, really pay attention to what’s going on and where I fit into it, be considered rather than (probably unadvisedly) jumping right in. It’s also rather nice to have a work story to tell my husband that he hasn’t already heard fifteen times.

In a meeting with our senior manager recently, I remarked on how odd it sometimes was to be on a career trajectory so different from the academic one. If I were to be making a 5-year plan as a new assistant professor, it would probably read something like “be doing the same job I’m doing now, just with tenure.” But now, what I could or want to do five years from now, within the SickKids organization or elsewhere, is far more open and uncertain. Like being the new person in the office, that can be a little scary, but it’s also really exciting. I don’t know what I’m doing five years from now, and I’m totally okay with that. I’ll take it over feeling like there’s nothing I can or want to do any day.

#alt-ac · #post-ac · good attitudes about crappy possibilities · grad school · job market · mentoring · openness · PhD · reform · student engagement · students · transition

Things I wish someone had told me during my PhD

melissadalgleish8 Comments

I was invited, about a month back, to give a talk at Queen’s University to a mixed group of grad students, adjuncts, faculty and staff on hacking your graduate degree for maximum post-PhD flexibility. I hosted a similar session for some students at my university today. The point of the talk is that graduate students can make strategic choices about the opportunities they pursue during their degrees,  and that these opportunities can help them develop a variety of skills, a strong professional network, and a compelling body of work which can make it easier for them to pursue a variety of career paths inside and outside of the academy. What I wanted to do was have an honest conversation about the things I wish I had known during grad school, things that would have made my time there even more enjoyable and productive, and that would have made my eventual transition onto the #alt-ac track (both mentally, and literally) more seamless and painless. And how does one hack one’s graduate degree, you might ask? Here’s my advice. (Do note that it places the onus on graduate students, who were my original audience. The conversation about what faculty and administrators should be doing, and about why some of this shouldn’t be the responsibility of our PhDs, is for another day.)

1. Be Realistic, and Open, About What Comes After Grad School

In the recent America-wide survey by Duke University graduate student Gregory Brennen, the data showed that 83% of graduate students started their PhD expecting to become a tenure-track professor. This is in stark contrast with the current data on how many PhDs actually end up in tenure track jobs—most estimates suggest that fewer than 50% of PhDs end up in any kind of academic job (that includes contract teaching) and that only between 15% and 25% ever secure tenure track jobs. Given this reality, graduate students need to prepare for, and embrace, the multitude of possibilities open to them after they complete their degrees. And they need to remember that being an academic is just a job, and that the are tons of interesting, fulfilling jobs doing other things. Mine is a good example.

2. Make Strategic Decisions About What You Do During Your Degree


As a friend kindly reminded me after I kept claiming that I got lucky in ending up in my job, we make our own luck. What seems random is actually, when you look back, a series of strategic decisions that lead to a whole host of post-degree opportunities. In my case, that strategic decision was to take a research assistantship in lieu of teaching during the fourth year of my PhD. While many PhD students fund their studies by teaching, and that’s a wonderful opportunity for people who are looking for careers in education, that may not be the best choice for people who are looking to do other things and need a different set of skills. These other opportunities are also extremely useful academically. Research or graduate assistantships are a big one to consider, as is doing an industry-partnered internship with Mitacs. So might be going on an international exchange, or selecting a graduate co-op program (which UBC now has in English, and Aimee tells me Waterloo is going to develop.) In my case, the research assistantship, researching graduate student professional development programs, let me develop the skills, knowledge, and experience that got me my job as a Research Officer.

3. Take Advantage of the Resources Available on Campus

As grad students, it’s easy to believe that most of the student support services available on campus are there for undergraduates, but that is emphatically not the case. There are a myriad of resources available on most campuses to help graduate students make the most of their degrees, to help them navigate the academic job market, or to help them transition out of academia or into an #alt-ac or #post-ac career. The Career Centre is a great place to start, and they can provide assistance with academic and non-academic job searches; Advancement can often connect grads with alumni in the fields they’re interested in; most Canadian universities now have graduate student professional development programs that offer a whole host of workshops and seminars; Mitacs offers a full suite of free transferable skills workshops; and many faculty members can, sometimes surprisingly, provide guidance and support in the search for jobs in and outside of the academy. It can be scary talking to faculty about plans to abandon the tenure track–believe me, I know–but the culture of silence around #alt-ac and #post-ac transition isn’t going to disappear until we all start talking about it.

4. Consider Creating A Shadow C.V.

One of the most important things graduate students can do to demonstrate to people outside of the academy that they have the needed skills is to have evidence that you’re capable of working outside of the academy. Especially for PhDs, the assumption that we’re overeducated and lacking in practical skills can be hard to overcome without demonstrated outside experience, and having at least one example of non-academic work experience to put in a resume can go a long way toward helping graduate students mentally connect the skills they’ve honed as a graduate students with those that crop up on job postings, and to help overcome the feeling that there’s nothing they’re qualified to do but be a professor. People have started calling experience developed alongside academic work, but not included in academic documents, a “shadow C.V.” In my case, I took a year off between my Master’s and my PhD to work in publishing and continued tutoring and editing throughout my degree. Other people I know have done summer placements, taken part-time jobs, done industry-partnered internships, or created web-based consulting and writing firms that allow them to work on their own time.

