 I appreciate that. Hopefully it will be useful for our students. That's what I'm hoping for. We can use it in conversations with our students, with our administrators. Anybody else? Introduce the next person. Well, thank you. All right. Allow me to introduce our next speaker if you'll have a seat, please. Elmarin Wood, PhD, is co-founder of Beyond the Professoriate, a mission-driven organization that provides career education and professional development for graduate students and PhDs. Beyond Prof provides services to individuals and partners with institutions to support their efforts in empowering students and postdocs to leverage their education wherever smart people are needed. In online webinars, on-demand videos, blogs, and an online community, Beyond the Professoriate features PhDs with successful careers who share their unique expertise and experiences to support graduate students in their job search and future employment. Beyond the Professoriate is career advice by PhDs for PhDs. Merin has been a lead researcher on several important studies on the academic and non-academic job market for humanities and social science PhDs, working for the American Historical Association and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her writing has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and University Affairs. Her essay, How to Move Beyond the Professoriate, is part of the edited collection, Succeeding Outside of the Academy, published this fall by University of Kansas Press. A proud Canadian, Merin now lives in Denver. Merin Wood. I tend to wander, so... You have a remote control of your slides down the line. Perfect. Happy Thanksgiving to my other Canadians that are here. It's Monday. The joke always goes, it's the day that we're thankful that we're not Americans. Too soon. Yeah, so I'll just talk a little bit about Beyond the Professoriate here to give you a little bit about our expertise. I did my PhD at Carolina UNC Chapel Hill. I did a master's degree at Carleton University in Ottawa, and my undergraduate is at the University of Lethbridge. Jen and I actually met doing our MAs at Carleton. She did her PhD at the University of Toronto in history. We're both historians. We have a learning specialist who's also a PhD from Carleton University, and our undergraduate... Sorry, undergraduate. Our graduate intern that we have is also a historian. We like to say we're a woman-owned business, but we're also a historian-owned business. We started in 2013. Both Jen and I moved into the space. I had not to do a tenure-track job search. I actually did. I spent three years on the academic job market from 2009 until 2011. So that was super fun. It was great years to be on the job market. And I began to... When I decided to leave academia because the jobs were just getting worse. There was just fewer of them. My partner, who has an MBA from Duke, we're a divided household, if you know that school, he was like, well, where did other history PhDs go? We lived in Washington, D.C. This place must be chock-full. And I was like, he went to a rich school with an MBA. They tell you where your alumni is. No one knows. So I actually began to track where history PhDs went, partly just out of my own curiosity, because I was like, if I'm not going to be a historian, what else can I possibly do? I published that study in the Chronicle of Higher Education. That led to work with the American Historical Association. And as I was in the space writing and publishing, I could see this person whose name sounded familiar, Jen Polk, who was also doing work as a career coach. And so we formed allied together in 2013. We do an annual online conference the first two weekends in May. And we do some of the work ourselves, but we really pride ourselves on beyond the professory of being collaborative. So we have PhDs who come in and do webinars. We have career panels. We do workshops. And Jen and I, we host. We use an extensive network of PhDs. And we're really excited about that. We have an online community for PhDs. We do a lot of online events. It's $9.99 a month for membership. So we try and keep it affordable. And again, the members can come and attend these career panels. New, and I had some flyers out, is actually, we're just getting through our final tech issues this week and launching Aurora by Beyond the Professory. This is a subscription website for institutions who want to provide professional development to PhDs. On the flyers, it says 90. We actually have now added another about 50 PhDs to the platform. And we add new content every month. So this is a combination of career panels, how-to seminars, as well as one-on-one interviews with PhDs. And it also just recently, this is the community, it also recently just occurred to us that there's not a lot for PhDs who are interested in academic jobs. Did I break it? No, it's good. Yeah, we're good. Yeah, so this is our online community. But we just realized that there's not a lot of opportunity, or online support outside of institutions for PhDs that are actually interested in academic jobs and a lot of PhDs want to do that first. So this fall, we're starting a Be a Prof by Beyond the Prof. And we actually have a couple of seminars coming up next week, specifically on the academic job market. And the philosophy that we have at Be on the Prof. is we want to empower students to make informed career decisions, whether it's a lot of people think that they want to be faculty. We're in the process of actually interviewing faculty to add to Aurora, to our stream, to be like, what is it like to be a faculty member? Does it sound at all like what you think it is? And that's also part of the academic job market that we're expanding into. Because we think that students should be able to hear what it's like to be a market researcher or a UX design researcher or a professor and really be able to do this exploration early and often so that they end up in jobs where they feel like it's a good match. We have faculty members who come to our community because they didn't do career exploration and they don't actually like their job and they're unhappy. Or they made personal sacrifices that now they wish they hadn't have made. And so we really want students before they take that step to get on the academic job market to really explore their options. So it's a really... We're beyond the prof, but it's not only beyond the prof. So I wanted to give a little context to some of the data that we saw here. That's the promo piece, done advertising. Let's get to the research piece. One of the things that I've been working on, just sort of my own, I'm a historian by training, so I'm personally fascinated into the history of the academic job market. How did we end up where we are and how long has this been going on? And so I started reading about two summers ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times and The Washington Post, just to start getting a sense of the history of the job market crisis. So I want to talk a little bit about that before I get into where people go because I think it's really important to understand, and I guess because I'm a historian, to understand the root of the problem. One of the reasons why I really want to talk about it is that, and you'll be surprised, that the way that the job market is often presented on academic Twitter is really divorced from data, from the data that we've been seeing. And I think it's really important for us to really understand the challenges that we have on the academic job market, why we see them, and how long might they be around, how long might we be facing this crisis. So let me find my talk. And this is, of course, gross generalization, but let's get started. So one of the things I think is really important to understand about the way the academic job market functions is that it's actually very much tied to demographic booms and busts. And so the first real expansion, of course, was after World War II, but if you look at the 1960s, the universities actually grew in the United States by 120%. So as much as I like to blame the boomers for everything, because I'm almost a millennial, it's actually the people that were hired to teach the boomers. So to teach the boomers, boomers are coming to college, they ramp up across the United States and Canada. The University of Lethbridge was started in 1967, so it's a pretty typical story. Across the United States and Canada, they were creating new programs, new universities, hiring and rapidly expanding the professoriate. The challenge is that... Cold War spending is increasing science on campuses across the United States and Canada. So defense physics, for example, just explodes in the 1960s. It's important because in 1969, they changed the way in which funding... There's a crisis that begins in academia, it actually starts in physics, it actually starts in STEM, it doesn't actually start in the humanities, and it's because the Cold War begins to change over the 1970s and the federal government ends. Across, in Canada and the United States, begin to cut funding to universities and institutions. But we see this massive growth in hiring, and everybody is given tenure. So you have this locked-in cohort of faculty members all hired in around a ten-year period, all about the same age, and they're all tenured. And then by the early 1970s, you begin to see this demographic shift. The boomers are through college, and we don't actually need to keep hiring faculty members, and everyone's been given tenure, and oh my gosh, they're all going to move through the ranks at the same time. So our payroll is going to start ballooning as this cohort of faculty begins to actually move through the ranks. So universities begin to stop hiring. There's hiring freezes. And this is really important because people generally stay in their jobs for about 30 to 35 years. On average, a person is about 30 to 35 when they get their first ten-year-track job. So you have to take that cohort and then add 30 to 35 years, and you begin to see when we actually have the next hiring in the four universities. So in the 1970s, there's a couple of other things. The way in which universities are funded changes. Physics is hard hit by 1969. You're reading in the New York Times about these marauding physicists that can't get jobs. Industry stops hiring for physics. It's just an actual crisis. You also have the inflation and energy crisis. So university budgets are just being gobbled up. And there's a lot of stories about universities up here in Massachusetts that actually have to close for extended periods of time because they can't afford to heat the buildings. And they do give faculty raises. Sometimes it's like 7%, and I'm like, wow, that sounds really good. But inflation that year was like 11 or 12%. So any money that's actually going from the state to the universities is just being gobbled up by these other ballooning costs. So you see a real constriction across humanities and social sciences and the number of people that are actually entering the academy in the 1970s through really the early 1980s. The challenge that we don't have, of course, neither in the United States or Canada right now, is that there is a low unemployment rate. Yes, it's a gig economy, but there are actually lots of opportunities outside of academia. In the 1970s, you have double-digit unemployment rate. And so the real crisis for these PhD programs in the 1970s