 Hi, I'm Nancy Frischberg, and this is the Linguistics Career Launch of Summer 2021. And our guest for this session is Anne Crook, who has advanced degrees, and she'll tell you about those, and worked for Amazon for a long time in several positions of higher and higher rank, and has now left the corporate world and is pursuing her own projects. We came across her work because I am a fan of Twitter, and Anne wrote two Twitter threads that we have adapted, with credit to her, of course, into posters. Now this will tell you exactly when this happened. This was two years ago, before the pandemic, when people still went to the office and that faculty and students could decorate their office doors with posters of fun or significant information. And so the posters still exist, the ideas still exist, but the distribution for those ideas may have to change a little bit. And today Anne's going to talk about some free and easy steps for faculty to take to support students who are curious about careers beyond academia. Anne, please talk to us. Thank you so much. Can I say, as I often do at the beginning of most talks, that nothing I can say is as important as anything you can ask. So I encourage you to put questions in the chat, and to raise your hand. And Nancy, if I seem not to notice them as I go, I'll count on you to interrupt me. All right. Thank you very much. So I'm Anne Krug. I did a PhD in English literature at Cornell, and I taught as a faculty member at the University of Michigan. And after leaving the faculty, after not getting tenure, I worked as a bartender. And then at Amazon, and then I did the small startup thing. And then I worked in a medium-sized product design engineering firm. And now I run my own business, and I work with national nonprofits. So that's the capsule version, and I'm happy to answer any questions about those transitions that you might have. But today, I'm here to talk about what you can do as faculty members or as advisors to people who are thinking about non-academic career paths, even though you yourself may not have considered such paths, may not be expert in them, and may feel you don't know how to guide them to them. And I want to start off by talking about a mental shift that's really helpful for you to make. When faculty recommend students for faculty jobs, they do so from a position of authority. Which is to say, my dissertation director said to the people at the University of Michigan, I am a Miltonist. This is Anne Crook. I have trained her as a Miltonist. Because I am a senior Miltonist, I know she will be a good one. Please hire her, or words to that effect. And that is typically how faculty reach out from positions of authority. And it's authority around subject matter. But when you are talking about jobs that you don't know about, it's going to be much more about fit and permission and abstracted skills. So I want to plant that seed in your head right from the beginning. So here are the things you can do that will help students think about the non-academic job market. The very first thing you can do is you can tell the truth. And that is you can tell the truth about data, the likelihood of their landing an academic job, and the likelihood of their landing a tenure track job. Which may be different. We have actually a very, very good set of rich data now, primarily from history, that show that the prime years for hiring someone to a tenure track job are the last year of their dissertation and the first year after they finish their dissertation. And so it is not factually correct to say to students that if you hang on for a few years, it will give you a better chance of getting a tenure track job. Now, these data do vary slightly by field. So it's important that you stay current with the data in your field. But it's very, very important to tell the truth to students. So that's the first thing. The second thing you can do is you can say out loud, preferably in person, you know, when we get back to in person things, at a meeting of students, we know that many of you will not get academic jobs. And we know that some of you do not want academic jobs. We will do the best we can to support you in those searches. And it will not prejudice your path to the degree in this department. And you have to be able to say that out loud to students. And you have to say it once a year, preferably at the beginning of the year. And the audience for that should be the department chair, the director of graduate studies and anyone supervising a dissertation, as well as, of course, the dissertation students. And the reason I say this is that it is very important that everyone hear the same thing. Because what you want to preclude to the extent that you can, of course, that is not entirely possible, what you want to preclude to the extent that you can are back channel conversations that say things like, oh, I know the job market is tough, but you're so good, you'll get the job. Because those kinds of conversations and those kinds of different narratives going forward about what the truth is are very destructive to the mental health of graduate students, in addition to being incorrect. So that's the first thing you can do. You can say out loud and upfront, we know many of you will not get academic jobs and that some of you do not want them and we will support you. That's the very first thing after telling the truth. The second thing you can do is you can start thinking about placement more broadly than typically academics do. When academics say placement, they typically mean I placed a student in X academic job. But they do not necessarily mean, oh, I placed a student at Amazon or, oh, I placed a student in a hospital Essex program to talk about how we talk about end of life issues, for example. So I encourage you to think about placement as anyone who leaves your program and gets a job. Now, another important thing to think about is that, again, in academic terms, people typically talk about placement of people who leave their program with a degree. I encourage you to think about placement and people's outflow to jobs with respect to your entering cohort. Because what that does is it signals to people if they get further along in the path to a degree and they decide that this is not for them, that there is an exit path that has dignity and that will be recognized by the faculty. And that kind of visibility is incredibly important. And I'm going to say one more thing about this and then I am going to stop