6. Learn How to Talk About Your Skills and Research to People Outside of Academia

Academese and English can sometimes seem like two different languages, and this is a major barrier to people with graduate degrees trying to make their qualifications and research make sense in contexts outside of the academy. It’s only natural. Communicating highly specialized research to non-academics isn’t a skill that most academics at any level practice all that much, other than the inevitable attempts to explain your work to your mother, or to someone you meet at a party. This is certainly changing, though. But opportunities to practice do exist, and graduate students should take advantage of them: compete in the Three Minute Thesis; take workshops on clear language writing; practice translating research into non-specialist language. Doing this can seem very non-intuitive for grad students, especially for those who have been academe for a long time, but once they learn how to do it, the relationship between what they do as academics and what shows up in job postings often becomes painfully obvious, as does the potential impact of their work outside the academy. This is, as a side benefit, and increasingly strong focus for many granting agencies, a number of which also now require clear-language or lay research summaries.

7. Think About What You Really Want to Do

Many PhD students are committed to being professors without actually knowing what the life, and the job, of a professor is really like. Our archives here at Hook & Eye can be pretty illuminating. Parts of it match up closely with the starry-eyed dream, but others definitely don’t. Meetings are endless and often frustrating. Grading is a slog. The pressure to publish and get stellar teaching evaluations can be debilitating. Students are disengaged. Service takes up far more time that people realize, and there’s never enough time for research and reflection. Graduate students should be figuring out what it is they really love about academia, and thinking about other jobs that might let them do those things more. The book So What Are You Going to Do with That? includes some fantastic exercises, ones that helped me realize that the things I love to do and am good at doing–coordinating, facilitating other people’s work and success, communications, writing, mentorship–are key components of all sorts of #alt-ac and #post-ac jobs, including my current one.

8. Think About What You Really Don’t Want to Do

As PhDs, we’re indoctrinated to believe that we should be willing to give up everything for a tenure track job. At some point, I shrugged that indoctrination off and made a list of the things that were more important to me than tenure: I didn’t want to move, wait until I was 40 to have kids, spend most of my life grading papers, spend multiple years as a contract professor, or write things that no one would ever read. For me, those were pretty convincing reasons to give up on the idea of becoming a professor, which requires total mobility, limits reproductive choices, requires far more teaching than research for most people, and mostly values journal and book publications that most people won’t read. The most important thing I had to convince myself of–and that we must tell graduate students, over and over–is that choosing where to live, desiring to have a child without worrying about compromising doctoral work or chances at tenure, refusing precarious employment, are totally legitimate life choices that are okay to voice aloud, despite the tendency of academia to suggest that if you aren’t willing to sacrifice your whole life, even your whole identity, to being an academic, you’re a second-class citizen. It broke my heart, in a good way, to have a whole gaggle of female Queen’s students come up to me after my talk and thank me for saying out loud that my desire to have kids before I was 35 was a factor in my decision making. It is for many people, and that’s something that should be discussed openly.

The other important part of this equation is to get graduate students talking to people they know in academia and outside, and find out from them what their jobs are really like. So long as we perpetuate the belief that academia is the only worthy place of employment, and that a professorship is the only truly fulfulling and engaging job, graduate students will ignore a whole host of career possibilities that might be a much better personal and professional fit.

9. Don’t Conflate Who You Are With What You Do

This is an obvious one, and a hard one to avoid–but if graduate students can avoid the trap of believing that they are academics, and that if they don’t get to continue to be academics they’ll be nothing, they’ll save themselves a horrible and painful identity crisis if the time comes that the professoriate becomes an unobtainable dream. A professorship is just a job. It is not a vocation, or an identity, and graduate students are so much more than the single career option the academy tells them is worthy. 

10. Enjoy the Ride

Getting paid to read for comps. Taking classes totally outside of your area because you can. Auditing things purely for interest. Debating theory over far too much wine. Style-stalking your favourite professor. Choosing conferences based purely on location. These are some of the best parts of grad school, and they should be relished, and they often aren’t because PhDs are too busy conferencing and publishing and professionalizing and shadow-CVing and comparing themselves to all of the other PhDs they know. Yes, those things need to get done (minus the last one) but statistically speaking, the chances of getting to stay in academia on a permanent basis are slim. Enjoy the ride while it lasts.

***

So, dear readers, what do you think? What advice would you give to current graduate students facing the reality of a terrible academic job market? What advice do you wish you had gotten during your PhD?

