Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD 9781487594268 2018

Chapter 1 Get What You Want from Your PhD

It’s the first week of your PhD program. You’re on your way to being a scholar! You will at last meet Professor A, whose work you’ve always loved. You now have student peers who are just as into intellectual pursuits as you are. You’ll be a teaching assistant for a class and finally have a chance to start strutting your stuff. The list of upcoming seminars and visitors for the fall excites you. Your courses have long reading lists, but it’s like a smorgasbord menu—everything looks so interesting. Your biggest dilemma is choosing between all these great ideas and potential supervisors and coming up with a dissertation topic. And that dissertation is going to be a bang-up job, rocketing you into your dream academic position where you can cultivate new, enthusiastic young minds.

Fast forward to Year 6 of your PhD program. You know every inch of the floor your department is on and far too much about the strengths and flaws of both the faculty and your fellow students. You’re now a course instructor, for the third time, not for experience but because you need the money. No matter what you’re doing, you always have a gnawing feeling that you should be working on your dissertation right now, but you secretly hope that something (such as a sinkhole swallowing up the university campus) will force you to abandon it all. You have no publications because you wanted to put all effort into getting the dissertation done … last year. Most of all, you have no idea what the future holds. You still hope for an academic job, but you’re also buying lottery tickets because the odds are probably the same. But there’s no time to muse. You should be writing …

Or consider this alternative future: You finished your program in Year 5 with a strong, tight dissertation that is now in press with a publisher. Two of the dissertation chapters came out as separate journal articles last year. Not that academic publishing is really your priority, with your new position at a national market research firm, a job you picked up through your network and where you’ll be applying the research and project management skills you developed in grad school. You are teaching on the side, because you enjoy it, and are getting invitations from departments to apply to their tenure-track positions. Your future possibilities seem endless. And it’s all because of how you managed your time and energy during grad school.

Your graduate school experience can end in a number of ways. Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD is all about moving from that promising start to a satisfying finish and avoiding the middle outcome—or, if you’re currently in that outcome, how to transition out of it. Your definition of satisfaction might not be working in market research, which is fine. The task of this book is to help you identify and reach whatever your particular definition of career satisfaction is.

Individuals who are either considering or enroled in doctoral programs are typically smart and motivated. However, many are unsure about how to prepare for their future careers and are unaware of the importance of being strategic in their choices from the earliest moment possible. Work Your Career provides you with motivation and strategies to guide you as you seek to proactively work your career. Rather than moving through your doctoral program with your eyes solely on the next step, we will push you to maximize your personal agency and strategically position that next step into the larger context of your career trajectory. What those steps and trajectory are is ultimately up to you; this book is oriented toward helping you decide what is best for you.

To achieve this, we structure our guidance around an overarching question for you to continuously ask yourself:

Given both my future goals and the information currently available to me, what is my best decision right now?

We return to this simple but incredibly powerful question within each chapter. Embedded within the question are a number of critical elements that have the potential to change your thinking, your actions, and ultimately your career trajectory. The question forces you to explicitly consider your future goals, and to be realistic as you do so. It pushes you to gather whatever information is available to you and to go beyond relying on what you presume to be true or what your well-meaning but perhaps not fully informed professors and fellow students are telling you. The question demands you use the information you find to weigh your options as you make your choices. And the question requires you to continually reassess your decisions and to make corrections to your path as new information emerges, as circumstances change, and as your goals evolve.

The question is also highly personal. While we suggest a goal for you later in this chapter, ultimately your future goals are yours and yours alone—not your supervisor’s, your mother’s, your partner’s, and certainly not something set “on high” by academia writ large. This is your life, your career, your current and future happiness. The best decision for you might not be the best decision for anyone else; one size does not fit all, despite the messages that many students hear (or think they hear). Making the best decisions for yourself will not necessarily result in the exact outcome you predict; life lacks guarantees, and that certainly applies to the advice we provide. But ideally, by asking yourself this question about both your large and small decisions, and by continually returning to the question to reassess and change course as needed, you can avoid any future feeling of regret with respect to your career choices. You can also develop a sense of confidence that you are capable of making the best decisions for yourself and that you can strategically pursue your own best interests.

Answering this overarching question will require you to consider numerous smaller questions and to gather the necessary information to answer these questions. Work Your Career is structured around a series of such questions, ordered sequentially from before one starts a doctoral program to when one is entering the job market. While you may be tempted to skip ahead if you are at a later stage, we hope you will take the time (it is a short book!) to read the book straight through. There can be value in considering whether you might have made different choices; at the very least, it can serve as motivation to start applying the question to your decisions moving forward.