for questions. In order to make it clear to students that that is what placement means, it is very important that on your department's website or and on the walls of your department on old-fashioned bulletin boards or on your door of your office that you put up, you know, the photo and bio thing of where people went. So you're going to say, oh, and congratulations to Ann Crouk, who got a job as an assistant professor of 17th and 18th century British literature at the University of Michigan. I also want you to put on your website and doors. Congratulations to Ann Crouk, who got a job of VP of Operations at Synapse Product Development, where she'll be managing IT or whatever it is. Yeah, maybe not so great. That was a pretty crazy job, but there's that. But it is very, very important that you make visible that there are other paths. This is especially important when you have people who, like me, went right from undergraduate to graduate to graduate school to an assistant professorship and who did not know any other paths. And that is very often true of people who are currently in faculty positions, but it is much less likely to be true for current students. So it's incredibly important that you make this make these things visible everywhere you talk about placement. That is in your placement materials, that is in your the walls, that is in your website. You have to articulate where people have gone to work. The other thing this does, of course, is it makes students able to imagine those careers for themselves and it enables them to reach out to people who have those jobs to find out what they needed to do to get them. That is incredibly important. And by the way, that takes some of the work of saying, what do you do for this job? That takes it away from you and on to people who currently hold those jobs, who are likely to be better sources of information. OK, so now I am going to stop a minute. I am going to open the chat and let's see. We have a question that someone asked me to represent them for. Fabulous. OK. And so this individual says, I'd like to remain anonymous for the question. Do you mind asking Ann about how I should talk to my advisor about my decision to leave academia? So the very first conversation about that should not be with your advisor. The very first conversation should be with graduate students or former graduate students, which is better, who have worked with that advisor to find out if your advisor is likely to receive that information well, because I am very sorry to say that some faculty members do not react well to the news that someone wants to leave academics. Now, no one should be surprised at this point, given the job market, but also paradoxically, many faculty members react worse to this about their best students because they feel like they are losing like their academic child. I mean, it's crazy, but this is often how people react. So first, do a little research, find out how the person is likely to react. And then when you talk before you talk to your advisor, when you think about it to yourself, ask yourself not only why you are leaving because it always has it is as, you know, literary people say over determined. There's always 37 reasons. But think about which ones you want to talk to your advisor about. And, you know, and you can say, I don't think I am temperamentally well suited to this career or I need to optimize my career path for geographic flexibility. Or I mean, there's all kinds of things you can say or you can say, I adore this particular field. I want to focus my communications effort in this other field. But what I want you to have is an explanation. That you feel represents the reasons you're making the change. And then the third thing I would say is that please, please, please, please, please practice before you go talk to your advisor. Do it with your parakeet or your partner or a close friend or somebody who is in, you know, the ideal person honestly is a former graduate student who's no longer in that field. But please practice it. It is always astonishing to me that everybody understands that kicking a soccer ball or making biscuits from scratch or playing the clarinet is something you have to practice. But there's a reason that every HR person in the history of the world says role play and the reason they say it is because it works. So so that's how I would advise talking about it. Excellent, excellent advice and thank you for that clarity. I have a question on kind of the strategy of all this. When we we being the linguistics beyond academia core team who went in front of the round table of department chairs and program leads at the Linguistic Society meeting a while back and talked about the things we were doing and we hadn't even gotten to the stage of having summer school. We were just saying support your students who are thinking about non-academic careers. It's economically the right thing to do. Somebody who's a friend of mine came up to me later and said, well, my dean says to us all the time when I'm in the department chair, how many how many of your students have you placed in R1 universities? And this means PhD students, right? Pastors and I'm saying that for the benefit of the recording audience, because I know you know that. But so if you haven't placed students in faculty positions at the least the first level of research organizations, you know, the Big 10 and Ivy League and all that, then you're not getting the rewards within the university. How can you change the how can change minds at the dean level, right? Yes. So I will say from the start, change happens at universities at this level of the level of graduate programs when the deans, the chairs, and the directors of graduate studies are aligned. So all my remarks for the next couple of minutes are designed to talk about how you align those. Now, I hope this doesn't sound too cynical, but universities are very, very sensitive to how they are perceived both publicly and by their peers. The kind of remark you just made Nancy is a reflection of how universities are sensitive to their reputation among their peers. What where that needs to be supplemented is with their public perception. And you know, we all know that certainly from my days as a faculty member and continuing today that many faculty members wish that their perception by the general public were better than it is. So the way you bring those two things together is that you work on elevating the non-academic outcomes and you show