#alt-ac · collaboration · community · emotional labour · jobs · student engagement · transition

On Care and Connection as Guiding Principles

melissadalgleish2 Comments

It’s almost six years later, and we’re still at it. Every three weeks we gather with wine, pounds of cheese, our laptops, a baby or a couple of cats for company, and we talk words. The prompt is usually simple: does this section make sense? is my tone consistent from the material you read last time? I need to cut this article down by half–help! By the end of the night, we’ve usually figured it out. The people whose writing we’ve critiqued feel heard, and talented, and like they know what to do next. But more importantly, we feel connected. We’ve caught up on all of the personal and departmental gossip. We’ve traded recipes. We’ve talked boyfriends and girlfriends and spouses and coming out stories and faculty crushes and teaching techniques and upcoming conferences and why today was a good day. We go home feeling a little glowy, a little giddy, and not all of it is from the wine.

Losing that connectedness was one of the things that I feared most about leaving the PhD, but it was also the thing I knew I didn’t have to fear at all.

Creating more of those connections–a community of care, of support, of mentorship, of collegiality–is one of the best parts of my administrative job. It’s also one of those that I’m most committed to. I was collaborating with one of our technology services people on a project today, and he asked me if my role was “student facing.” It took me a minute to get what he meant. When I did, my answer was that in the past it really hadn’t been, but that’s something I’ve been working to change. In the past, the person in my role would most often act as a liaison, or as an enforcer of procedure, or as a conduit for feedback coming from on high. I do those things, but I question the effectiveness of the arms-length approach. I prefer to work with students one-on-one, to coach and to guide and to support. In my portfolio of graduate professional development and the cultivation of our graduate research culture, I rely on graduate students as sources of knowledge about important skills, knowledge that can be shared with other students, and as examples for the rest of the university community of how dynamic and cutting edge graduate research can be.  I love talking to our students about their work. I love cultivating their involvement with the university. I love providing them with opportunities to do more, to do better. I love providing them with chances to create new communities. And I love when the barrier between me as an administrator, albeit one who is simultaneously a student, and them as a graduate student breaks down, and we talk to each other as people, as emergent scholars, as part of the community that shares a passion for ideas and discovery and knowledge.

I like to think that my work is fundamentally informed by an ethics of care. I worry that that’s a feminized approach to my job, that I’m falling into the trap of mothering my students, that care is a bad polestar to guide a career. But I got into graduate admin because I cared about the mental, financial, emotional health of grad students like me, who struggle with negotiating between what the academy thinks it is, thinks is happening for its students, and what the reality of life after the PhD looks like. I opened my office doors to any student who wants to see me because I believe that the personal should take precedence over the procedural. I focus my attention on initiatives that build community among graduate students, primarily because I know first hand what a difference it can make to know that someone cares who you are, how you are, how your work is going. I mentor. I coach. I cheerlead. I give tough love. It’s hard work, choosing the path toward the personal, the intimate, the connected. It takes more time, and energy (particularly emotional energy), and effort. It requires that more effort is focused on fewer people, that energy is concentrated rather than diffuse. It leaves you open to being disappointed, or frustrated, or angry.

But then I think back to the wine, and the cheese, and the babies, and the faces that have surrounded me since the day I stepped through the doors of my PhD orientation. I’ve been so very lucky, and I can’t help but believe that I have a responsibility to help others cultivate the community I’ve been so fortunate to have, to be a part of that community and invite others in. I don’t have to worry right now that my goals for my larger career and my goals for providing students with community, connection, care are in conflict; it might become an issue one day. But until then, I’m leaving my door open and letting care and community-building be my guide. I can’t help but hope it’ll do some good.

#alt-ac · administration · grad school · identity · risky writing · transition

On Being That Which You Question

melissadalgleish1 Comment

It’s been six months, but most of the time it feels like I’ve been in the Faculty of Graduate Studies for as long as I can remember. My days as a full-time PhD student feel like they happened a very long time ago, and a lot has changed. My writing related anxieties (and they were many, and sometimes debilitating) have entirely disappeared, replaced with an affection for my dissertation and the writing process that brings me much joy. No longer worried about making myself attractive on the job market as a Canadianist, I’m delightedly pursuing my other academic passion, which is writing, reading, and talking about doctoral reform, graduate professional development, and post-PhD pathways. I have a decent professional wardrobe, and I finally figured out a quick but put-together hairstyle (a.k.a. have been too busy to get a haircut and it just happened to grow out nicely). Instead of frequently being the oldest person in the room, surrounded by students, I’m quite often the youngest, and more often patronized than I would like. I usually identify myself as a fellow PhD student when I’m working with graduate students, but not when I’m working with other staff. I have people to delegate to, and wish there were more of us to share the work. I’ve seen inside the sausage factory, as Kim Yates delightfully puts it in her great essay about taking a staff position post-PhD, and I’m only mildly horrified.

Some things, however, remain much the same:

1) Impostor syndrome doesn’t just go away when you change jobs (file this under “things I knew but chose not to believe”), and it has cropped up in all sorts of weird places. Like at our monthly Research Officers meeting where my predecessor, now in a different Faculty, commented that my pay band was totally out of line. I was just about to chime in with “I know! I can’t believe what I make!” when she continued “they SO don’t pay you enough. That job is hard.” Oh. Or when I presented at a big provincial conference for higher education professionals earlier this month and worried that I would reveal that I was doing my job totally wrong, and then found out that I was doing it pretty much like everyone else, and pretty damn well for someone who is learning everything as she goes. Or when I was invited to give a talk at another university and realized that I get to take a train (my favourite thing!) and be away from the office for the day and get paid for it (rather than, as with conferences, end up in the hole).