With this core philosophy in place, let’s get started.

Table 1.1 Worksheet: Considering future goals and available information

Given both my future goals and the information currently available to me, what is my best decision right now?
Questions to get you started:	Your gut reaction answers:
Future goals:
■ What kind of tasks do I want to be doing in my future work life?
■ What would my ideal work day look like? How do I envision balancing my future work and personal lives?
■ Where do I want to live? How important is that to me?
■ How much money do I want to make? How important is that to me?
■ What kind of difference do I want to make in the world? What do I consider to be meaningful work?
■ What do I like doing, both day to day and over the course of a year or more? What motivates and energizes me? What does the opposite?
■ Do I like immediate payoff and rewards? Or am I comfortable with investing for the long term, such as through a PhD, even if exact results are not guaranteed?
Information currently available:
■ What types of career skills are valued in the sectors that interest me? Do I feel I can build/acquire these skills?
■ What are the average PhD completion rates in my field? Time to completion rates?
■ In what careers do PhDs in my field work? Is a PhD necessary to do this work?
■ Who are recent PhD graduates in my field that I can identify as possible role models (or cautionary tales)?
■ What are my resources, personal priorities, and personal commitments at this stage of my life? How might they affect my pursuing a PhD?

Is this book really for me?

Work Your Career has a number of key audiences. One is individuals who are considering or just entering doctoral study, including current or recent undergraduate and master’s students, as well as individuals returning to university. If this is you, we are excited about the potential for this book to help you make strategic and informed decisions from day one.

Individuals who are in the early stages of their doctoral programs also have a tremendous amount to gain from this book. At this stage, you are gaining a sense of your interests and aptitudes and confronting a number of “opportunities” that will either serve as important paths to success or distractions that will add time to your program for little gain. If this is you, we are excited about the potential for Work Your Career to help you discern what steps are truly in your best interests and will create concrete, career-advancing evidence of your skills. You are well positioned to ensure that the remaining years of your program drive you toward the goals you seek—and to determine if achieving those goals is best met by completing your program or by moving in other directions.

Work Your Career is not just for new or early PhD students, however. For those of you who are finishing, have already completed, or have discontinued your doctoral program, we will help you position yourself, your work, and your experiences to ensure you maximize your competitiveness on the job market. Further, in reading the book (including the earlier chapters), you may realize additional steps you can take in the short term to build your network and develop evidence of your skills. There is still time—there is always still time—to ensure you are making your best decisions in light of your future goals and the information currently available to you. Today seems like a good day to start.

While we speak directly to PhD students in these chapters, we know that many faculty, and in particular PhD supervisors, graduate program chairs, and department chairs, are deeply committed to advancing the success of their students and understand that such success can take numerous forms. If this is you, we believe you will find our approach useful as you assist, guide, and mentor your students. We admire your interest in helping your students prepare for multiple avenues of success and your compassion for them as they do so. We hope this spirit is strong across the academy.

We are well aware that many students return to academic study after working for a number of years, are international students entering the Canadian university system for the first time, are managing physical or mental health disabilities and challenges, or have a range of work, family, and other responsibilities. For these individuals, regardless of your stage in your doctoral program, we believe that Work Your Career will be particularly helpful to you as you seek to navigate and learn (or re-learn) the Canadian postsecondary world and balance many competing demands on your time and energy.

Both of us are Canadians working within the Canadian university system, so this book is grounded in Canadian experiences and norms. However, we strongly believe our advice will resonate in a variety of national contexts. Similarly, we intend to speak widely across disciplines. While we are both political scientists, we believe that our approach is appropriate to people across a range of scholarly traditions, particularly other social sciences and the humanities, but also the natural and applied sciences. Our intention is to help new and emerging scholars reach their career goals, regardless of disciplinary context. While some of the specifics will differ, the broad questions and the central theme of how to work your career transcend national and disciplinary audiences. Read on and see what we mean.