how they are, I won't say as good as because no dean or senior academic is likely to believe that in our lifetimes. But you elevate them to say here is what this student is doing with the background and the training we gave them. And privately because this is not a conversation you have in public you have to work with deans and administrations to focus them on the data and to say we have good outcomes for our students. Here are these good outcomes, right? And you have to believe that they're good outcomes. Because if what you say is here is the microscopically vanishing percentage of our students who get these kind of good outcomes the response is inevitably why should we fund this program. But what you want to be able to say is here is the extraordinary skill set we have given these students and here is how they are putting it to use. And that is a long conversation and you have to be in this for the long haul. But I got to tell you data and numbers are on our side. More students are being placed in these positions and what you really want to do ideally for that conversation with the dean is you want to have a student who has been in one of those other jobs and able to say here's what I got from this program. Here's why it prepared me to do this cool thing that I now do. Now the way you find these people and this is not I want to say totally totally free but it's very inexpensive particularly if you have a work study student is that what you do is you go back and you look at the last call it 10 years of graduate students entering the entering cohorts and what you do is it's if this is an absolute excel spreadsheet exercise it is not entertaining or difficult but it's very important is you go through and you find out where they work and you contact them and you say what did you what did you learn from our program what would you have liked to have prepared you and then you find out what they are doing and then this is maybe the best thing you can do from your students once a semester have a panel of four of those people who are in non-academic jobs come in and and talk for like 10 minutes each about what they do and what their what their jobs are and have them take questions. I have found by the way that two things one is that graduate students are former graduate students are very willing to help out in this way because they have been in this position and they are willing to help the other thing is that graduate students particularly the office of professional development or the equivalent at your institution are very willing to sponsor these talks they're incredibly useful and it's a great way to show people what the pathways are and then of course what you have to do is you have to invite the deans to all of these talks because I know they are under pressure and responding to oh if we don't place people at our ones we're not doing our jobs but the truth of the matter is there are so few places at our ones and we have so many more programs and so many more students than can credibly train students for those jobs that we must show them the kind of other work they are doing because otherwise we're going to be down to you know four departments I mean and that's crazy so but yes I saw a remark in the chat um departments to self audit about where their students are placed um and again this is not hard uh take advantage of linked in because if you do assert really if you do a search on linked in you will find you know 90 percent of where your students have gone I'm going to advertise a couple of upcoming sessions that may also be of interest that link directly to what you're talking about one is next week I believe is the time you have to look up the time there are two professors from Oberlin who presented a poster at the lsa the linguistics society of america meeting in uh 2020 about outcomes for tenure track openings in linguistics and uh the interesting thing was they're finding that there are fewer and fewer of these over uh whatever period of time they've followed I did the little item that you have talked about I made a spreadsheet and I'm going to add that to their conversation I only did two departments both of which have all their phd students listed so I'm not talking about ma's and bachelors but um I compare I I I tried to find such departments and these were both departments founded in the late 60s or early 70s and so you know there's a commonality there both respected and they have roughly the name same number of students uh who finished phd's but the interesting thing to look at there is what are they doing now and the answer is fewer people are getting tenure track jobs more people are taking what I call jobs of precarity that is a second postdoc a third postdoc uh visiting professor a contract position a la la la and more people are getting jobs outside of the university environment and my my interpretation of just those two departments oh the other thing is people who are getting jobs outside the university are often listed as blank for what their job is now I can go to link in and find out what they're really doing but the department isn't filling in those spots with what are you doing now so my listing says Nancy Frischberg uh my dissertation title my advisor and then blank right and and this is the problem we have to elevate these outcomes we have to talk about them as good positive outcomes where people are doing good work and we have to get away from this myth that the university is the only place where serious intellectual work takes place right and that everybody loves grading student papers well that almost goes without saying but but also let's you know data the largest employer of economics phd's currently is amazon and that's a good thing we we want people to have better information and the most current research tactics and you know and the best and like here's what students are talking about we want these outcomes and we have to gradually we have to participate in this process of broadening what people think are good outcomes and where intellectual work takes place and the thing I always say to graduate students who have of course absorbed their faculty's attitude about this is that it is incredibly important that you disaggregate the work you do from where you do it because people associate the work they are doing with the university and in fact the work they are doing might take place in the university or it might not but you have to I mean but but for for from the perspective of graduate