Preparing Grad Students for Careers Outside of Academia

I’ve been encouraged by the discussion of alt-ac paths in this forum over the past couple of years.  However, it has not really caught on in my department. 

Even though I’m currently working full-time outside of my “home” field, I’ve been advised not to declare my intentions to my committee lest I give them any reason to doubt my seriousness in regard to completing my dissertation. 

My department has just recently made efforts to bring in alumni voices to give an idea of what it would be like to work for different types of institutions (other than R1).  Hopefully it is starting to open up and look outward. 

Having said that, I do not believe they would claim any responsibility to train students for alternative career paths beyond general analytical and communicative skills. I assume that the faculty intend to train the future scholars of their field.

I should add that our graduate school has been offering at least an event or two per year (e.g.  panel discussion) about alt-ac careers that I have found to be useful.  The discussions seem to revolve around finding an assistantship outside of your department (done) and coming to terms — psychologically/emotionally/etc. — with a different path (in medias res). 

Once a grad school admits a student into their humanities program I’m not sure there’s much that higher ed can do to help the grad student unless that grad student has an understanding and a commitment to a non-academic job prior to matriculation.

Therefore, higher ed should consider:
(1) disallowing humanities grad-school admission directly after graduation from undergrad. Get a job, then come back to the institution;
(2) not accommodating the ongoing TT job decline by admitting fewer humanities grad students;
(3) raising humanities grad school tuition costs and cutting funding to grad school programs.

I think this is a great topic and meaningful dialogue. It may be worthwhile to highlight the perspective that graduate students may already have established and successful non-academic careers or be working full time during their graduate school experience, and that not all may plan to become academics. Hopefully, institutions will use this article’s reflections to become better oriented to the needs of all students.

I earned my Ph.D. in a digital humanities program with many part-time doctoral students at a university ranked in the top five in student enrollment in the U.S., but which was almost solely oriented to the full time, otherwise-unemployed graduate student. To be in a dissertation support group, obtain CV review, buy software from their computer store, and access many other tuition-supported services required being on the main campus between 9 and 5, and the nine-hour residency semesters were a financial hardship. These are things that faculty and administrators can change to improve the odds of students finishing doctoral programs and to help students reach their career goals, whatever they are.

Thanks! It’s good to hear that your department is “looking outward.” When you speak to the alumni voices, do you mean those who are still teaching/professing in universities and colleges, or are they from other industries? The point you make, though, about the concern over having committee members take students less seriously if they have aspirations outside higher ed are so very real. We (higher ed) need to rethink what it means to be “successful” in this field and be willing to work with students who don’t fit our notions of “success bound” (as professors).

Thanks, @Chris. I can’t imagine that universities would NOT bring in grad students not programs, as that revenue stream and the prestige of having a grad program would cease. Would you be willing to extend the law school analogy here (from our previous discussion)? It’s appropro to this situation.

Well, I think it maybe easier in the sciences than the humanities.  About 90% of our Ph.D. grads chose career paths outside of academia which have starting salaries similar or greater than that of the faculty who were their dissertation mentors.  The biggest hurdle for faculty working with these students was for them to stop thinking of this as “selling out” and to start accepting that this is a rational decision by our students.  Once that mental adjustment happened, students felt comfortable asking for advice about resumes and job searches outside of academics and also felt emotionally supported instead of belittled for their decisions.   I think the attitude of faculty mentors is critical to help students feel comfortable about seeking work outside of academia.

Overall, our graduates find that our program prepares them very well for careers in industry since companies are looking for scientifically trained folks who know how to think. It is not that we do a whole lot special outside of events sponsored by our career services office to prepare them for these careers, it is just that the program does that automatically.   As far as I know, all of our Ph.D. graduates from the past ten years who are interested in working are employed in jobs that use their degree (this caveat comes from a significant number of stay at home moms among our Ph.D.s).

