Atlanta
At the downtown Hilton hotel here throughout the weekend, it was easy to find a ready-made pipeline of minority scholars.
That's because the hotel was the site of the largest gathering of minority Ph.D. students in the country, also known as the Compact for Faculty Diversity's annual Institute on Teaching and Mentoring. The four-day conference that ended Sunday drew 1,500 or so doctoral students, their mentors, postdoctoral scholars, and even some junior faculty members. The goal of the Institute, in its 18th year, is to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups who earn doctoral degrees and then go on to work in the professoriate.
"We're all about ensuring that we continue to graduate more minority Ph.D.'s," Ansley Abraham, director of the Southern Regional Education Board's State Doctoral Scholars Program, said during the meeting's opening plenary session.
Besides the Southern Regional Education Board, which is the lead host of the institute, the compact consists of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the Gates Millennium Scholars, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.
All of the compact's members work together to provide a conference environment that supports attendees in their journey to become academics—particularly in one of the tightest job markets in recent history. Attendees like Chandra N. Jack, a postdoctoral fellow in bioengineering at Rice University, got such a morale boost from coming to the institute last year that she found her way back to the gathering even after earning her Ph.D in ecology and evolutionary biology.
"Last year I was unsure if could be a professor," said Ms. Jack, who also did her graduate work at Rice. "But I came here and I saw all these people who look like me who were working on their Ph.D.'s, and I heard how they were going through the same things that I was. Just being here helped me a lot."
This year, Ms. Jack is focused on navigating her way through life after graduate school as a scientist—a task she said will be made easier with information she gleaned from sessions offered at the institute. Most sessions were tailored to meet the needs of graduate students at various stages, and panelists gave frank advice and insights on writing dissertations, submitting grant proposals, getting published, negotiating a first job offer, building a strong tenure and promotion dossier, and getting past obstacles like race and gender discrimination and departmental politics. Other sessions gave tips on how to recruit and retain minority students and faculty, strategies for mentoring students of color, and increasing interactive teaching and learning.
Also on hand were recruiters from about 60 institutions who were looking to fill junior-faculty positions. To be sure, the prospect of finding a position in the academy is already causing some doctoral students who were at the conference some angst. And those who have tried the academic job market already spoke of how their goal of becoming a professor seems impossible in such a competitive market.
"I really might have to think about looking outside of the academy," said one conference attendee, whose dissertation is nearly complete. "There are so many people competing for jobs right now, and all of them are superqualified."
Indeed, several panelists acknowledged the tight academic job market, and, in one session, attendees learned how to identify the skills that people with Ph.D.'s have that would be attractive to employers outside of academe. Junior professors, who gathered at a mini-conference of their own that ran concurrently with the institute, heard about other career options, including academic administration, as well.
"Find ways to demonstrate that you can add value to any position that's out there," said Jessie DeAro, a program officer at the National Science Foundation, who earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Still, even the state of the academic job market couldn't pierce the buoyant mood at an awards ceremony for those who earned their Ph.D.'s in the 2010-11 academic year. Several dozen graduates made their way to the stage to say a few words of thanks to those who helped them along the way—among them the people they met over the years at the institute.
Said Jasmine Crenshaw, who earned a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of Florida: "The compact and the institute gave me the strength to finish."