students the two most important mental shifts they have to make are to abstract their skills from where they are currently doing their work and to separate the work they are doing from where they are doing it that is the key to mental success and what what I tell graduate students is the graduate students who make the transition most easily to other lines of work focus on what is similar about their former workplace in their current one and their former subject areas in their current one yes if they focus much much more on the differences they tend to spiral and to focus on the place and to spiral in a really negative way and that it that does not help them a ton so right right anyway that's a long that's a long answer to a short question but that's that's fine sometimes that happens somebody asked also I think you've started to address this how can students who are in our audience take these ideas back to their departments to start that change from the student level and I'm going to say the first answer I'll give which is this session is being recorded and we hope you will share it with absolutely once it's more generally available probably after the first of September so right one step well and also the thing students can do is they can ask their director of graduate studies tell me about placement for non-academic jobs and if the answer is I have no idea right which will be the first answer almost certainly then what they should say is well let's find out because a lot of these outcomes are terrific and so that's when they can propose projects like let's find out where they're going but the other thing they can do and this is honestly this is a terrific thing for the health of your department and the health of of grad mental health of graduate students is to look at entering cohorts rather than exiting cohorts because what that does is it shows you when people are self selecting out and why and that is an answer you want because how should I put this delicately there are good reasons and there are bad reasons and you want to know both but what there are also is there are reasons that you do not have visibility into and there will be things you will hear responses from people who leave well I thought I was going to be a professor but now I'm doing this this totally different thing over here and I had no idea that this course in psychosocial linguistics would help me now I you know one example is one of my colleagues at the University of Michigan a philosophy professor her husband is a physician in Detroit's hospital and he was the single most successful physician at talking to families who were facing decisions about whether to take loved ones off life support and how you have those conversations and how you read people's verbal and nonverbal cues is of course critical to success in a role like that and you know that's part of your what you all do professionally and you will learn things about how people use their training in their jobs that you don't have visibility into and that will be how we start expanding the conversation beyond academics yes yes and more yes I'm thinking of somebody who is helping out with this event who I knew in graduate school and was given a terminal masters I never had heard of that expression terminal masters and you know why why do we make these phrases that are so valued laden anyway she had a very successful career in you know a related but different field and I stayed in touch with her because I couldn't see that she did anything terrible bad she you know was ethically fine she was scholarly fine as far as I could see and apparently her work wasn't linguistically enough for the professors so she went off and found another career and has gotten you know accolades and all that stuff but never had any contact back with our department and I don't think most of the students even in my cohort remember you know that she what what happened to her oh yeah right so right it's a erasure you know I feel oh absolutely there is also there is one remark I would caution you all about that I sometimes get questions from faculty about why graduate students don't react well to it sometimes well-meaning faculties say to students when they feel they have to leave the profession don't worry at least you'll make so much more money than we all will and people mean it kindly but what graduate students here is you're selling out and so there is you know it's as you say another one of those value judgments and people within the walls of academia tend to make self-protective self-justifying value judgments like that and I encourage you that when you hear yourself saying oh well at least this will be the outcome to realize that you're making that kind of value judgment my very favorite example of this was from a professor at a distinguished institution whose very best student got a great job she got a job as an associate producer of drama at the canadian broadcasting company and it was clearly the best job anybody anybody that year got and she described it to him and she was very enthusiastic as well she ought to have been and his reaction was oh that's too bad and he got it and he changed how he and he told this story on himself and he and he had to talk through how he learned to say something different but it's every time you say something that indicates that another a non-academic path is a too bad or a less than desirable outcome or is just going to get you money or something like that all of that contributes to the weight of depressed expectations and and depression about outcomes that graduate students have so I encourage you to be intellectually generous and to believe that there are great outcomes out there yes indeed I mean even at this stage within the last few months when I was describing the lcl for a chair of a linguistics department when I was talking about the kinds of courses we were offering and who the speakers might be and so on well that's not linguistics I and I call that a microaggression in the modern world in the modern terminology and sure took me a few minutes to recover from that I don't think he realized how insulting it was but I obviously remembered it because I'm still telling the story well once later you know the other thing I would say is that this is where the peculiar structure of academics has some really profound responsibilities for people who are tenured when you are tenured it is incredibly important that you attune yourself to those microaggressions and that you call