I’ll have a lot more to say about this, as my current position is both outside of the realm of what I trained for (I have a PhD in biomedical sciences and was an NIH and NSF-funded faculty member for a while) and will require me to initiate some career development programs for current biomedical PhD students. But I want to comment briefly on something that I see all too often. I have seen many successful grad students and postdocs be “encouraged” to stay on the track for a PI/TT fac position, even if they are expressing serious doubts about their desire to do so. At the same time, many weaker students (some of whom, I might argue, should have never been admitted or retained in PhD programs in the first place) are encouraged to seek “alternative” careers. Often, the bar for thesis completion is lowered for these students. This is not right.

First thing we should do to prepare grad students for careers outside of academia is uphold rigorous standards for admission to, and continuation in, PhD programs. 

We should hold all students to the same standard of excellence, whether they want to be scientists, brain surgeons, patent lawyers, high school teachers, or pole dancers. A PhD with your university’s name on it should mean something predictable and consistent. 

If your best and brightest don’t want to pursue a faculty position, let them do what they must do and don’t disinvest in them. If you can’t help them find a path, find someone who can help. The best students are those that demonstrate superior critical thinking and analytic skills, outstanding communication skills, the ability to process large amounts of new information and make connections, and intellectual flexibility in the face of unexpected results. Who would you rather have working at, say, the EPA, or teaching high school or acting as a science advisor to a politician-someone like that, or some hack that you should have dismissed from your program when they failed their qual the second time?

A PhD in biomedical sciences is a tax-payer funded gift. It should only go to the most deserving, and we should really be willing to think about ways that we can give something back, outside of academia.

Certifications.  Whether we want to agree to it or not, certifications now and in the future hold more for the graduate outside academics.  If you are an engineering graduate, the PE certification opens the doors for your future, an MBA? Then you need to also hold a CPA or PMP.  A degree in IT?  Better get one of the many IT certifications to go with that degree or you will be in the interview do-loop.  My school now offers specialties and emphasis areas that go on our graduates’ degrees showing they hold a specialty or an area of specialized study.  We have found these to be beneficial and offer industry an immediate understanding of the skill sets the candidate brings to the table.
 
Schools that collaborate with professional certifying bodies will go a long way to providing their graduates with the ability to apply their learning in a productive manner to both themselves and to industry.

Well, it’s starting to look up.  However, those small steps are mostly from the other side of our joint department.  Lots of room to grow. 

When they have brought in a panel of alumni of the department, they are those that are teaching at other universities and colleges.  Maybe a couple of the 10 or so that I’ve met have had less-than-traditional positions (continuing studies, or joint appointments as administrator and instructor). 

The graduate school has had a couple of panels specifically on alt-ac paths that have been very helpful.

Even though my aspirations are still within higher ed (just a different capacity), I’m wary of stating that outright to my committee.  Of course, I’m also still curious about some sort of hybrid position.  I’m more interested in opening doors than closing them at this point.

Externships, Externships, Externships.

—/
http://BrickellLegal.com

When I was working on my PhD in the late 90s, people talked about getting jobs outside of academia all the time.  This was Chicago, and most people in my program wanted to stay in Chicago more than they wanted an academic job (or so it seemed at the time).  Our grad program did not have a rule that we could not work outside the university (I remember one woman saying she thought it was more important to graduate without loans than not to work another job during grad school), and we were always getting job notices from law firms and state/local agencies on the grad student listserv.

This is why I have found it so odd over the last few years to see conversations just starting about working outside academia when many people in my cohort assumed that’s what they would be doing.  Ironically, though many people did work in downtown Chicago and received full-time job offers upon graduation, most of us are now tenured or close to it.  Though I still think there is a law firm in Chicago where all the non-lawyers are people with graduate degrees in English from my program.  They loved the first one they hired and kept asking for more.

Would teaching high school be considered a career outside of academia? If so, I have known a number of MA students who were high school teachers and who were working on their MA in English Literature or in Rhetoric and Composition. They had no plans on teaching at the university level, and certainly no interest of doing research at the university level.