is like there's actually no place for professionals to go because there's rapid unemployment across North America. But I find this personally, there's... In history, to start solving this problem, we see the beginning of public history programs. The first public history programs come out in the 1970s. The American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association begin to have alternative career panels in the 1970s. About 1974 and 1975. So almost everything that we're trying now, these kinds of symposiums, these kinds of conversations, alternative careers for humanities PhD is a book I have on my shelf published in 1980. All of the conversations that we're having, they actually have in the 1970s. And one of the things I'm really fascinated by is they begin to create sort of summer boot camps on campuses. One is actually at NYU, run in Stern Business School, and started by a Harvard historian Ernest May. And the idea was that they would give people like economic business and computer courses, and that they would go and they would bring these faculty members or businesses to campus and actually interview these PhDs. And they had like over 3,000 applications for careers in business the first couple of years they did it. And they ran it to about 1987. And if you put careers in business in LinkedIn, you can find people who still list that certificate on their LinkedIn profile. It's a really interesting program. And they spent about, it was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which again is funding all of these programs today. I find it super fascinating. So this, of course, by the 1980s, as if everyone is familiar, there's these rumors that, oh, my God, there's like crisis and horror that has happened is going to finally end. And we will finally hire more faculty. And of course, the Bowen Report comes out. And he is, of course, the president of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, as well as formerly of Harvard. Yeah, and so people, he publishes a story. Oh, sorry, that's where my mic is. And so we have this report that comes out that talks about the fact that millennials, so I'm born in 1980, no one can decide if I'm a millennial or not. But I went to college in 1998. That's when I started. And millennials, of course, we all know is the largest demographic in American history, that cohort. So they're all going to start going to college sort of mid-90s. And we actually have reached the trough of the number of PhDs that have come out. So people drop out of PhD programs in record numbers. People shutter PhD programs in the 70s and 80s. And so finally, by the early 1980s, you have a decline in the number of PhDs right at the same time that you're going to have this increased, or this rumored increased need for faculty. So this report gets a lot of attention. The one person who says like this isn't going to happen is actually Lynn Cheney. That Lynn Cheney of those Cheneys, she's president of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She takes out an op-ed and says, nope, there's enough PhDs for the jobs that already exist. We can increase classroom sizes. And there's going to be no need for all of these new PhDs. So you better just not do what you're going to do. And of course, because who she is and her politics, her criticism of the Bone Report was not taken seriously. And I never want to have to tell you that a Cheney is right. But there was some truth to what Lynn Cheney was saying. I think people really underestimated the number of, how universities were going to increase in balloon class sizes, the faculty to student ratio. But also everyone really underestimated adjuncts. So we start seeing really in the 1970s as a way to sort of bring in new energy and new ideas. People begin to, the adjunct becomes a feature of academia really in the 1970s. Post-docs become a feature in the 1970s. There's less than 3% or 4% of STEM PhDs are doing post-docs in the 1960s. And of course now vast majority of PhDs in STEM will do post-docs before they get faculty. And that growth happens in the 1970s as universities try and figure out what to do with these PhDs that can't go into industry because there's no jobs in industry or into academia. I think the first story I read about, like the plight of the adjunct was in 1983. And it could have come out of the chronicle like tomorrow. It was the exact same thing. So what happens? Well, Lynn Cheney and Bowen, somewhere in the mix, is actually the truth of what happened. We actually do see an increased number in faculty. So there's two different things that we have to talk about and they both overlap. One is in the mid-90s you do start seeing people retire because they were hired in the 1960s. You had 35 years, right? You start seeing people retiring in the early to mid-90s. And so by the mid to late, mid-90s to early 2000s is really peak hiring. And at the same time, my generation, the millennials are going to college. So we are actually increasing the number of faculty. So during this whole time when you're reading these, like we're killing faculty positions and replacing them with adjuncts, there's almost no evidence that that's true. What we actually have seen is an increase in faculty, both in the contingent as well as on the tenure track. It's just that I've added four apples and I've added 11 oranges. So it is true that a greater share of faculty are contingent, but that's only because we've added 11 oranges. We have also added four apples to our fruit bowl. So it's really like both can be true. And it's really important to note that there was, in fact, an increase in hiring over this time period. So from the national humanities indicator, you can see that between 1999 and 2013, they actually increased the size of faculty. That includes both contingent as well as full-time faculty in the United States by 54%. So that's actually quite large. And you can see on this slide here that you can see the share between the not tenure and tenure track, the full-time non-tenure track, and part-time. And occasionally, the humanities indicator will break out arts. Oftentimes, they say it's statistically or too small and they don't necessarily break it out, but they do. So you can look at the humanities indicator for a lot of really cool data. History, 70% of faculty in history departments are in fact tenure or tenure track. You know, it's smaller in English department, so it ranges. So anyways, the point is, we did actually grow the professoriate but when thought we were going to grow the professoriate. This coincides, of course, with enrollment. Canada looks very similar. I'm sorry, I scrubbed my Canadian data out of here, but I do have some. But we had peak enrollment in the United States around 2010, so we're actually starting to see a decline enrollment in the United States now again, which of course, we've ballooned the professoriate. It's exactly the same as the 1960s, right? We've ballooned the professoriate. We've replaced the people who've retired. We've hired a massive cohort and now they have jobs. And that's great. But what it means is that there's a finite need for faculty and I can't emphasize this enough. This is why these conversations are so important is because it probably will be like when you guys retire that we'll start seeing an increase in faculty hirings again. And that's fine, but that's just the reality. And you can actually map it, because what's really interesting with the data is that we should actually be able to map. If you start thinking about average age of faculty and the jobs and so long as faculty positions don't get cut for tenure, we should actually be able to map when there might be actually an increase in faculty if we want to do. So this is just a chart here that actually shows growth in full-time. This is STEM faculty, but there's also social sciences. So it's not just in the humanities that we've seen an increase in faculty. But the most important thing is we haven't actually seen a massive decline in faculty and numbers across the United States just to emphasize that point again for a different discipline. This goes back to the talk about the age of faculty. So this is a chart that Rob Townsend, if you like data, Rob Townsend's at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but he used to be deputy director at the American Historical Association and he's been doing data on the job market for 18 years. But Rob calculated the average age of history faculty based on the directory that they had. So you can see that right around the time of the job crisis, the average age of faculty declines. So what he was seeing is that as the average age of faculty goes up, you actually did see some more increases in job and now the average age of history faculty is about 48. So it means that, again, we're looking at a fairly young professoriate and I did a study for what I just talked about on history and English departments in Canada and it looked fairly similar. Let me see if I have that number. So in the humanities departments, English and history, 60% of tenure or tenure track faculty earned their degrees between 1990 and 2004. So there's just that nice big like 15 year cohort that was hired. And of course, there's just been an increase in the number of new PhDs that have come out. So the reason why it feels like there's a tight job market is because there is more competition for these jobs based on the fact that PhD programs have in fact actually been graduating more and more PhDs. So you can see, here you can kind of see the trough here in the late 1970s and some of these disciplines like engineering actually declines there for a little bit and now of course it's accelerating. Life sciences takes off. Education is having a crisis and the humanities, again, you peak. And the important thing is you can also map. So you guys are fast. You said that it was like five years to time to degree, under six? Because the average time to degree in the humanities is eight. Yeah, so I was like, whoa, you guys are smart ones getting finished fast. So anyways, you can also begin to sort of backtrack to periods of unemployment. So you can see that there's the real crisis in the 80s. More and more people did actually go to grad school. So you had about seven to eight years and you can start seeing when cohorts begin to come out. And so one of the things, one of the reasons why there is actually such a large number of PhDs is that a lot of people in 2008-2009 went to grad school to wait out the recession. And now they're coming out on the job market right at the same time that there's fewer and fewer jobs. So it's basically 1973 all over again. That's the good news. I'll joke inside. So one of the things that Jen and I do, my business partner Jen and I, is we spend a lot of time interviewing PhDs. We record the interviews. We sometimes lightly edit them. We add closed captioning and then we put them up in our various platforms. And I want to get to the point of like how PhDs actually find jobs when they leave the professory. Because of course they don't die always. They go on and have other careers. One of the things that we really I think I can speak I was like I think I can speak for Jen on this. Jen and I think we both passionately feel that the PhD is a really important education that people can leverage in a lot of ways. But we want I want to caution and we actually wrote a piece in University Affairs about