2) My academic credibility hasn’t vanished overnight; if anything, it’s increasing in some areas. I’m getting asked to do more invited talks than ever before. I have a major new publication on the books, and I’m working out a collaboration with one of the country’s major advocates for doctoral reform. My academic network is expanding across the border in useful and interesting ways. And perhaps best, I get to do the work, to build the reputation, to do the research, to share the knowledge, without having to reenter the structure of the professoriate. At the same time, I’m realizing that finishing my PhD remains necessary to achieving my #alt-ac goals, which is a good question to have answered.

3) And speaking of vanishing, neither (I’m both pleased and disconcerted to find) has my wariness of academic administration, despite my being firmly ensconced within it. I’m admittedly not very far into the beast–I’m only one step away from our graduate programs on the organizational chart, and when I’m not liaising with the government or other granting agencies, I work directly with graduate students, faculty, and student services. A fair part of my job is teaching, mostly in the realm of professional skills and grant writing. Critiques of administrative bloat, outsize salaries, and blatant self-interest are, for me, in sharp contrast to the leanness of our Faculty’s operations–we have a reputation for being the busiest and toughest Faculty to work in–and just how deeply the folks I work with care about grad student success. Those critiques don’t seem to apply to us.

But then I attempt to mentally picture the structure of the university that sits over my head, in all of its many many layers, and realize that I can’t completely wrap my head around a structure of its size and complexity. I realize just how newly created the positions are of some people I work with (even my position has only existed in its current form since the year I started my PhD), how many of those new administrative positions there are, and how desperately we fought during our last adjunct strike to get two tenure-stream conversions. I hear from Aimée that her office has curtains from 1972 while the administration building at her university is doubling in size. I try to explain to our President’s manager of communications, who started not long before I did, how polarizing a figure he (and his salary, and his car, and his housing allowance) was during our last labour dispute, which was centred on fair compensation and job security for contingent faculty. I see efforts duplicated, resources misdirected, politics getting in the way of getting things done. I work to bring to the table the perspective of graduate students, the people we’re serving, a perspective that sometimes gets lost with a group of people who never were grad students, or who haven’t been one for a long time. And I try to reconcile my long years of being a graduate student, at a university where grads tend to have a critical and indeed antagonistic relationship with administration, with my few months as just one of those administrators. That reconciliation hasn’t happened yet. 

But maybe, as tiring as the internal contradiction can sometimes be, that’s a good thing. I don’t want to become an administrator who forgets what it’s like to be a student. I don’t want to accept the structures and the processes of the university as the status quo if there’s a better way we could do things. I don’t want to feel entitled to my job, or indispensable, when most of my academic friends are still vying for an infinitesimally small number of stable faculty positions. I don’t want to identify as an administrator to the point that legitimate critiques of the structure I’m in make me defensive, or challenge my sense of identity, rather than inspire me to work on the problems they identify. So I’m going to hang on to that questioning, that suspicion, that critical distance, that impostor syndrome for as long as I can. I took this job because I passionately believe in the value of graduate education, and because I want to be somewhere that lets me make a real and tangible difference in the lives of graduate students and in the ways that the academy supports and trains them. And if I can keep on asking those questions, I’ll do those things better.

But remind me to read this in ten years.

balance · day in the life · jobs · organization · productivity · time crunch · transition · work · yoga

Relearning How to Get Things Done

melissadalgleish3 Comments

For the year between my Master’s and PhD, I worked as a sales and marketing coordinator for the Canadian branch of an international academic publisher. As a coordinator, a lot of what I did was, well, coordinate–organize meetings, provide people with support, do marketing and outreach and answer customer emails. There was always a lot going on, a dozen voicemails to be responded to, and I got used to juggling All The Things and making sure that none of the balls got dropped.

And then I went to back to grad school. And instead of All The Priorities, my workload shifted to just about five: reading and writing for each of the three classes I was taking, teaching, and my service commitment (which was often, pleasingly, party planning). Instead of focusing on how to juggle an ever shifting and constantly growing list of things to get done, I was trying to reclaim the focus and concentration I had worked so hard to develop during my Master’s. Fast forward to the dissertation writing phase, and my major priorities narrowed even more: writing and teaching. Life seems pretty simple when your to-do list, on many days, says “work on Chapter Three.”

Fast forward to now, and I’m back where I was when I started my PhD, but in reverse. I’m so used to working on a few large projects, ones with not terribly many moving parts (or with far more people to share the load), that juggling the myriad priorities and tasks of my very busy job can often be overwhelming. And I’m not good at overwhelmed. Overwhelmèdness tends to turn into anxiety, which turns into procrastination, which turns into guilt and more anxiety, which…you get the picture. And can’t afford to be overwhelmed, or anxious, or behind, or guilty–there’s too much to do! And for those of you who are old hat at juggling All The Things as a matter of course (I’m looking at you, parents), and are smiling wryly at my fledgling attempts to seriously Get Things Done–I salute you.

