From the issue dated June 6, 2003
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The Path to a Ph.D. -- and BeyondHow a group of historians has fared, 10 years after graduationBy SCOTT SMALLWOOD Fresh-faced graduate students begin their quest for a Ph.D. certain that they
Along the way to the Ph.D., things change. A few students take their master's degrees and bolt. Some do end up with part-time jobs. Others get the doctorate but then fade out of academe. Graduate students may fall in love with people or geography, resulting in compromise positions that they never thought they would take. A few do prevail and, at last, get the dream job. At the University of Washington at Seattle, the graduate school has created a survey that tries to track the career paths of the more than 3,000 students who have received its Ph.D.'s in the past decade. The survey, done mostly recently in 2001, provides a glimpse of where those doctorates have gone. About a third are tenure-track faculty members, 10 percent have non-tenure-track jobs, and about 20 percent have jobs in industry. The survey also drills down to the departmental level -- showing, for instance, that 55 percent of the 77 history Ph.D.'s covered by the survey have tenure-track jobs. Just 3 of those 77 hold jobs entirely unrelated to their doctoral degrees. To look beyond those statistics, The Chronicle tracked down 10 of the 11 people who earned doctorates in history from the University of Washington in 1993. Almost all of them remain in the academic world. None are waiting tables, driving trucks, or fulfilling any other stereotype of the underemployed Ph.D. One woman stuck around on the campus, working as an academic counselor in the history department. Another is in Seattle, outside of academe but working as a historian for the Museum of History and Industry. Their former classmates now live all over the country -- one teaches at Gordon College, in Massachusetts; another recently earned tenure at Virginia Commonwealth University. A decade after they went out into the world, here are some of their stories. 
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 49, Issue 39, Page A10
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education