this based on a response to the University of Toronto's 10,000 PhD project not to draw correlation between the PhD and the jobs. So just because I run an ed tech company the AHA should not put me up and say oh you can get a history PhD and then go off and run this. It's like well my brother-in-law works at Google Cloud and it gives me business advice. My partner has a background in IT and I don't know what I'm doing most of the time. There's actually very little about what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis that directly relates to my education as a historian. That doesn't mean I regret it. That doesn't mean it doesn't inform my thinking. It doesn't mean that it doesn't inform the way that I go about my life. It doesn't mean that I'm not happy I got a PhD in history. It just means that we shouldn't hold up these PhDs and say this is a job for an historian. It's just a job that an historian now has and I think that's really important to think about, to differentiate between where PhDs go and the way they're leveraging their education and then one of the things I'm really going to emphasize is oftentimes PhDs are leveraging their distractions their non-academic work and they're pairing it with their skills and that's actually how they're getting their jobs and then the other really important thing is networking. Having that community, having that network and 99% of the PhDs we interview reference networking as critical to their job success. Talking to people, informational interviews being in the right place at the right time having an internship, having a part-time job having their I'm going to give you one story having their wife's mother's college roommate's husband give them an opportunity. You know there's a lot of network you call it nepotism but that's just how business works, right? When you hire somebody you know hiring is expensive, firing is even more expensive I'm a small company, I hire an household and then they ruin everything and I have to fire them like I don't want to do that. So a lot of this what you're going to see and one of the reasons why you see these PhDs outside of the professoriate is that they are leveraging their personal networks the people they know, the people they can get to know as well as their outside distractions paired with their education in order to actually find their careers. So here's some examples and I've taken some there's one for if you guys have alumni who are doing non-academic jobs who want to talk to me we started asking for interviews from like August and I got two people and one person cancelled on me so I've pulled other humanities and some STEM PhDs for my examples but we'd love to include arts PhDs in Aurora so you know send them our way also if you want to be interviewed about what it's like to be a faculty member institution we'll let you know so Paige Cooper Paige Cooper has a PhD in bio what is it molecular cell biology one of the things that we find beyond the professoriate is that it's just as hard for PhDs in STEM to transition out of the academy as it is in humanities and social sciences so it's not you it's just hard and that's particularly true of people who don't want to go continue to do bench science if they really don't want to continue to do bench science it becomes very difficult for them to find their ways so this becomes a conversation to have with all your colleagues across the institution because it is as much of a challenge for STEM PhDs as it is for us losers in the humanities so Paige's story is that she's now the director of a program at Duke University that supports undergraduate and graduate students who are members of underrepresented groups her work involves putting on workshops and mentoring students one-on-one she works in student affairs which might not be an obvious place for a STEM PhD but she loves it and what motivated Paige was she didn't she wanted to work with students and she did like she looked around and realized that PIs spend all their time writing grants and they don't get to spend time with students and that was not what she actually wanted to do so this is where I think having like when we're talking about how do we students figure out what they want to do having conversations with faculty about what your life actually looks like and bringing an alumni from institutions that are not R1 not doctoral programs but actually like 4-4 teaching loads or community colleges and having them talk about on the same panel as other PhDs like what does it actually like to teach a 4-4 teaching load and live in rural Ohio like is that something that I want to do what does that look like and bringing them with other alternatives it was like oh that sounds really exciting I actually think that would be fun so Paige so she decides research was under a thing so she did a lot of informational interviews and she oh yeah so she got this job through informational interviews so one of the things Paige was doing was she was working a lot she was taking a lot of initiative in her lab to mentor students just like volunteering for high school science fairs to be a judge as one way that she was starting to get experience and then she did informational interviews and she met somebody who was at Duke who was then able to tell her hey this job is coming up and I think it would be a good fit for you and they were able to help her with her application now of course universities have strict hiring policies so like it's not directly nepotism but knowing somebody on a committee knowing somebody who can give you advice on an application that that internal knowledge that students get when they talk to people working in those disciplines and fields really makes or breaks their application and having that person not say hey I've got to expect this application from this woman she seemed really smart no matter that goes a long way to getting that person the interview and we really want to emphasize that people don't get jobs through informational interviews but they get interviewed they get in front of hiring managers and that becomes really important so important for PhDs in career transition because we don't have the direct linear work experience that so many people are looking for so if I can have coffee with you and say this is what I'm interested in this is what I've been doing how would someone like me work at an organization like yours and then I get that feedback from you and then I'm able to tell you why I'm actually interested in transitioning out of academia well you can already have that information and look and review my resume or you can tell the hiring manager that and so it really gives that student an opportunity to make the case for themselves before they're actually in the running for jobs and that's really important for getting opportunities yeah so Paige just talks about and this is I think one of the things we can talk about like what can you do for your students really encourage them to be distracted encourage them to get involved on things on campus encourage them to volunteer community projects to be applied and engaged in their communities to build networks but have a different kind of work experience get out of the classroom get out of the archives, get out of the libraries and be engaged in other ways because those stories and that experience can allow them to reflect on what it is they love when they feel energized and other places where they could feel similarly energized as the classroom or in research and that's really important Simon, Silas has a PhD in theology and he now works at a trade publisher they actually publish religious books so Silas started entry level and this is one of the things that people don't like us to say but it's true a lot of the PhDs that we see especially other humanities and social sciences do start entry level and the reason why is that it gives them an opportunity to learn the language of the new industry how the company works how the industry actually work and so those entry level positions are really important and a lot of times PhDs won't apply for them because it's like damn it, I have a PhD, I've worked really hard I shouldn't have to start entry level but in career transition it actually is really important to say yes to entry level opportunities and we do find that PhDs rise rapidly Silas has been in this job for under a year and he's already been promoted from marketing into a combined position of marketing acquisition that he'll be put into acquisitions very quickly so he had to come in learn the language, learn the industry but because he has a PhD and because he has experience and he has those skills he will advance and so the first job is not the last job and it's okay to start entry level and we do hear this a lot from humanities PhDs and so he says sometimes it takes a low level job an entry level job to break in to find yourself doing the kinds of work you'd like to do sometimes means you have to do work that frankly is perhaps below your skill level your experience level to do the kind of work you'd imagine yourself doing he says once you're there you can make significant contributions you can make real impact on teams on projects but you have to give them and yourself that opportunity and I think it's you know it's a it's an important story alright so Kate Meyers Emery again back to this idea of distractions so she has a PhD in archaeology and anthropology and now she's a manager of digital engagement at a museum so you know not necessarily obvious how an architect or an archaeologist would end up in that position but to pay for her PhD she did a lot of side hustles so again it was like her combination of being a strong communicator, research being able to tackle new projects you'll be interested to know that one of the things that PhDs from the humanities tell me was one of the most useful pieces of their PhD was actually comps because when they exit the academy they have to learn an entirely new field fast they have to read themselves into a new industry fast and they have to know how to actually tackle that project for themselves so being able to be broad is way more useful than to be narrow in this job market and so it's actually not the dissertation that they find most useful for their career transition it's those damned comps and I haven't been asking that because I've been in rooms especially in Canada where you have a lot of people from the UK system where they don't do comps and they'll be up against the Americans and Canadians who do comps and they almost swear there was almost a fist fight at this one conference that was out over this question so it turns out it actually is really useful to have your students do comps and coursework if they're going to leave the academy and it's useful in the academy too so keep comps so Kate Meyers Emery so she works in her hometown that was really important to her you know we hear this a lot people make these decisions they like being out of the academy because they feel very empowered they get to decide where they're going to live they get to decide to prioritize family they get to decide to prioritize cities that they want to live in or move and they feel very empowered when they make this decision eventually it can be very terrifying and they don't necessarily always feel supported but that's one of the constant themes that we hear from the 145 PhDs in the last 18 months so Natasha works at this digital