Most of us attend graduate school because we love the subjects we study. We work hard. We learn. We grow. We change. We can’t see ourselves doing anything else. But we suffer. We have angst. We lose relationships. We go into debt. And we endure all of this because we love the discipline. We anticipate a career in a field that will excite us for decades. We assume we’ll become a professor. (OK, stop laughing.) We assume this as grad students because we don’t know what else we can do with a Ph.D. in [insert your discipline of choice here].
It’s academic job season. Hundreds if not thousands of people are now applying for tenure track positions across the country. But as we know, jobs are scarce, and the competition for these scare jobs is intense. The process of applying for these one-shot-in-several-hundred positions can be demoralizing and expensive. Many are applying to these jobs because they assume that’s what they are supposed to do with graduate degrees, and still they know their chances of getting a job are slim. On the other hand, other people are applying for jobs because they don’t know what other options might be available. They don’t know their other options. Being a professor is what they are supposed to do with a graduate degree, but it might not be what they want to do.
If you are finding yourself in the “what-do-I-do-with-myself-if-I-don’t-want-to-(or-can’t-be)-a-professor-position,” you might check out a few resources. Jo VanEvery, a Ph.D. in sociology, and Julie Clarenbach, a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, both academic coaches, created Conscious Career Course, a six-week course that can help academics think about their educations differently, think about their skill sets more creatively, and can open up career options that they might never have considered. A series of 90-minute conference call session covers topics as “Activating Your Curiosity,” “Identifying What You Have to Offer,” “Identifying What You Care About,” “Expanding Your Possibilities I and II,” and finally, “Putting It All Together.” These calls include conversations, lessons, readings, and exercises to help academics reconsider their career paths.
Students in the Conscious Career Course are not passive listeners during a conference call, it’s important to know. Each student participates in the calls (as desired), is a part of a simultaneous online chat session with other students during the conference calls, and has access to other students and instructors during the six-week course session. Lastly, students have between-session homework that helps them—individually—work through ideas, fears, doubts, or possibilities.
If you are interested in this course, check out the Conscious Career Course website, as it contains all the details of the course (dates, times, costs, etc.). The next course begins on October 6, and the courses are scheduled through 2013.
Full disclosure: I attended the Conscious Career Course in during the summer of 2011. The course is intense and thorough, and I found myself struggling to think differently about my skills, weaknesses, strengths, desires, and hopes. I’m usually very self aware, but this course taught me much about myself and the kind of career I desire. I would recommend it to anyone on the job market, considering leaving higher education, or even those who want to think differently about life’s path.
If you are not quite ready for a full course on possibly leaving higher education, Jo and Julie also offer a free eCourse, Myths and Mismatches, a course that asks you to think about your situation in ways you might have considered. Each day for 10 days, Jo and Julie will send you—via email—content that describes a myth or mismatch in academia. You can answer the questions or ignore the questions. They are simply questions for you to think about and apply (or not) to your own situation.
Lastly, if you are certain you wish to stay in higher education but maybe not on a tenure-track, Bethany Nowviski, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library, wrote a ProfHacker piece about a year ago: “The #alt-ac Track: Negotiating Your ‘Alternative Academic’ Appointment.” This detailed post has many suggestions about how to, well, negotiate your #alt-ac career. Well worth the read.
All of this brings up questions that we’ll cover in future ProfHacker posts: How are we preparing graduate students for a life outside the tenure track?
But in the meantime, how about you? How do decide if you are cut out for a tenure-track position in higher education? When do you decide this? How do you begin to find out what else you can do? Please leave comments and suggestions below.
[Image by Flickr user Môsieur J. and used under the Creative Commons license.]
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