Blog readers may be interested to know about a new initiative launched by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and Educational Testing Service (ETS). To address the critical need for innovators and experts in a wide range of fields that are essential to America’s success in the global economy, the two organizations have convened a commission of academic and industry leaders to explore this important issue and to offer findings and policy recommendations in a new report which will be released at the CGS annual legislative conference in April, 2012.
The need to develop a highly skilled workforce was first addressed in a 2010 landmark report “The Path Forward: The Future of Graduate Education in the United States.” That report argued that the nation’s future prosperity and ability to compete in the global marketplace depends on producing graduate degree holders prepared to address the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. One major unmet need the report identified was that of understanding pathways through graduate school into the world of professional occupations.
The new Commission on Pathways through Graduate School and into Careers consists of industry leaders, university presidents, graduate deans, vice presidents for research and provosts. It’s role is twofold. First, the Commission will guide a research effort addressing issues such as:
– graduate student knowledge of career options
– how students learn about occupational opportunities
– the role of graduate programs and graduate faculty in informing and guiding students along the path to professional occupations
– career pathways that individuals with graduate degrees actually follow
The second role of the Commission is to help create a national conversation about why understanding the pathways through graduate school and into careers is important. Commission members will also provide advice on policy recommendations for key stakeholders.
Additional information is available at the following link: http://www.cgsnet.org/portals/0/pdf/N_PR_PathwaysCommission_Sept2011.pdf
Council of Graduate Schools

I have a bit of a different perspective on this topic for two reasons. First, I’m what you might call a multidisciplinary grad student; I have a M.S. in microbiology and am now working on an M.A. in rhetoric and composition. Second, my current department (English at an R1 land-grant school) is vigorously interested in this topic and actively trying to improve the current state of affairs. Unlike most others who have commented here, I found more emphasis on the TT scientist career in my microbiology program than I do now in my English program. I think the reason for this comes down to the experience of the professors. Nearly all of the faculty in my microbiology program had followed the traditional TT straight on up after earning their PhDs. Most of the faculty in my English program have worked outside academia; one of my profs has also taught at the high school and community college levels, another has been on editorial staff at both newspapers and magazines, a third is heavily involved in consulting work. Having benefitted from non-academic careers themselves, its natural that they encourage students to consider the same AND that they have the tools to advise us on how to do so.

With the dissolution of the traditional TT, with more and more faculty pursuing extra-curricular engagements, and with many graduate students coming back to school later in life after other work, I expect that we’re not far away from departments like my own being the rule rather than the exception.

I’ll give the same answer I did to Frank Donoghue’s clog in the same issue of the Chronicle:

My radical suggestion–as a former ABD (though in Philosophy,
not English) who has had a wonderful 45-year career in scholarly
publishing–would be not to reduce the number of graduate students
admitted but to offer two different tracks: one would be aimed at the
traditional Ph.D. for those who plan to become professors; the other
would be developed to enhance skills of people who think that a
nonacademic career would be more rewarding for them. The main difference
between the two tracks is that the latter would not involve the
preparation of a dissertation, an exercise that is valuable for those
heading into an academic career but is mostly a waste of time for thise
going into a nonacademic career. Aside from the dissertation, the rest
of graduate education can be more or less the same on the two tracks,
though the nonacademic track could be broadened by exposing students to
some skills–say, statistics–that could come in handy in nonacademic
work but wouldn;t be needed for a specialist career teaching English. As
I can attest from my own two years spent in top graduate schools, at
Columbia and Princeton, graduation education can be a rewarding
experience that can pay off dividends in a nonacademic career.
developing this two-track system would enable higher education to avoid
the harm of overproducing Ph.D.s for the academy while maintaining
sufficient numbers to sustain a graduate program financially and
providing an educational alternative for people interested in careers
outside the academy.—Sandy Thatcher