It’s taken me a fair bit of trial and error over the last five months, but I’ve finally figured out a few things that can help take my 9-5 from crazed to calm(ish). Being a bit of an app junkie, some of these solutions are technological, but some are about as low-tech as you can get:

  • I do yoga and/or meditate as soon as I get up in the morning. A friend posted this image on Facebook the other day, and that’s precisely the effect I’m going for with my daily mindfulness practice–less mental clutter to wade through, less anxiety, less distraction. If I also want to do some meditation practice while I’m in transit, I quite like the Buddhify guided meditations that are designed specifically for commuting. 
  • Anything that needs to get done goes in Remember The Milk the very moment that I think of it or someone asks me to do it. It is the only to-do list program/app that works for me. Everything gets tagged by which area of my life it belongs to (Work, Academic, Personal), which project it belongs to, what priority it is, and when it needs to get done. Life is so much lower stress when half my brain isn’t taken up with trying to remember the things I think I’ve forgotten. I subscribe to the Pro version (about $20/year), which means that I can easily view and add tasks on my phone and tablet and they’ll automatically sync to my web and desktop to-do lists. 
  • I keep my desk clean, and I close all my files and turn my computer off at the end of the night. Arriving to a messy desk and a messy desktop makes me feel behind before I’ve even started, whereas a lack of visual clutter (and a pretty desktop background) lets me start the day with a fresh mind and fresh eyes.
  • I check my calendar and my to-do list as soon as I turn on my computer, but I don’t check my email. I’m a morning person, which means that I have to be careful to protect the early part of the day for serious thinking and/or writing work. I try not to schedule meetings in the morning for the same reason. The world is not going to end if I don’t check my email until 10:30 (emergencies are what phones are for), and so I often don’t. I’ve also turned off all of my email notifications, which means that I pay attention to my email only when I choose to.
  • I don’t send emails to people in my office. Ever. Unless they’re working from home, or I need to send them a file. One of the things I love best about my Faculty is the culture of in-person communication. From the Dean down, if someone needs something, they come see you to get it. My Associate Dean and I can often be heard carrying on conversations to each other from our respective sides of the hallway (I like to think everyone else in the office thinks it’s charming). But it helps cut down on inbox clutter, it gives us a chance to connect on a personal level every day, and the walk down the hall is a great change of scenery and of pace (literally).
  • Coffitivity + Songza form the soundtrack of my days. Coffitivity plays coffee shop white noise (which is phenomenal for both creativity and concentration) in the background, while Songza plays whatever I want over top. I work in a traditional-concept office (i.e. my office has a door), but we all always leave our doors open and it’s nice to be able to block distracting chatter (or my colleague’s 70s rock radio station).
  • I take an actual lunch break at the same time every day. Sometimes I spend it chatting with my colleagues in the kitchen, sometimes reading, sometimes going for a walk, but I never eat at my desk, and I never work through lunch.
  • I use the Pomodoro technique, especially when I’m trying to power through a whole bunch of little things that are swarming around my to-do list like a cloud of mosquitoes I’m desperate to escape. It’s amazing how many one-paragraph emails you can send in 25 minutes, and how blessedly uncluttered my to-do list and mind suddenly become.

I imagine that my Get Things Done routine and techniques will shift and change as I continue to more fully inhabit my new role, and as I discover things that work better for me (or stop working). But for now, this combination of tools and strategies leaves me feeling competent, calm, and in control at the end of the day. Or most of them, which is the best I can ask for.

Have any productivity and time management tips and tricks you’d like to share? What keeps you from feeling like someone put your brain through a blender? 

#alt-ac · #post-ac · academic work · parenting · transition

The Damage Done by DWYL

melissadalgleish4 Comments

Did you read Miya Tokumitsu’s “In the Name of Love” this week? I bet you did. It seems like everyone in the circles I run in (probably the same circles you run in, if you’re reading this) read her meditation on the damage done by the creed of “do what you love, love what you do.” The article hit me where it hurts (as the best writing does) in making me realize that even after I publicly admitted the damage DWYL did to my psyche, it’s an idea I still cling to. And why?

In the abbreviated version of the story of my leaving the tenure track, two important people with interesting takes on DWYL got left out. The first person was my dad. I grew up in a house where DWYL was not, at least for my parents, an idea that had a lot of credence. For one, my parents started working and parenting before they were in their twenties, and DWYL wasn’t a luxury that two newly-marrieds trying to raise a baby (and then two) on a single income could afford. For another, my dad knew what it was to be forced to turn what he loved into a career (souping up cars stops being so fun when you work with cars all day), and see that love transformed into the plain old slog of work. I had a friend when I was a teenager who also loved cars, and I vividly remember my dad telling him to do anything but work with cars. Keep it a hobby and keep the love, he said. If I got the same advice from my dad, I don’t remember. Or I wasn’t listening. But whatever he did or didn’t say to me, I’ll tell you this. I did an English PhD because language is what I love, and while my parents didn’t have the luxury of choosing to DWYL, they made sure that I did. Speaking of love, I can finally use the present tense again, because for a long time, language was not what I loved. It was what made me feel anxious and scared and like a big ol’ failure. Now that reading and writing about books is not what I do for a living, I’m far more attuned to that love than I was when I was supposedly doing what I loved as a job. Dad was totally right.