Our experience: Loleen

I consider myself to be an accidental academic. I started my undergraduate studies with all intentions of applying to medical school, only to quickly discover that enjoying high school sciences and enjoying university sciences is not the same thing. (Given that I don’t like to touch strangers, something that medical doctors are typically required to do, this early discovery was for the best.) My love of the general scientific method and for research and writing drew me to the social sciences, and the applied side of political science really appealed to me. When I went to pursue a graduate degree, I was interested in academia, but I also harboured fantasies of working in politics, or doing government relations for business, or publishing, or … just something. The ideas were murky, but I sensed excitement and action “out there.” I vividly remember a moment as a graduate student driving through downtown Calgary at lunch hour, observing all of the well-dressed, fast-moving office workers and thinking, “I want to be part of that.” After I completed my PhD, I applied for a handful of academic positions, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was recently married and had no desire to move around the country on limited-term appointments hoping for something permanent. And there were opportunities outside academia that allowed me to use my research and writing skills. Ten years later, an academic opportunity emerged in my home town, and the potential to move my children close to my parents overrode my reluctance to re-enter academic life. Changing careers was hard for me. I found great meaning in my not-for-profit work, and I am grateful to have had the opportunities that I did.

What should my career goal be?

“Wait,” you might be saying. “You just told me that my career goals are mine alone. And now you’re going to tell me what my goal should be?” Well, yes, at a very high level we are going to suggest one because it will help to position you well.

The question “Given both my future goals and the information currently available to me, what is my best decision right now?” requires you to begin with your future goals in mind. This ensures they drive your choices about how to direct your time and energy. While many students have a single, narrow goal in mind—specifically, a tenure-track university professor position—we encourage you to adopt a broader goal that takes into account all relevant information. Doctoral study is (or at least should be) a transformative life experience that expands your thinking, your skills, and your network. While many students start programs with an eye on a future academic career, the reality is that many doctoral students in the social sciences and humanities do not complete their programs, many who do complete do not end up in academia, and of those who do end up in academia many work for years in short-term positions prior to obtaining their permanent academic position. This information is hopefully not a surprise to you, and it is information that you should consider when strategically planning your future.

The goal that we propose for you is a successful, rewarding career that uses your talents and the skills you developed throughout your education. This career may take a number of forms. This goal is respectful of the realities of the academic job market and is celebratory of the amazing skills and training that PhDs bring to the workforce. It also focuses on your own personal agency: You cannot control job market conditions, but you can take concrete steps to make yourself an attractive employment prospect to a number of sectors. It is critical that you prepare for multiple career options, rather than assuming or preparing for just one, or worse still, drifting along preparing for nothing. What is exciting is that, by approaching your doctoral program with this broader goal in mind, you can work your career to increase your overall chances of success wherever your career path takes you.

Our experience: Jonathan

As an undergraduate, I never planned to pursue a PhD; I was more interested in law or politics, and after my BA I worked at the Ontario legislature. I turned out to be a lousy political staffer, but I discovered I really liked the study of legislatures and political institutions, which led me to graduate school. By that time I definitely had aspirations to an academic career, but I knew the market was poor, and I kept my options open. And my time at the legislature and ongoing exposure to that world meant I encountered people with PhDs working as legislative committee clerks, researchers, lobbyists, and so on. These jobs looked interesting, and I kept those options open, including taking a short contract working in the Ontario government that could have led to a permanent job. In the end, a tenure-track position that asked for my specific background opened up at just the right time, leading me to where I am today. But I am always glad that I kept my mind and options open.

What does “work your career” mean?

PhD career discussions tend to take a bifurcated approach of “academia” or “other,” in which academic jobs get the gold star and everything else is some form of consolation prize. We reject this. We don’t see non-academic jobs as a “back up” for individuals to pursue when academic careers fail to materialize, and we don’t see the competencies and knowledge that one develops during a PhD program as being tangential to success in these careers. We also don’t see the attributes that are valued in non-academic jobs as being irrelevant to academic career success. (In what career is the ability to complete projects, meet timelines, work effectively with others, and communicate clearly to a variety of audiences anything but a benefit? Professors need these competencies as much as any other professional.)

We strive for a more seamless and lifelong approach: How do you “do what interests you” throughout your career, regardless of sector? This obviously requires attention to different contexts and disciplines, but we feel that this seamless approach is not only new but also necessary. We strongly believe that by taking a broader approach you will prepare yourself well for a great career, period; preparing yourself for careers in a broadly defined sense will result in a better career regardless of sector, because the competencies are valuable across multiple domains.

To work your career, you need to start building these competencies immediately. If you are just starting your program, you have ample time to make numerous choices with respect to what you study, how you spend your time, and what experiences you seek. If you are near the end of your program, or even if you are done, you still have time to redirect, refine, and reframe your experiences to position yourself effectively. It is never too early—and never too late—to start asking the question that we posed at the start of this chapter and to start making more strategic choices. The middle chapters of this book are devoted to developing career competencies and—importantly—to finding ways to provide clear, irrefutable evidence to potential future employers that you do, in fact, possess these abilities.