engagement so she says the way I got paid for grad school was doing a lot of weird side hustles revolving around social media and digital engagement so that practical experience helped her get the job and then she says there is so much from doing a PhD that is applied to this position both anthropology and social media are about communities she says I'm more passionate about the tools that I learned during grad school than I am about the content of what I'm actually doing and the skills needed for this job it was just thinking about those things differently than I normally would have so Adam Rubin is another STEM PhD and he wrote a book called Surviving Your Stupid Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School it's supposed to be ironic but he actually does a lot of publishing on the side and he writes for Science Magazine as well and this is the networking piece so again even though he's STEM and he had he has direct knowledge and technical experience for the job he has that comes from his PhD but he was only able to get that job through networking so so the first part of the story is that he actually started going to a malaria seminar in DC where he was doing his PhD and he said it was really boring and it took him like an hour to drive but he felt like he should go to these industry malaria seminars even though he didn't really learn that much and one day the CEO of a company stood up and did his research on the type of work that Adam was doing in his lab so he met with the CEO and said you know I'm really curious as to what I'm doing the CEO says well you know we don't have any jobs thanks so much and then a few weeks later his wife's mother's college roommates was in town with her husband and they said oh we're just gonna you know we're moving up here because he's just gotten a job at this like this tech company this biomedical company that Adam was really interested in and he was like wow this is really a coincidence I just met your CEO and the guy was like well we don't have any openings right now but why don't you come to these Thursday seminars I'm now in charge of organizing them and you can talk about your research so Adam did he showed up and he did his research and then a couple months later there was an opening in the company that was now in the like wife's mother's team and he asked the CEO if they could rewrite the application it was meant for a bachelor BA or BSC and they said well can we rewrite this for someone who has a PhD and actually hire him for the job and the CEO says yeah he seems great so they rewrote it and he got the job so again even if someone has direct technical work experience and has STEM that networking piece is so critical to how PhDs get their jobs and it's critical for how everybody gets their jobs you know my partner has an MBA and does consulting and he only gets gigs through networking I'm almost done, alright so Rachel and then we'll talk about what people are doing on campus so Rachel she was really interesting because she actually studied women in tech in India and now she works in tech but one of the things that she really emphasizes is again networking so she had to create a portfolio when she went to do a career transition she didn't actually have the direct technical experience that she needed so she took online courses from Coursera to learn user research she volunteered for friends in Boulder she's a CU Boulder grad she did a couple of free projects for start tech Denver and Boulder are very much for tech so she did a couple of free projects for friends and then she got some contract work and in 10 days on that contract she was actually hired into a full time job she saw a piece on LinkedIn about this Boulder company that recently been acquired by Cognizant which is a huge company of 250,000 employees and this woman in Boulder her company had just been acquired and so Rachel reached out to her and said like I really love that article you wrote this is really interesting and really inspired by your approach to tech and the woman wrote back and said oh you know we're looking to hire send me your resume so she streamlined Rachel and Rachel now and she's the curator of the think tank of the company and she says that there's so much room for humanities and social sciences in tech and this will shock you because most of the time the people who are putting out the apps and the software don't talk to humans and they don't interact with humans and they don't know how to study humans so the ability to actually like know be human focused in your research and being able to be a strong communicator all in user design three women and they all very much emphasized their research their ability to do research their ability to come up with research projects but also their ability to ask questions to people and be able to listen to people and be able to then write about that and take that knowledge back was the transferable skill and it didn't matter if they were anthropology or education or history that's the transferable piece your ability to ask humans questions and this is my performing arts well sort of he got a PhD in cultural studies and background in performing arts Omar he applied to a thousand jobs he submitted resumes to a thousand jobs and he got nowhere he got a cup and this is so important resumes are useless unless they're paired with networking and so he sort of do something which I think is really interesting and there's a growing demand in corporations for facilitators for improv to go into organizations and leads seminars and teach improv as part of team building exercises and so he started doing that because he couldn't get a job and he has a background in stand up and so through this he was able to build a network and create again a portfolio of work experience and then he his wife was working has a job at a company and he met the CEO and said you know I would really like to do this kind of outreach for your organization this is how I think that I could fit into your organization and this is what the position might look like and the CEO was like that sounds awesome you're hired so Omar actually created his own position but again he had to actually develop an outside network and create his own business and establish himself outside of academia before he was able to take that opportunity so the moral of that story is like outside opportunities getting people engaged in their communities and having building networks and having opportunities to demonstrate their skillset in other areas outside of the academy is really important so I have a couple of case studies we do a research and innovation series for Beyond the Professorate it's free to attend and what we do is we ask researchers or faculty or program managers at universities to come and talk about what they're doing on their campus we did 12 last year we've got four scheduled for the semester we'll do another six they're Thursdays at noon, they're online we record them, they're available afterwards so a lot of these that I'm going to talk about are from that research and innovation series so this is Carlton University Carlton in the sociology department they're really interesting so they're actually they're not actually the sociology department at Carlton is one of the top ranked in Canada they're one of the large sociology, PhD and institutions but they are seen as everybody is a challenge in having students get tenure track jobs so what they actually ended up doing is they started a professional development program and they hired a post-doc a woman who'd come out of their PhD program and they created a part-time administrative position as well as a teaching position so a lot of the funding for her position came through her teaching undergraduate classes but they were also able to get the department they were unable to get money from the grad school they actually came up with money from their own department to then pay for part of her time to be focused on developing a professional development program they have a Facebook group where Kara posts a lot of jobs that come through and part of her job was actually finding jobs that PhDs could potentially apply for and posting them on Facebook one of the key things that Kara did is she found partners on institution on campus to bring into the department and that's really important we've know from research that has been done that students want professional development from their department they don't want it from the graduate school necessarily they will not go to career services they do not see career services as something that's for them they even though you might not be the best person to tell them about jobs outside of the academy they want you to that is what they're expecting from their department now there's a mismatch there but having creating these types of like opportunities for a new PhD out of your department or even a PhD in your department to bring resources from campus to the department she created she brought alumni back Ottawa is like Washington DC basically so there's a lot of PhDs working in think tanks and government that she was able to bring back and do talks on campus what is most interesting to me about Carlton Sociology Department's program is that they opened it up to people who had been out for three years because so often when PhDs leave their department and they don't get academic jobs they go into this wasteland where they don't feel necessarily attached to any particular community and it becomes very difficult for them and they were trying to support PhDs both in the academia as well as outside of academia so one of the things the department did was they figured out how to sponsor library privileges for alumni up until three years after because they found of course that if you're a contingent faculty and you're trying to do research or all of your independent artists being able to publish and write becomes incredibly difficult when you lose your library privileges so that was one of the things that they were able to do for their students they had the networking events on campus where they brought organizations in and so they facilitated those conversations right on campus and within the department as well so finding people bringing them in having conversations and creating that and it wasn't faculty that did that I want to emphasize that they did find money from the department but they created this position for a recent PhD and Cara now actually has transitioned out of this job and she's now working at a think tank in Ottawa and loves her job and she talks about this job that she got from her department as being really critical in getting that job because she was able to do program management, project management she was able to develop a lot of skills so not only was it really good in that she helped other her fellow students but she was also given an opportunity in her department to basically work in an all-tact position so we, this is University of Kentucky oh, Cara said in her interview I just want to emphasize this that having this professional development program in place became really central to recruiting and students perspective students were really fascinated and interested in the fact that from day one they felt more supported by their department in finding the career and it also was really important in retention of students so they saw dropouts decline that people stayed in the program longer they were able