Nowadays, I share my life with someone is totally anti-DWYL, although for different reasons, and his perspective was incredibly important in my journey to quitting the path to the tenure track. My partner reasons that if what you want to do is make the world a better place, and you don’t believe that work is the best place to do that (and/or you recognize that a job with world-changing potential is a luxury most people aren’t afforded), here’s what you do: get a job that pays the bills, and do what you love, and your world-shaping work, in your off time. As Tokumitsu so devastatingly argues,

If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves, what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.

Ouch, and I hate to admit it, kinda’ true. My partner’s firm “my job is not who I am” stance is pretty much the opposite of the DWYL “non-love labour is meaningless” ethos, and that unhooking of identity and employment was, at first, a bit of a shock. “What do you mean, you don’t believe in DWYL?,” I remember thinking. Why wouldn’t you want to pursue what you’re passionate about full-time? I’ve definitely had to ask him to explain his stance to me more than once. Once I understood where he was coming from, it forced me to rethink what I was doing in academia, what Tokumitsu calls the ultimate land of DWYL:

Nowhere has the DWYL mantra been more devastating to its adherents than in academia … There are many factors that keep Ph.D.s providing such high-skilled labor for such low wages, including path dependency and the sunk costs of earning a Ph.D., but one of the strongest is how pervasively the DWYL doctrine is embedded in academia. Few other professions fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output. Because academic research should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts, if they are considered at all.

I’m not actually sure that academia is the place that DWYL has done the most damage. I’d argue that it’s far more pernicious in current “mommy” culture (the one that expects motherhood to be sunshine and roses and a labour of love without exception) and that DWYL is one of the major factors behind the failure to recognize parenting as legitimate labour worthy of significant recompense. But unquestionably, the doctrine of “do what you love” has done a lot of harm in academe, particularly with regards to issues of labour conditions and fair compensation. In my case, as is true for many academics, the harm was done when the doctrine of DWYL reinforced, over and over, the total alignment of self and occupation under the guise of self-actualization. And when I started realizing that the professoriate was maybe not for me, and falling into the consequent “If I’m not an academic, who am I?” trap, my partner’s critical distance was a balm. There was another way to think about who I am, one that didn’t depend on what I did. And that alternative perspective was in large part what let me finally let go of academe, unhook my identity from my job, and move on.

But still. I find myself in my current role, one I genuinely do like a lot and find fulfilling, falling into the trap of DWYL. “Do I love this?,” I ask myself as I try to wrangle a gaggle of senior faculty into setting up a scholarship adjudication meeting. “Am I living up to my full potential?,” I wonder as I place a catering order for a student event. “Why did I relinquish control over my workday?” I question as I sit in a meeting and watch other people add item upon item to my to-do list. But then I remember: what I do isn’t who I am. Research Officer is my title, not my identity. Unlike when I was a full-time PhD student, work ends at 4:30 and the rest of my time is my own. I am fairly compensated, I have job security, and I belong to a good union that ensures its members are treated fairly. And for the first time in a very long time, I have the luxury to  actually do what I love–read, write, think, cook, craft, spend time with the people and felines I love, do absolutely nothing–on my own terms.

What about you, dear readers? Do you also fall into the DWYL trap? What’s your philosophy about the relationship between work and love?

#alt-ac · #post-ac · transition

Being Alt-Ac at the MLA

melissadalgleish

Due to my excellent negotiation skills, I got most of last week off to go hang out at the 2014 Modern Language Association Conference in Chicago, an experience that was rather different from the last time I attended. (Hot tip: administrative jobs sometimes have major vacation restrictions. I’m technically prohibited from taking any time off between mid-August and March. Also, the apartment I stayed in last time didn’t flood. January really can be the Monday of months.) I was still considering the tenure-track the last time I attended, and I spent most of my time at panels on literature and theory. The chair of my panel was interviewing, and it was hard not to pick up on what Karen Kelsky calls “the pervasive emotional buzz of desperation.” I went to the same mock interview session that Kelsky critiques here, and started to realize just how much I never wanted to do an academic interview. (I think it was the trick questions designed to ferret out if you ever intended to procreate that squicked me out the most. My uterus is none of your damn business! And also, yes, because admitting a desire to have a kid doesn’t make me a bad alt/academic.)