Is there a wave of academic jobs coming?

There was a golden age of academic hiring in the late 1960s, leading to perennial predictions of a new golden (or at least bronze) age tied to the retirements of earlier cohorts. But contemporary academic hiring is tied less to retirements and more to government and university finances and changing priorities. A retirement in the department of, say, English might not result in a new hire in English. It might result in a new hire in biochemistry, or some other unit in the university. Or it might not result in a new hire at all. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The fact is that the academic job market has two conditions: crappy and really crappy. Some years are better (crappy) than others (really crappy), but the supply of PhDs will always be well ahead of demand. View predictions of a new golden age with extreme skepticism. And be fully aware that PhDs have other opportunities—exciting opportunities, and more opportunities—in numerous sectors.

What career competencies am I building over the course of my doctoral program?

One often hears about “career competencies.” The challenge, especially for social science and humanities PhD students, is that it is not clear what exactly this means, nor how you can articulate this to others. PhDs often know that we “know stuff,” and we like to believe that we can “do stuff,” but explicitly connecting these dots to career opportunities takes thoughtful reflection. We encourage you to start thinking explicitly about the competencies that you want to be able to legitimately claim by the time you leave your program, and then strategically work to establish evidence that you can draw upon, describe, and if necessary show to others to prove you have these abilities. We’ll repeat that last point: Evidence in the form of specific experience and tangible outputs is key. It is one thing to say, “I can write clearly and simplify complex topics for a general audience,” but it is another thing to back up this claim with copies of your opinion editorial and your report for a local not-for-profit. In the coming chapters, we will provide suggestions for how you can strategically build evidence for the following career competencies:1

• Critical thinking and problem solving: PhD programs in social sciences and humanities naturally train students to obtain, interpret, and use information to analyze issues and address problems. Some students are able to speak to specific quantitative, qualitative, or textual analysis skills, which is fantastic; quantitative skills and statistical literacy in particular can be important career assets. But even if these particular skills are not part of your training, your program and dissertation work will undoubtedly develop your critical thinking and problem solving abilities. Be conscious of the need to articulate this to potential employers.

• Written and oral communication: The ability to communicate complex issues clearly and effectively to diverse audiences is a key career asset. One would presume that all social science and humanities PhD students should be able to claim this competency, but sadly this is not always the case, and PhDs can have a reputation for not speaking or writing like normal people. (We were going to use the word “verbosity” there, but it only would prove the point.) Our advice: Take advantage of the incredible opportunity a PhD program gives you to build your communication skills, and identify appropriate publishing and speaking venues that provide evidence of your communication strengths.

• Digital technology: Knowledge economy work requires technological ability to complete tasks and solve problems. As a doctoral student, you may be surprised to learn about the wealth of technology training available to you—often for free!—through your university library, IT office, or other units that is unavailable to non-graduate-student mortals. Completing such training can be a wise investment of time (and might cost you a lot of money once you are no longer a student).

• Professionalism and work ethic: Productivity. Time management. Project management. Punctuality. Accountability. PhD programs do not necessarily train students in these areas, and while there are many inspiring role models of professors who squash deadlines like bugs, arrive to meetings at least five minutes early with prepared notes, and dress in a manner befitting the profession, there are also … other role models among the professorate. Disorganization, absent mindedness, and strange spots on one’s shirt may have their charms, but not for you. Professionalism and a firm work ethic are things you should proactively develop as a doctoral student, and we devote all of chapter 7 to this topic. Your goal, we suggest, should be to develop such a strong reputation for your professionalism and positive work habits that your future references (including your PhD supervisor) rave about these qualities on your behalf. Such reputations can be gold. Cultivate yours.

• Teamwork and collaboration: Good news! Those annoying team projects with fellow graduate students may benefit you after all, even if you feel like you did all of the work yourself. In all careers, the ability to play well with others is critical. As you work your program, use your curricular and extracurricular activities to create evidence of your ability to build collaborative relationships, work effectively with others, and manage and respect diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Building this competency, and being able to articulate this competency, should be a priority for you.