to continue to recruit students by celebrating and supporting all career paths okay so University of Kentucky graduate school this is a little different I've got a couple of department examples and a couple of kind of more graduate level center program examples for you here so this is a preparing future professional so you have preparing future faculty this is of course the graduate school and Nathan Vander Bort is the man's name who does that he's he was vice president of academics so it was and I think that's another avenue for departments is to actually reach out to the PhDs working on your campus and invite them to help you create future professional courses or maybe even teach the future professional courses as an adjunct a lot of the people that we interview love teaching so I think that you probably would be able to find somebody just even on your own campus who would be really excited and interested to work with you and other departments in creating you know humanities focus future professionals course the importance of this course for Nathan was that he wanted to begin to change culture in his department or in the department in the university by having these conversations so again he talked about the fate of the job market it's biomedical it's way worse for them it's only 10% feel good about your 38 you're doing better than biomedical and he wanted to it showed an investment in career development structures and established connections with employers so it's a 16 week course and the students get two credit hours for it the course is designed to talk about the reality of the job market to learn what skills are required to transition to other careers they have to identify resources themselves that will help them and the students have to create an action plan for a non-academic career as part of this they're also so the course is structured around career exploration where the students are they read about other you know science and science careers they focus on transferable skills again Nathan works with the career center for some of these as well so he doesn't teach them all himself and the students are required to do informational interviews they're required to find somebody who has a career that they're interested in and interview them and that doesn't preclude them from talking to a faculty member so if they think that they want to work as a PI they should go interview PIs and learn what that's like so he builds that right into the program and then they talk about job application skills so they learn resume writing in that course as well yeah publicly engaged scholarship is another way in which departments are facilitating these connections between students and learning skills that can help them succeed outside of the academy so Molly McCarthy did a great one hour workshop for us on their publicly engaged scholarship program this is out of the Humanities Institute at UC Davis so again there might be other places for you to especially people with smaller PhD programs to partner to develop these kinds of things so this is funded by the Mellon Foundation and so they have fellowship for 10 public scholars and Molly was really interesting because when she started this program she started not pushing but she started offering workshops on non-academic careers and students wouldn't come now when humanity students are interviewed about their career choices 80% will say that they want to be faculty members so one of the things that Molly has really tried to do with this program is to reach students where they're at so one of the reasons it's called publicly engaged scholarship instead of internships is that the students want to do publicly engaged scholarship and they don't feel like it's a stigma if they want to take their scholarship into the community the same way it might be stigmatized on an academic job search if they were to say like an internship so it's marketing but it matters as with things in marketing it's open to both humanities social sciences students and they have a part-time program manager who runs this they teach a spring seminar so it's a and then the students complete their projects over the summer so it provides them with much needed summer funding and it also then doesn't necessarily conflict with their time to degree which as you know from the eight years average for human there are other humanities programs time to degree is becomes a real issue personally I think time to agree is like not really that interesting like if you're if you're graduating PhDs who then struggle for three to five years that doesn't necessarily seem like that's as good as having another year to a program if the year then accelerates full-time meaningful employment like I think there's other metrics that we should be thinking about other than like the graduation rate and I know that there's funding and budget issues that like limit that conversation but I think that that's you know an interesting important thing so they all have community projects some of the students create their own projects that's much easier for social science PhDs to do than they found for humanities PhDs because humanities PhDs I think they really do struggle to think about how their skills can be applicable outside of academia so one thing we see from like UBC has done a really great study where's my UBC yeah UBC has done a really great placement study of their PhDs I know the University of Toronto has done this the AHA and the MLA one of the things we see is that humanity students want to stay in higher ed or they default to higher ed so they're contingent they go into higher ed administration or they go into faculty positions but we see a very small percentage of humanities PhDs moving into industry at all I think it's a problem like I think industry is obviously great I'm in it there is a lot of need for humanistic thinking in industry the ethics of humanistic thinking but humanities students tend to want to stay in higher education and we see that across all of this data so one of the challenges that humanities PhDs have is they don't know how their skill sets can translate so what they have done at at UC Davis is they've actually found partners like the California um arts council for example or the California Department of Education so places that are government or mission driven organizations and the partners actually will suggest um internships basically, publicly engaged scholarship for the students and so half of these spots, half of the 10 spots are open for students to have their own projects and the other half are basically sponsored projects the organization doesn't have to pay for it but they have already come up with the scope of the project and they advertise those and the students can then apply to actually take those projects so the projects are very digital humanities focused the ones that Molly shared with us, a lot of them are like building websites, doing interviews and then publishing the websites, those kinds of things um another UNC Chapel Hill history department where I did my PhD they, their funding is interesting so I worked with them to do their data tracking and you guys seem to have lots of it already and they were actually able to take departmental data, the tracking that I did for them and go to the grants office and work with the grants office to get a donation specifically for the department to fund internship programs so they have gone, they don't have an outside funding agent, they have gone completely outside of the graduate program and they've actually managed to secure their own grant um to do this and they were, they did that by saying help us this is the state of the job market, this is what our students need, your gift will help our students in this way so they're able to use that data to make a specific task and so they have a grant that supports four PhD students again in the summer, it's three thousand dollars the last time I heard um that the student gets and they do it over a couple of weeks and when I went to check on what, so when I went to check and see what the students were doing all four students that had been sponsored this past year were all doing intern, well three of them were doing internships on campus they were doing internships in um the special collections or they were doing uh internships within university uh departments, one student was actually doing an internship at a local museum but they were all local they didn't require the students to travel and they were engaged even within their own institution and to go back to what I was saying like a lot of humanity students really want to stay in higher ed they like them, it's a mission that they believe in it's a place where they feel like that their skills have particular value and so I think that humanities programs have a real opportunity to create partnerships just on campus, you know with student affairs or with your GSA to create opportunities that can fund internships just without having to have students travel or even go off campus because students really actually are interested in that career path and I think it could be a really interesting thing for you all to explore on your campuses that would meet students where they're at and then if they decide to move off of campus that's great but there's a lot of opportunities just even within the university that could be really fruitful for students and fudging some funding with your grad school on RA ships or how these positions are paid that could be an interesting conversation to have as well to work just within the budgets of the university to create these kinds of positions for work that already needs to be done. So that's my last that's my last one and with Carolina so yeah questions I know that was a lot and I went fast. Thank you so much for that that was hugely helpful I want to go back to something that you mentioned really quickly in this which was the reluctance that students have to go to campus wide events around this can you talk a little bit about what drives that because I know one of the things that I've been trying to do on my campus is talk to my dean inside of Arts and Humanities about handling this on the divisional level because our program cannot possibly be the only program that's facing this and other students in other programs must have similar problems and desires so how can we work together on this instead so can you talk about what's driving that reluctance so we can figure out how to actually induce the students so that we're not reproducing all of this labor on a departmental level Yes please Just to add to that because I was on board with you 100% until that moment where I thought well because I'm also wondering about perhaps a perceived mixed message that we might be sending students about this is what we're training you to do but either some of you aren't going to cut it or you probably won't like it or whatever it is right So I want to push back on training, are you training or are you educating Well I can see training in terms of sort of ancillary professional positions right so being artistic director or doing other kinds of work in theater performance that's not in a tenure track position but if we're also going to be teaching them how to be accountants and how to be in tech or something like that how is that when I can't do it but also how is that what does that conversation look like Yeah I mean I'm putting this up because one of