This time around, I happily spent my time at panels and workshops on graduate reform/professional development/careers, which the MLA convention arguably does better than it does literary studies. (It is, at times, painfully obvious that many of the non-job seeking presenters write their papers on the plane, or are too busy catching up with old friends to contribute much to the intellectual success of the conference.) While the AHA is arguably doing the best job of addressing these issues head on (“No More Plan B,” anyone?), the issues facing graduate students (and post-docs, and adjuncts) were front and centre at the MLA, as was the acknowledgement that pretending everything is hunky dory just doesn’t cut it. Some examples:

  • Russell Berman’s panel on PhD reform was alternately heartening and disappointing, with some programs doing exciting things with comp structure, others creating new PhD programs that sound like the same old. 
  • The report on the AHA’s post-PhD tracking data means that we now better know where PhDs are ending up, and therefore what they might need as students, and we have a sense of the wide alumni networks that we need to figure out how to access. 
  • Conversely, the continued drive to open new PhD programs (and the refusal to reduce enrollment targets, either on the part of universities, or in the case of my province, on the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities) means that the vast gap between number of PhDs graduating and the number of academic jobs isn’t closing anytime soon. The debate over this issue was one of the most interesting of the conference.
  • The advice provided to PhDs interested in post- and alt-ac career options was sage, practical, and heartening. (The session didn’t get its own hashtag, but Katina Rogers’ tweets from January 10 provide a nice summary. [Update: the panel Storify can be found here.]) And I’m at a point where I’m okay with going up to people and telling them that they should talk to me about being a speaker at their next event. MLA 2015, anyone?
  • The panel that I spoke on and that my friend Daniel organized about dissertations beyond the proto-monograph was really well attended, particularly for a grad student only panel. And despite some of us saying fairly radical things (Let’s write comic books instead of dissertations! Let’s scrap the dissertation altogether!), those in attendance–which included members of the MLA task-force on doctoral reform–were willing to entertain all sorts of suggestions in the name of making the dissertation useful beyond the tenure-track and more adaptable to the vagaries of our individual projects.  

My takeaways from the MLA, while many, centred on two things. One, it’s heartening that despite the assumption that large and influential organizations like the MLA tend to be slow and reluctant to change, the MLA as an organization (if not always its individual members) is actively recognizing, and working to address, the issues facing its graduate members both before and after defending. Two, despite my worries that I was distancing myself from my academic persona by taking an alt-ac job, and despite my concern that I’d feel as though the MLA (and academic conferences more generally) were no longer for me, that turned out not to be the case. I can be both alternate and academic, often at the same time. As academe continues to wisen up to the fact that it is made up of a far more diverse group of people than just academics, it makes room for those of us occupying liminal, or multiple, positions. And that, as someone who loves academic inquiry but not the idea of being an academic, is a welcome realization.

#alt-ac · #post-ac · administration · balance · commute · day in the life · transition

The Non-Academic Day-to-Day Debunked

melissadalgleish2 Comments

From what people tell me, life as a tenure-track professor isn’t all that different from life as a PhD student, especially with the increasing expectations that grad students will be presenting at conferences, publishing, and doing service activities. Sure, you teach more. The pressures to publish increase. You add supervision and more service to the mix. But the job is fundamentally still flexible (in terms of focus, hours, and location), self-directed, and performed in the same environment with the same types of people. Transitioning from the day-to-day of a PhD student to the day-to-day of a faculty member sounds pretty easy.

One of the consequences of the way that grad students are indoctrinated into the conventions and customs of academe is that the day-to-day realities of working life outside of the academy seem a bit strange, a bit scary, even a bit unsavory. I know lots of us have had these thoughts: Working in an office from 9-5 sounds like a prison sentence. Non-academic work and co-workers can’t possibly be intellectually stimulating enough. No boss is going to tell me what to do. I’m nearly three month into my new administrative position, the amount of time conventional wisdom suggests it takes to settle into a new job, and I’ve been reflecting on what life is like in the #alt-ac compared to my initial fears and expectations. So, what’s it like, you ask, and what did I think it would be like?

Belief: There’s no way I can spend two hours a day commuting.
Reality: Yes, commuting kinda’ sucks. I spent twenty very cold minutes in an extraordinarily long line for the bus this afternoon. But most of the time, it’s actually very pleasant. Sometimes I write, or crochet. Mostly I read. The commute is so automatic now that I’m mostly unaware that I’m doing it at all, and I’ve read more books in the last month than I probably did all of last year.

Belief: I like sleeping in and starting my day when I choose.
Reality: Most mornings, I get up a 5:15 and go to the gym before work. I leave the house at precisely the same time every day, and I have no choice about when I start my day–everyone in my office works the same hours. I don’t mind in the least. It’s actually easier for me to get up at 5:15 than it is to get up later, probably because I’m in a lighter part of the sleep cycle.

Belief: I’ve spent five years working from home, mostly alone, and I’m a total introvert. There’s no way I can be productive and sane working in an office full of people every day.
Reality: I love working around people. I love my cat, but spending my days only with him were making me a little crazy. When I need to focus, I put on my headphones and/or shut my office door. I love office gossip, and that when something isn’t going well (or when it is), there’s always someone to vent to or celebrate with. And you can’t beat co-workers who buy pizza for everyone when their back-pay from a contract negotiation comes in.

Belief: I’m too independent and self-directed to report to someone on a regular basis.
Reality: Probably because my job is pseudo-managerial (I’m staff, but my position used to be management level and mostly still resembles a management role), I have oodles of autonomy. But I like reporting to someone. The PhD is a whole lot of delayed gratification and feedback, whereas office life provides tons of both. It also helps that my boss is straightforward, reasonable, and practical, as well as someone I actually like talking to. 