• Leadership: Your doctoral program may or may not provide you with opportunities to develop and demonstrate your ability to lead others. Through your coursework, program, or teaching or research assistant roles you may be provided with a clear project within which you get to organize others and motivate them to complete specific tasks, identify and prioritize action steps, and delegate and supervise tasks. But, more likely, you will need to strategically create your own space to develop and establish evidence of your leadership abilities, possibly by pursuing activities outside of your formal academic program, including a part-time job or a volunteer position, that align with your interests or passions. What you just see as soccer coaching looks like leadership to us. And, more importantly, it can look like that to future employers if you frame it appropriately.

• Global and intercultural fluency: The ability to work respectfully with individuals from a range of backgrounds is of increasing importance to many careers. Many social science and humanities programs include coursework that allows you to increase your global and cultural understandings, and your non-program activities afford actual opportunities to engage with individuals from other backgrounds.

As you move forward in your program, be conscious of your current experience with particular competencies and what you can do to develop further. We suggest you create a portfolio that you update monthly with absolutely everything that is even remotely relevant as evidence of your competencies. Future You will be happy you did so.

Table 1.2 Worksheet: Creating your portfolio of career competencies

Career Competency	Examples of Evidence	Your Current Evidence	Options to Build More Evidence
Critical thinking and problem solving	completed two courses in research methods and statistical analysis; designed and administered online survey for cycling club
Written and oral communication skills	presented research at conference; authored report for local community group
Digital technology	use of particular software in dissertation; completed software training programs
Professionalism and work ethic	completed dissertation; completed teaching assistant and research assistant work; managed logistics for local school fundraiser
Teamwork and collaboration	completed group projects; worked as a member of a research team
Leadership	teaching experience; served as a not-for-profit board member
Global/intercultural fluency	completion of relevant classes; international experience; volunteer for local intercultural association

Do I really need this book? Won’t my supervisor and program train me to work my career?

Ideally, you wouldn’t need our advice. Instead, you would learn all this information firsthand from your kind, wonderfully wise mentors. This may occur for some students, but not always. Advising and mentoring grad students is wildly hit and miss, in part because most academics didn’t get much mentoring themselves, in part because some are not really gifted in that whole human interaction thing anyway, and in part because many supervisors are only really good at advising people how to follow careers that look exactly like their own.

Professors can talk about almost anything, often at great length. But despite our profession’s notorious ability to wax (semi-)poetic on topics large and small, discussing careers is challenging for many supervisors. A diminishing minority of professors started their careers at a time when tenure-track academic jobs were plentiful. The majority (your authors’ cohort included) were taught and mentored by that same diminishing minority; while they entered into a competitive job market, they did so being constantly reassured by their supervisors that there was soon to be a wave of academic hiring … any day now. Given this, it is no surprise that many academics, even the most well intentioned, are unable to provide good career mentoring for PhD students: They received little or none themselves.

So, to return to the original question, yes, you really need to read this book, and no, it is not necessarily true that your supervisor or program will train you to work your career, although most faculty are increasingly sensitive to these issues and aim to be as helpful as possible. To be sure, your first source of advice for all these matters should be your supervisor or other faculty in your program. They can provide you with discipline-specific information that is beyond our scope, so we’re happy if their advice trumps ours. But one of the crushing facts of life for grad students is that while their scholarly world revolves around their supervisor, the reverse is not true. Your supervisor can’t read your mind, and you may not know the right questions to ask. Furthermore, shared intellectual interests don’t always mean compatible personalities, which can create professionally vigorous but personally awkward relationships. Some people really click with their supervisors on all levels, especially for this kind of informal mentoring. Others don’t. Regardless of how helpful your supervisor is, our advice will help you make the most out of your situation.

Is it “corporatizing” to talk about employment training in a PhD?

When discussing university programs and careers, a common critique is always raised: Universities are not “supposed to” be about employment training, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level. Approaching university education through an employment lens, it is asserted, advances the “corporatization of the university” and loses the true meaning of higher education, which is to enlighten the student through the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. While we are generally sympathetic to this vision (which always has a beautiful, ivy-covered campus as the backdrop), we feel it does a terrible disservice to doctoral students. Doctoral study is a long-term investment of time and financial resources, and the opportunity costs are large. Moreover, the PhD has always been at least in part about employment training; it is just that the employment training was for a specific type of employment (tenure-track academic positions) that is becoming more and more scarce. Fortunately, programs and institutions are increasingly shifting their training to better match the future career needs of doctoral students. At the same time, it is critical for students themselves to strategically orient their own thinking and activities and to work their career. Counting on programs to do this for you is risky.

Why are most PhD programs so focused on academic careers?