them out and that you do so in a nice way you know you can always say gosh I think that's a great outcome for her or I don't agree that that's a problem I don't agree that that's not linguistics or whatever it is but tenure is a profound protection that is not available in most professions and that is also not available to the huge numerical majority of people in an academic setting and if you have it if you have that extraordinarily extraordinary privilege it's very important that you exercise it on behalf of people who are less powerful excellent I was going to announce another session that I think complements this one well and besides the Oberlin one that I'm going to participate in with my spreadsheet data that could certainly be augmented by any work study student who wanted to participate the other is tomorrow morning we're going to talk about what's the history of the linguistics society's involvement with talking about careers outside the academy there was a very brief volume I'll show it to you here quite little type script produced out of a one-day meeting in the winter of 81 so that's only 40 years ago oh 39 and a half sorry 39 and a half years ago where they talked for a full day about professions that might be open to people outside of academia and then nothing happened or very little happened now I have critiques of the of some of these talks not all the talks were given by people in those professions nonetheless this was a great start to something that has yet to blossom or maybe we've caused it to blossom here I hope that we can sustain the energy and the interest that we've found here I don't know if you know this but we've got 190 people registered for this course this whole month long event and that was with a very minimal marketing effort on our part so I think there is definitely demand one thing I will also say to all of you is that I have put a lot of what I've said here and a lot of resources for graduate students on my website and these are both free and ad free so if you go to my website you will not be inundated with whatever the internet is selling currently I'm sure it's terrible but anyway my website is just and crew com and there is a tab for graduate students it is good that you are where you are now that another piece of advice I will give you is that your Canadian colleagues are likely to be further down the road than the United States folks in handling this and there's a couple structural reasons for that one is that many many more PhDs are funded by provincial and the federal Canadian government so when employment statistics started going south they got on the stick much more quickly than American universities so and I do about I don't know half to a 60 percent of my business in Canada so if you have colleagues in Canada who have worked closely with their professional organizations or with their graduate professional organizations at their university they are likely to have really good ideas about what they have done for their graduate students because in my experience they are much further down this path than folks at American universities I didn't realize that thank you and that meant the structural reason certainly understands the most helps me understand the motivation totally yeah yeah we just got a couple minutes left I'm going to ask I'm going to ask our very capable assistant to put the evaluation link in there thank you you she already knew what I was asking for and thanks very much Rachel and everybody who's attending please do share your short survey results with us any other hot questions for Anne Alex you want to chime in there at all and I wonder if you could recommend ways that we could get these conversations started with with deans especially if you have the protection of tenure as faculty members right um so if you are not tenured uh the easiest way to get the attention of the dean is to find the most senior faculty member whom they respect in the most important or one of the perceived important departments at your institution um because this is not a battle flag that it is easy for junior people to carry and so it is incredibly important to find the right allies on the senior faculty who will help you do this because you know again this is a very uncomfortable message for people whose academic structures are held up by populating r1 departments with faculty members and who get respect that way and to say that those things may need to change you know nobody likes change my jack russell doesn't like change and why should deans like change you know move my cheese yeah yeah they totally hate it so it is very important that you start your search by figuring out who is the best position to make this argument now what you are in a good position to do and this is different is to find someone who from your field or another field who has gone on to an incredibly interesting challenging career uh outside the academy and to say that person to bring that person in to talk to the dean to say you may not be aware but i have gone on to do cool thing um and one of the reasons that i have successfully been able to talk to faculty is that they should listen to somebody who has 13 years experience at amazon say but it matters to them that i have uh if you'll excuse the expression the terminal degree right from an r1 university they care about that and they shouldn't just care about that but they do so what you want to find is somebody especially who is from an institution that they care about and that was the advantage i had coming from amazon because everybody's heard of it right so it sort of shortcuts the explanation and that's what you want to find you want to find a sweet spot who can be your messenger and what can be the message right and sometimes that takes a little time but that's that's the thing that junior people can do find a champion find a champion and you know uh find someone who smiles but who is ruthless excellent all right all right i think we did all right well i wanted to say thank you to you all because i remember from my time on the faculty that uh an hour at lunch was often the hardest thing on earth to find and and i'm i'm very grateful for you giving me some of your time and we very much appreciate your sharing your well developed points of view and well developed arguments with all of us uh i hope to see next year that we can report back to you with lots more progress awesome well uh congratulations and uh and good luck with your work thanks san bye bye