the we talk to career services about this new option and one of the things we talk about and they know it humanity students don't show up and I don't necessarily there's a number of things that we hear from career services we just went like this is an anecdote the humanities institute at the University of Winnipeg paid for Jenna and I to come up and it was full of engineers like they were like we have two historians to come talk to you in the humanities institute it's like humanities for humanities and humanities for humanities and it doesn't come and so I think part of it comes I think why Molly's is so interesting Molly's approach is because you know survey your students and find out what their career plans are and when she did that like 80% of the students were like nope faculty are bust and she was like right but math like that's not going to be the way it works so that's why you know there's other things that you can do in departments on campus and I know a lot of graduate programs have begun to do more things like research ethics so that's something that doesn't necessarily sound like I have to have a non-academic career but it could or grants writing which is another one which could be applicable to an academic or a non-academic career so trying to be strategic about those kinds of like what you're calling them you could even do like a professional development documents like just talk about applications and just label it that and then sneak in some resume writing as part of that but I think it really they don't want to not be faculty like that's the biggest problem that we have with humanities PhDs is that there are a lot of them vast majority of them are coming to PhD programs because they want to be faculty and you know I mean I joked with the chair of the department you know when I did that data forum I said you know if you would have showed me this data when I was a grad student and would have said only 40% of you will get tenure track jobs I would have said that's too bad for Robin and Phillip like it would never have occurred to me that I was going to be the person that wasn't going to get that job right just would not have like I'd gotten all my grants and I was like top program and I thought I'd made it and I was like you know whatever I guess I was Aryan I was young I don't know but I was also getting fed that message you know from my faculty mentors like well you're like this work is so great and you're going to be fine and you're you know I think that if there's also a way to require I mean I know that that becomes a problem with credit like credit hours and there's lots of issues around that but requiring some kind of professional development or working it into a pedagogical course I know Caroline has done this they actually have now a required course the students have to take where they talk about historians in the profession and they talk about all historians not just the ones that end up working as historians and so they try and sneak it in whenever they possibly can I think the other reason why the sociology example from Carlton is so interesting and what Jen and I see all the time is we we thought we would be working much more with grad students and we see almost no grad students we see people who are three five seven twenty years out who then will come they'll be sessionals for like 10 or 15 years before they realize it's not going to become a contingent fact like a job this is why I think the date of like how long are people on the job market and like when should you leave like from the study I did from the Chronicle and the humanities it was like two years three at the max like and that includes your ABD and then there was like nobody getting hired unless they were tenure track faculty making lateral moves so it's like a really short window of opportunity and I think making sure students know what that opportunity is so they can make strategic decisions and opening up your department offerings to students who are in and around your school who are now out can be really important and facilitating that kind of work for them including them in your conversations yeah one of the things I find interesting in the comparisons with a lot of the humanities things that you're citing is that it's not a cultural thing that people generally grow up as a kid or develop as a teen thinking I'm going to be a historian but there is this identity issue with theater that I'm a theater person and I think that's unique to our field I think that I don't know maybe I'm overstating that but I think it's more so than anthropology or a lot of other maybe I don't need to argue that point so much but one of I just wanted to note that because I think that is something people want to stay in theater and the other thing that was interesting to me was how to manage the amount of shame and fear around it because we make certain types of decisions when we're ashamed and when we're afraid and we don't use logical decision-making you know patterns when we're in these states and I think that they're already so ashamed and afraid as PhD students because it's there's a lot of shaming mechanisms that are in place that have been we've all inherited from you know generations and generations that we're trying to dismantle to make it a more supportive experience but still rigorous and still tough so I feel like part of this thing is like getting able to show up and even consider this idea of what they're perceiving of as failure while they're even doing it is such a funny thing and how to couch it is not failure when that's really what they want to do because you know what our jobs are so fun it's so cool to be a theater professor it's it rocks like it's I can't imagine a better job and they see that it's a great job so I don't know like and I know that that's like basically other things but I guess I just want to bring that in of like acknowledging that it's shrouded in a lot of this here's my question for you what is it about being a theater professor that rocks what actually motivates you and excites you about the work you do the ability to work with students the ability to do my own creative work and research and then be able to do performance it's like crazy to be able to do all three what is it about working with students that you love they invigorate me I love touching the future so it's like the future piece yeah I mean I didn't think about it too heavily there's probably more yeah so like that's the kind of work that we do with humanities social science students because you know like I loved I mean you say like theater and I also have a background in theater but like I loved history like I read like you know Anne of Green Gables in Canadian but I was Anne like I had red hair and I talked a lot and I was adopted like I was Anne Shirley but like I was always fascinated with that and so getting to go to a history department where there were other nerds like I think this is part of the appeal of the academy for so many people is like you're a dork in high school and then you go and you're like rewarded for being weird you know like all of a sudden you get to talk about like you know I mean I read you know pornography in the 18th century like I did and that was useful useless dissertation but I loved it I loved my you know queer studies and having these esoteric topics and being around other smart people but what the work that we have to do with students is that why like what was it about history that was actually really exciting to you because or what was it about my dissertation that was actually really exciting to me and so what I've actually figured out about myself running a business is I love strategic thinking I love it like I actually hated going to the archives like if someone had actually pointed out how little time I spent in the archives it might have been a really good clue that I probably wasn't going to succeed as a professor I love teaching so I do this you know or I do these online workshops so and what I love about teaching is was motivating and mentoring other people to be successful that's actually what I really loved about it so if we take what motivates us in the work that we do like what is it about theater what is it about performance what is it about working with students like what's that hook and when we help students realize what their hook is then they begin to see other opportunities and they can have conversations with other professionals who can talk to them about like similar motivations and then I get similar satisfaction because the interesting thing about all of these we did so we have 20 career panels they have three to four people on them we did 40 one-on-one interviews with PhDs this last summer every one of them say that about their job I love my job I love it this is the best fit for me I'm so glad I'm in it and I think like we have to have people come in and say that like I didn't like it was I'm really energized by the work that I do now in a different way and this is what the hook is the other reason why having students do that work and figuring out why they're there and what they love is because that's what that's what you tell people in informational interviews right like what because you have to like because you're 35 years old and you're doing this you have to be able to say like so as a university researcher and educator or as you know a director what I really love doing was this and now I'm looking for an opportunity where I can continue to do that kind of work just in a different capacity so really doing that deep dive that like career coachy like reflective exercises even before you get to transferable skills thinking about what the hook is and why like I and I talk to people about this all the time in theater because it's theater there's something that you're experiencing in theater that allows you to explore things that are really important and passionate to you and if we can articulate that then we can begin to find other avenues I would just call out to this group then to say if we have aspirational people who are our graduates who are those people I would love for them to get interviewed by this because I think of our grads who aren't in this academic position and I think most of them would say they settled one was had a corporate job because he was going through a divorce and he needed to you know and he held out for a year and another one is doing a center administrative but I don't think so I think finding wildly fulfilled people who did this would be great yeah I mean we think well they come to us like we they volunteer to be interviewed so we I guess we self-select but we we know hundreds of happy fulfilled PhDs thank you for your presentation I just had a question about the timeline of this because it occurs to me that we could counsel people out of the PhD before they finish the dissertation and do you need to finish the I mean do you find that people are needing the degree to do what they're doing 100% not like no one wants to hire a history PhD or an English lit PhD 100% the credential does not matter 100% the credential does not matter but it's a credential that doesn't mean that the skills don't matter so people one of the questions we ask right and that's the thing you have to remember about it with like an industry right is that industry positions hire people based on a whole variety of work experience and education so the fact you have a PhD and someone