As a doctoral student, you're immersed in the knowledge of a narrow topic. But your graduate training is also teaching you about a broader subject: academe. And some Ph.D.'s opt to parlay this expertise into careers at academic associations.
Donna Heiland, a Ph.D in English, oversees several fellowship programs at the American Council of Learned Societies, in New York. Linda Thomas, who has an M.A in history and a year of doctoral courses under her belt, coordinates articles that appear in the publications of the Modern Language Association, also in New York. Eliza Reilly, who earned a Ph.D. in history, directs and develops programs at two separate Washington, D.C.-based associations that share office space and staff.
How do you land one of these jobs? Associations, while numerous, tend to be idiosyncratic, so the steps into a career at a higher-education-related organization are not well-defined. A large part of the preparation is researching opportunities that correspond with your interests and geographical restrictions.
An array of organizations
Associations related to higher education come in many forms. A prominent group of policy-oriented organizations, mostly located in Washington, represent the interests of professors, administrators, trustees, and others. There is also a large community of scholarly associations. And then there is an assortment of other organizations such as unions, think tanks, and test developers. (We won't touch on foundations here, because we've written about them in a previous column.)
All of these groups perform a variety of functions, such as lobbying the government on academic issues, publishing scholarship, keeping members in touch with one another, and administering grants and fellowships. A wide variety of positions are available, but we'll focus here on the ones that freshly minted Ph.D.'s are mostly like to get -- programming and editorial work, for example -- as opposed to the ones they are unlikely to land -- lobbying jobs and vice presidencies.
Program officers
"I managed to get through most of my teaching career without ever having heard of program officers," says Donna Heiland, who now is one. "But at some point I stumbled across this job category, started looking into it and reading job ads, and finally applied for three program-officer jobs, landing the one at A.C.L.S."
Program officers (also called program managers, directors, or assistants) work on developing and overseeing the various projects that associations operate. This can include both conceptual and managerial work. A program officer might brainstorm about how to encourage institutions to increase interdisciplinary studies, set up peer-review processes for grant applications, manage an Internet discussion group, write copy for a Web site, or visit campuses to monitor programs.
Ms. Heiland earned a Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 1988, and then taught at Vassar College, where she earned tenure. She was happy there, but not convinced that academe was a perfect fit for her. "I had a sense that there was a big world out there," she says. She wanted to do something that would push her in a new direction but still build on her academic experience, and she says she has found it at A.C.L.S.: "I'm on the interstices of academia and the rest of the world."
Eliza Reilly started her association career while still in graduate school. She worked as a meeting planner for both the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the American Conference of Academic Deans. Four years ago, she was offered a full-time job split between the two organizations.
At A.A.C.&U., an institutional membership organization whose mission is to support undergraduate liberal education, Ms. Reilly directs two programs that encourage the teaching of science to undergraduates in ways that focus on civic responsibility and human health. At A.C.A.D., a smaller organization whose members are deans and other senior administrators, Ms. Reilly develops programs to improve academic governance and strengthen relationships between deans and department chairs.
"I have wonderful colleagues, and the chance to work on issues of intellectual and political significance," says Ms. Reilly, who earned her Ph.D. in history at Rutgers University at New Brunswick last year. "I also like the fact that my jobs draw on all my academic skills, including research, writing, and conceptual thinking."
Writing and editing jobs
If you'd rather write about programs than run them, jobs in communications or publications might be more up your alley. These positions involve writing articles for the association's magazines or newsletters, editing material written by outside contributors, working on a book series, writing press releases, or designing informational brochures.
As a production assistant in the publications department at the M.L.A., Linda Thomas coordinates the progress of manuscripts through the copy-editing, typesetting, proofreading, and printing processes. She earned an M.A. at Villanova University in 1998 and enrolled in the Middle Eastern studies department at New York University before realizing that she didn't need a Ph.D. to pursue her real career interest -- academic publishing.
Writing skills also come into play, albeit in a slightly different form, in a job as a test developer for one of the various organizations that devise standardized tests. Working as a test developer involves researching and writing essays or multiple-choice questions and answers. And you get to make up some incorrect answers, known in the business as "distractors."
"This job allows for no intellectual freedom," says one test developer, who prefers not to be named. He spends most of his time condensing excerpts from books and journals into reading-comprehension passages, and writing questions and answers about them. "In order to be fair to test-takers, the questions written by different people have to be as uniform as possible, so we write according to very narrow specifications," he says, "It's not an outlet for your uniqueness, which might come as a shock to some academics."
Still, he says he enjoys both the work and his colleagues. "It's a great job for a generalist," he says. "I might spend a week working on an architecture question, then a week on a science question. And I like working in a collaborative environment."
Salaries and benefits
Not surprisingly, salaries at education-related associations are generally comparable to academic salaries. As with colleges and universities, larger and richer institutions pay better than smaller, poorer institutions. Starting salaries for A.B.D.'s or Ph.D.'s generally range from the mid-30's to the low 40's, and raises tend to be incremental and predictable.
Many academic associations offer very good benefits, with the employer covering all or most of the costs of health care, contributing a relatively large percentage of the employee's salary to a retirement plan, and typically granting all employees four or five weeks of paid vacation a year instead of the two or three weeks typically extended to junior employees in the corporate world.
Some organizations also offer unusual perks and benefits, such as sabbaticals, to senior staff members. At A.C.L.S., senior staff members are able to spend one day a week teaching or writing. And in the summer, the office closes at noon on Fridays.
If you're interested in pursuing a career in a higher-education-related organization, here are some first steps to take:
Surf the Web. To get a sense of the diversity of organizations out there, check out the Internet Resources section of The Chronicle's Web site. The Washington Higher Education Secretariat has descriptions of the 49 national higher-education associations that it counts as members posted on its Web site. The A.C.L.S. Web site has information about its members.
Read publications in the field. All those newsletters put out by associations, foundations, and the commercial press don't represent just job opportunities, they represent learning opportunities. Read them, browse the stacks at your campus, and develop an awareness of the important issues in academe and the ideological differences between major organizations.
Get a part-time job at an association. As is the case in most fields, academic associations tend to turn to familiar faces when they're hiring for full-time positions, and having work experience outside a classroom is important. Could you be a part-time standardized exam scorer, editorial assistant, or meeting planner? Look into the possibilities.
Cultivate an experience of education wider than your discipline. Take opportunities to work with university committees or graduate-student organizations that span the disciplines. Look for a part-time job writing for a campus publication or working in a dean's office. Doing any of these things will expose you to pedagogical and institutional issues that might not come up in your department.
"It helps if you really care about higher education as a collective enterprise," says Ms. Reilly, "and not only as it relates to your own scholarship."