Belief: I treasure my flexible schedule too much to work a 9-5 with only two weeks of vacation a year.
Reality: Yes, I miss weekday lunches with friends and Friday afternoon movies. But it turns out that a flexible schedule and I are a major mismatch. Anxiety about how to structure my time and about the sense that all the time was work time was the bane of my academic life. Now, 4:30 comes and work is over. I work some evenings, but I work on things I want to–these blog posts, my dissertation, on a friend’s book, with my grade 5 student–and they each have their time in my week. I feel no guilt about taking time for myself, my friends, my partner, my family. My brain positively adores the structure. Yes, I’d love to take off for thee weeks this summer, but I’ll get there eventually.

Belief: No one is as smart and interesting as academics, and any non-academic workplace is going to be soul-crushing and mind-numbing. (Yes, I’m exaggerating, but you know people feel like this, at least a little.)
Reality: My co-workers are awesome. Most of them are not academics. We all love to cook and eat, to trade office gossip, to bemoan whatever drama is going on with the students and faculty we work with, and to talk about our pets and families. No, we don’t debate about theory or David Gilmour. But is my working life lacking in intellectual stimulation? Not remotely, especially not the week that I had to read upward of 50 scholarship proposals in science and math. I can pretty convincingly explain massive gravity now, which is not bad for an English major.

Belief: I work in my yoga pants every day. I’d hate having to get dressed for work every morning.
Reality: Putting together a fun outfit + accessories is just that–fun. It’s nice to feel put together every day, instead of like someone who forewent a shower to squeeze in a few more paragraphs and only remembers at dinner time that she forgot to brush her teeth that morning.

Belief: All I do all day is read and write. What if I never get to write in a non-academic job? Or read?
Reality: I got lucky with my job, sure, but I spend most of my days reading, writing, and editing–nomination letters, instruction manuals, briefing notes, government reports, emails (so many emails), student research profiles, workshop descriptions, presentations, and on and on. With my headphones on and my favourite wordprocessor open, I sometimes forget that I’m not at home dissertating–except that my office chair is way better.

If my transition posts have a central theme, it’s this: the contemplation of transition, of not being an academic any longer, can be terrifying, but the reality is not remotely as terrifying, or as different, as our imaginings. Many of us are so conditioned to think of an academic life as the best kind of life that no other seems like it can possibly compare. Imagine my shock when I realized that the structure, the community, the wardrobe of the non-professorial life would, in combination, make me far happier, less anxious, and more productive than I’ve probably been since I started my PhD. Turns out the day-to-day of life in the alt-academy isn’t all that different, and is just different enough, from the academic day-to-day I once aimed for. Colour me suprised–and pleased.

#alt-ac · #post-ac · experiential education · transition

Making Transferable Skills Visible

melissadalgleish1 Comment

My Facebook feed is a wondrous place, and it’s most recent treasure was the news that UBC is piloting a co-op program in its English PhD program. Say what? Experiential education in the humanities, particularly of the co-op sort, is not as common as it could be. And from my experience–correct me if I’m wrong–it’s almost unheard of in Canadian humanities graduate programs. I’m thrilled that UBC is giving its students opportunities to, in their words, “widen their range of professional skills through paid work experience in fields such as academic administration, communications, project management, and archival, government, and NGO research” and “build valuable skills and experience that will extend and enrich their career options in both academic and alternative workplaces.” Yes, there are conversations to be had about the infiltration of the corporate world into the university, about resisting the demand to shape programs to meet the job market, about the implications of co-op programs for PhD completion times, about why an employer would want a PhD over a cheaper MA, and about whether co-op will just add to the already-strenuous requirements for a PhD or if it represents a new kind of #post-ac focused doctorate. And those are conversations I’d love to have, and I hope we have in the comments.

But for now, I’m focusing on the positive. One, it’s refreshing that UBC is doing what everyone should be doing, which is openly acknowledging that many of its graduates will be going the #alt-ac and #post-ac route. This is an ever-so-necessary step toward doing away with the stigma of quitting academe, and yet it is ever-so-rare a practice–I regularly interact with hundreds of graduate faculty in my job, and I can count on two hands the number of them who do the same. Two, if PhD students are going all sorts of places other than academia after they graduate–and they are, in hordes–then graduate programs should be providing them with opportunities to get the skills and experience they’ll need in those jobs, and that they’ll need to get those jobs. Not only am I pleased that UBC has recognized this, and acted on it, I’m pleased that they’re engaging in an open conversation about the skills their English PhDs have, and touting those skills both to the organizations they’re partnering with and to the general public. Perhaps my favourite part of their co-op website was this:

It’s that easy to articulate what PhDs do well, what we do every day, in terms that help grad students make sense of their skills and the world make sense of grad students. No PhD should feel like the only thing they’re good for is the professoriate, and one of the best ways to squash that feeling is telling them, from the moment that they start their degree, that there’s a whole world of things they can excel at. Let’s do this more.