else has like a master's in public policy yeah I don't really care what I'm hiring is are you a good fit do you have a skill set that's unique can you build my organization what's your particular value and so helping students understand again going back to what Rachel was saying about the humanistic approach that she's able to bring to her research and the ability to even create a research project is a highly transferable skill being wanting to build community wanting to engage with people wanting to inspire people wanting to get people up to interact with each other you know you think about like why do corporations spend like I guess I'm on camera I mean my husband went to like do like this improv thing the company spent $50,000 to spend two days to send their employees to do improv what is it about that experience of performance and getting people to engage that is about so that like businesses are paying lots of money to have this come in like have this kind of facilitation happening in their organization what is it about that and I think that that's where and I know you all are busy but having informational interviews yourself with organizations and businesses that are in your area figuring out what the major employers are and having conversations with them about what they do can actually begin to have so to go back to your point like I think it goes there's lots of reasons why people get PhDs I think it's perfectly fine I think it's an amazing education and I think that I personally push back against sort of this neoliberal argument that there needs to be a direct connection between someone's degree and what they do you know like I just it's bullshit you know and so you're educating people you are right I am too in different ways but you're educators and you do it so well and you have smart, talented, interesting bright people and to go back to the shame piece like for me that's the most destructive part is that I see people languish 3, 5, 7 years in these contingent faculty positions or they're basically unemployed you know like you would look at this data and you look at it for history and English too the under employment rate of PhDs is staggering the unemployment rate is low because they're smart ambitious creative people and they're like busy but the under employment rate of PhDs is staggering and a lot of it comes from this lack of ability to see how they fit into you know and so I think the conversation becomes not about training PhDs but about leveraging your education like what brought you here why are you excited okay and talking about timing I think it's never too early for students to do informational interviews or you know internship programs have been really highlighted to have that experience I think doing it early doing more than one finding opportunities for students to engage the other thing I'll say as somebody who's gone into this world is like you very quickly begin to see your skill set when you're up against other people who don't have it but when you're in a world where everyone operates like you you're like oh well everyone's smart at this you know and you're like actually most people are really bad at project management most people suck at it you got out of bed and you put your pants on you wrote your dissertation and you funded it and you finished it like you're actually really good at it right that's awesome most people can't do that like I talk to people all the time they're like oh you work for yourself that must be so hard and you're like why like I set my alarm I get up and I work what do you do but you know having that self motivation is something that really stands out so the more interaction students can have outside of people that are like them outside of academics they will see the value of their skill set and the way in which it can bring and that's the most important thing employers hire people who bring value to them it's not about the student it's not about the student experience it's knowing how you make the organization more awesome and how your skill set can build up and help that organization achieve its mission that becomes really critical on the job search but yeah so that's I guess that's my little rant it doesn't matter what you do with the PhD like getting it is one thing and then if you want to go do like fly fishing tours in Montana with your PhD awesome like I don't know like I think that that's a challenge right I'm like and I say that because I'm out and you guys have the pressure of funding your programs and demonstrating viability of the degrees in a very neoliberal university so that's a different challenge but I think we should push back one quick comment from twitter before I pass things on Donna Tellagalala of UC Riverside just notes I wish there was an acknowledgement of how racial class and gender privileges shape our networks to not only obtain a job but to hear about a job in the first place so this is yeah so one of the challenges that we have in interviewing PhDs is that so few PhDs are you know so few people of color actually get PhDs and then we see a even smaller percent that actually end outside of the academy but one of the motivating factors that we one thing that we do actually hear from PhDs of color who leave the academy is the alienating experience of being in academia and that they want to leave it because they don't feel like it's a place that where they are rewarded or exiled and they're in predominantly white program so we have heard that the thing that I want to say about networking and you know this is a challenge especially I think for Canadian schools where I've had a lot more of these conversations because there's a much higher percentage of international students in Canadian schools and of course there's the issue of race and racism in hiring a lot of the international students you know so now you can build your own network you know in hearing about jobs you say that it really is about finding organizations of interest finding people who work at those organizations of interest and yes it means you have to cold call them in order to have coffee and that's the same now there will be more limitations for women right especially women with children or there's the same issue of job searching when you're pregnant in the academy outside of the academy that's a challenge and of course there is the challenge of you know just racial discrimination in hiring you know and there's not much you can do about that but the informational interview is a way that you can actually begin to find places where you will succeed and there are professional associations that are out there that focus specifically on especially in you know cities with larger larger populations of African-American there are like centers that are specifically like entrepreneurship business for women businesses for people of color LGBTQ and connecting into those networks I think can be really critical and important there's a lot of business there's a lot of opportunities for women in business or there's a lot of organizations to promote and support women in business as well so that would be my suggestion and the the value of informational interviews is that you can quickly ascertain in informational interviews you can ask that question like what is the percentage of people of color that work at your you know do you sponsor do you sponsor people with H-1B visas and having those conversations can actually help students find places and organizations where they will thrive because you don't want to work for racists or misogynists so having those conversations about culture in informational interviews allows the student to actually do interviewing themselves of places where they will thrive and that's really important in the job search it's not just about finding someone who will hire you it's about finding a place that will match your interests and where you will succeed and so informational interviews is 100% important for for that as well I just wanted to follow up on the earlier comment about this job rocking and so on I might not stated in those terms but I actually agree with that emphatically and the students that I have interaction with and I have the privilege of mentoring feel strongly as well what surprises me is when I was raising my kids and I was standing in northern Virginia on the edge of soccer field with other parents many of whom in the Washington DC area are lawyers and are intellectuals and they would talk to me about my job and inevitably they would say you have a very cool job I wish I had your job and I would ask them why they wanted my job and it's because they're intellectual activity and this is almost a direct quote from them always came down to billable hours and much of what I do as an academic and as an intellectual much of what my students are doing as well and the mentorship that goes on between the two of us actually boils down to not just the practice of theater but developing ideological strategies to deal with the society that wants to boil everything down to billable hours and that's the ideological dilemma that we find ourselves in training our students is training them in that ideological perspective and then sending them out in a job market where they may not be able to sustain the ideological convictions that they themselves have developed as intellectuals and practicing artists so my question would be with regard to the program that you have here is is this something that is available by subscription through my university or is it something that happens how do my students interact with this? So this is just new it's coming online Monday we hope, Tuesday possibly so we have had conversations about 20 institutions we've got four that are saying that they want to sign up and we've got another 10 that are in the works students are able to join our community where we do events every month for students we do two open discussions where they can talk about fears, dilemmas basically it's group coaching but they can attend and we talk job strategies with them we have webinars every month on different types of jobs this month it's on marketing last month it was on user X research we've done stuff on data science and then we also have a library that they can rent that are of interest to them so we try and keep the price as low as possible because we know students have no money and so they're able to sort of choose resources that are available to them but yes we would love to get institutions to subscribe to this so that the students can have access to it while they're on campus to go back to the question about billable hours most work so yes and no I think most businesses are small and most businesses are see themselves in the habit of solving problems so they see that there's a need now maybe it's an industry industry specific need or in my case a professional like I'm mission driven right so I haven't had a paycheck in 18 months hope that changes soon and so I'm building something because I really believe in the mission of beyond the professor and I think this is really important and there's a lot of founders that do that they build things that are mission driven to solve problems the idea would be that you would be able to like make a livable wage potentially pay yourself and play other employees in terms of billable hours like that's often the outcome but so on my first date with my now husband he just finished his Duke MBA and I was