This book is not meant to discourage you from aspiring to an academic career; academia is one of the many rewarding career options available to PhDs, and our advice is framed for success in academia as much as other career outcomes. At the same time, there is value in positioning oneself broadly and in recognizing that in many traditional PhD programs various forces funnel students into an exclusive, narrow focus on academic careers.

PhD programs are taught at universities by people who previously earned PhDs and now have tenure-track jobs, and these programs revolve around the study of scholarly peer-reviewed research written by other people at universities with PhDs and tenure. Most faculty have spent their entire careers in the academic world, and part of their own measure of success is producing a new generation of scholars. Having been immersed in a particular set of professional values, they transmit those values to their academic offspring. The funnelling forces toward academic careers are also seen among students themselves. Many students have not explored the diversity of career options: the academic path is clear, while everything else is elusive and eclectic, especially for students working on theoretical projects with limited empirical or “real-world” dimensions. Some suffer from the “unicorn effect,” in that they are aware of the challenges of the academic job market but convinced that they are the exception. And students at later stages in their PhDs can get into the mindset that they cannot stop now; they must succeed, and there is one thing universally recognized as success: a tenure-track job.

The more aware you are of these funnels that (intentionally or not) push you toward preparing exclusively for an academic career, the more you can consciously move your thinking beyond this pervasive culture. We suggested earlier that you establish the goal of a successful, rewarding career that uses your talents and the skills you have developed over your education. This may be a career in academia. It may be that your completed PhD opens fabulous doors for you in other sectors. It may also be that your incomplete PhD training is all you needed to get launched in the direction you wanted; there are many successful people who discontinued their PhD program but still credit it for launching their career. Regardless of what success ultimately means for you, strategically positioning yourself starting today is a good choice.

Why should I listen to you two?

Who are we to provide this advice? To start, we each have experience in both the academic and non-academic worlds. Jonathan Malloy worked outside academia prior to completing his PhD; in doing so, he developed an awareness of the career opportunities for PhDs outside of academia and has been writing on the topic since the late 1990s. Loleen Berdahl moved in the opposite direction: after finishing her PhD, she left academia entirely with no intention of returning, worked in a think tank for a decade, and returned to academia with a high degree of reluctance given her enjoyment of non-academic life.

During our years as senior faculty members and department chairs, we have developed particular insight through interactions with PhD students, aspiring PhD students, and recent PhD graduates on a number of levels. We are also both fascinated by and passionately committed to graduate student mentorship. We do not claim exclusive knowledge; there are others who share our commitment. We do feel that our experiences and positions give us a broad view of doctoral careers, and that we have a perspective that is unique from the many other voices on this issue.

Work Your Career seeks to establish a new mindset toward PhD career development in Canada. To do so, we provide practical advice to set you up for a successful career defined in broad and rewarding terms. This advice, as we noted earlier, all links to a single question: Given both my future goals and the information currently available to me, what is my best decision right now? In prompting you to think regularly about this question, we believe that we are establishing sound practices that will serve you well in your career and your life. As our book is intended to inspire a new way of thinking, rather than to be a comprehensive how-to manual or compendium of data and literature, we have deliberately sought to make Work Your Career engaging, accessible, and brief.2

We boldly believe that Work Your Career will add value to your career and life.

Why are you writing this book?

We completed our own PhDs in 1998 and 2000. (Please skip the temptation to calculate our ages. We are each young at heart.) We convocated at a time when there was little discussion of the many career opportunities for PhDs, and we each experienced considerable angst in entering the post-PhD job market. In the two scenarios presented at the start of this chapter, we each sat somewhere between the two extremes, and in hindsight we can see how a more strategic, thoughtful approach would have made the transition from student to career easier and less stressful.

Thus, in many ways, we are writing this book for the current-day equivalent of our past selves. We want you (former us-es) to enter the workforce invigorated, excited, and confident in your ability to create a successful career. We want you (former us-es) to avoid wasting time and energy on things that won’t help your career prospects, and to start devoting time and energy to the things that will benefit you.

So, given both your future goals and the information currently available to you, what is your best decision right now? We think it is to keep reading.

Footnotes

1 These competencies are inspired by and adapted from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, “Career Readiness Defined,” accessed 1 February 2018, http://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-defined/. Return to text.

2 A good scholar never limits their literature to a single source, and we encourage you to read broadly on this topic. We particularly recommend that you access the following: Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius, “So What Are You Going to Do with That?” Finding Careers outside Academia, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Karen Kelsky, The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your PhD into a Job (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2015); National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (various resources); and Paul Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007). Return to text.