like I don't know about this guy like I was like and I sat night with questions from him and I said like what you know so why did you get your MBA and he said most people spend their lives in organizations like in organizations and businesses like the most of their waking hours are in these businesses and most businesses are dysfunctional so if I can come in to an organization and help them be more functional I make people's lives better and that's what I want to do I want to improve people's lives so like yes the company that he works for pays him based on his billable hours but for him what actually motivates him in his work and what he sees his work doing is actually building and supporting the people in organizations to have better less stressful lives and so I think that there's a lot of nuance in that I don't know for lawyers but you know going back to like the mentoring and the conversations you know the startup world is very fast-paced you know and I talk about this because I just was a Denver startup week which was an entirely free conference that was completely sponsored and you could just go to anything and everything was awesome but like all the content was amazing it was all done by these experts who were just volunteering their time but you know a lot of it's very fast-paced and a lot of it is very again about solving problems and doing research and checking it and seeing how it goes and then like coming back you know it's called agile right so you like see how it goes and you come back and you make changes and you go and you and so there is actually a lot of like intellectual engagement just in different kinds of questions to talk about gender and race like having those components and being able to come into organizations and be able to offer that perspective can make you very employable and very hireable having an international focus within like the tech actually make you very employable and very hireable because not a lot of people have that so the other thing is to like think about what happens in organizations so like to be a good leader is the same as being a good teacher right so if you're a project manager or if you're building a team making sure that your team feels supported making sure that people have goals that they're trying to achieve mentoring people into their roles a lot of the people that we talk to who love teaching and have left love that part of their job they love being like team leaders they love mentoring and a lot of times they also have interns that come in until they get to actually work with like high high or not high school they get to work with undergraduates and even college students still one-on-one in internship programs and they I think they gravitate to those like types of opportunities and positions so the same things that make you really strong as a teacher can actually make you really strong as a leader in an organization and allow people to excel and we hear that a lot from people. Yeah I had a question about the whole idea of the importance of distractions and part of the conversations that we've had in our department is about the ethics of taking less students funding them fully and and pushing to have them complete in four years so that they don't go further into that and so that they're we can actually fully fund them throughout the process and that involves limiting their side projects and distractions telling them to do research over their summer so to know what they're doing early in advance so that they can get it done in four years which is a short time to get a Ph.D. done so we just worry about your thoughts in terms of the relationship between that and the idea that these other possibilities of careers will come actually from the distractions inside projects that we're telling them not to do so that they can finish as quickly as possible. Yeah I mean like that's the UK model you know people get you know come in and do Ph.D.s and then they're out by like 27 you know and and they have less debt and maybe that's fine like I don't I mean I don't want to say like people should language and suffer in grad school longer but it's not helping like so I think that that it doesn't help people get jobs right so I guess the question becomes are there ways in which your program can set people up for like maybe there's an internship model that comes after the degree. You know like maybe there's a way in which you could graduate in four years and then actually go spend a year or at the summer after that doing an internship after you actually finish like there could be some really creative ways where you still build in distractions there's also ways I guess in which we could model like the time in classes right doing some of these digital humanities projects actually building them right into the program where students are developing portfolios as part of earning their courses so that they're developing like podcasting right like that's all the rage social media it's really you know social media marketing and communications is really important blogging being able to communicate effectively to the public what it is you do and why it matters that's important for scholars as well as non-academics so thinking about opportunities within the course where students can build in these kinds of distractions could actually maybe be really interesting pulling students into you know running and organizing a symposium for dissertation you know people to present on their own dissertations could be one thing that students could do so I think just being really thinking about I think this is where talking to professionals and even just doing a survey of PhDs in all positions on your campus to find out what skills they use and having conversations with people you know who are in those kinds of positions and then thinking about the ways you're building your programs to and just pointing out to the students as you're going through it like project management it's a thing this is really important this is what it is here's a day where we talk about project management now we're actually going to build project management planning into the dissertation process so that you don't have to retroactively say you're a project manager you could actually do project management in writing and finishing your dissertation this is what it looks like so there could be ways in which partnering with again just the PhDs that are on your campus to build some more things into your program to make students aware of the types of jobs that are available the types of skills they're already getting in grad school and how that sets them up for other types of careers could be really powerful so my question is about your comment that people aren't availing themselves of the career services and I'm wondering if one of the the sets of feedback that you've encountered is that people aren't doing it because that's not who they came to study with PhDs are such mentorship intensive programs that if I came to study with the amazing Noe Montez why would I go over there for career advice? I came to be Noe that's what I came to the program to model myself after so that's who I'm looking to to create my array of professional options is that something that you've the stigma on career services is that it's for undergraduates and the stigma on grads professional development at grad schools is that it's for STEM that's the stigma and some departments are trying to like actually Duke is a great example of this we had a Duke person Duke is a great example of this Duke is a great example of this they actually have but they also have a lot of resources but they have started to build up humanities focused and going into departments and partnering with departments from the grad school to departments to actually create specific programs that are like this is for humanities PhDs only for humanities PhDs no one but humanities PhDs could possibly benefit from those only humanities PhDs now that's not true but that's you know that's the approach to take so I think for departments don't have the students go to career services go to career services find out what they can do and bring them to your department they will be so excited they'll be so excited to be invited into the department and sometimes you know I would also I do want to caution on career services find out from career services if they do support grad schools because there are a lot of career services still that don't have people who are able to support grad students and so you don't want to have somebody who comes in who primarily works with undergraduates to work with your late 20s early 30 grad students because it won't work and that's the other thing is that sometimes students go to undergraduate focused career centers and they don't get help and they tell them to write like one page resumes that take off all their grad work great and it's not great so you know have those conversations and then see what kind of programs the other place that can often have really good resources of the teaching and learning center and we have found that when we talk to the teach like we've talked to teaching learning centers about this as well as career services and the teaching and learning center is a place where students actually do feel like they can go for professional development so that might be a place if you're going to build up programs to partner with teaching and learning centers because they see that as a place that is for grad students and faculty not undergraduates yeah oh yeah services awesome I'm the director of graduate career services here and that's a new position because we recognize it as a real need for graduate students and so I think more and more schools and I'm not sure what your schools do but check in with your career centers because I think that many of us even if we're not just just seeing graduate students are very adept at seeing graduate students who want to leave academia I think it's when they want to become faculty members that we tell them to go back and talk to you folks more because you've got that experience we've never gone through that but I think that more and more schools are really focusing on that and expanding because of the need and I just want to go back not just with career services your universities are probably most likely chock full of PhDs working in non-faculty roles and finding those people and bringing them in to do your resume writing your workshops your project management etc because again going back to the teaching thing like that is something that people miss so giving them that opportunity to come back into departments on the campus and help build up these programs even having them sit on your curriculum committees I know that sounds outrageous but having them come back in and say like okay well this is my perspective as a working professional in higher education this is what I think the strengths are this is what I would see and really take advantage of that talent that's on campus already I think is a just it's such an untapped resource by departments all of these alt-hacks and they will tell you they're untapped and they don't like the fact that they're not included in these conversations because they do feel they have a lot to offer so like you don't have to leave campus to find people who can help you solve this problem alright we're at time so I just want to say thank you to Marin one more time thank you so much for having me