Reprint: PhD Candidates Can Take Job Search to a Level Beyond Academia

PhD Candidates Can Take Job Search to a Level Beyond Academia

By Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 29, 2001 ; Page E07

Working on your PhD? Getting sick of people asking what you're going to do with it?

Okay, seriously now . . . what are you going to do with it?

The experts say only about 50 percent of doctoral students get a decent tenure-track teaching job after they graduate. And many of those students are going to win that job in a small school somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Are you sure that's what you want to do? If not, why not think about the many possibilities -- hold onto your tassels here, folks -- outside the world of academia?

Tech companies, foundations, nonprofits, lobbying firms and others are finding that they can benefit from PhD students. And the students are finding that they really dig the variety of occupations in what they commonly refer to as "the real world."

Take, for instance, Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius. Both have their doctorates in English from Princeton. Basalla is the online editor at Motley Fool Inc. of Alexandria and Debelius is the editor in chief at LifeMinders Inc. of Herndon. Together they wrote the book, "So What Are You Going to Do With That?: A Guide to Career-Changing for MAs and PhDs."

They have some advice.

A Different Context

In the midst of earning her degree -- she is a Victorianist -- Debelius had a few epiphanies. She knew she loved to teach, which would make her a great candidate for professorship. But she also knew what the job market for would-be professors was like, and that she probably wouldn't end up living where she wanted. Yes, she loved teaching, but she "wasn't ready to move to some place that seemed atrocious to me to do it."

Basalla, on the other hand, wasn't convinced she wanted to follow the academic track at all. "I wasn't entirely convinced I wanted to be a professor," she said. "[It] didn't warm my heart" the way it would for someone with a real vocation for teaching. She and Debelius spent many nights talking about what else was out there.

Basalla got a list of alumni and their jobs from the chairman of her department. She started making cold calls, asking people how they got into their line of work, what they liked and disliked about it. "I literally didn't know what was out there," she said.

As Basalla and Debelius found their way around a world outside academia, they started writing their book and interviewing others. Among some of the PhDs with outside-world jobs: A midwife who had written her thesis on images of mothering in medieval French literature, one of the hosts of the "Car Talk" radio show, a writer for Hallmark Cards and the former chief executive of Maidenform.

So how do you figure out what you want to do if you've been in that academic bubble for so long?

Explore and get some experience. Remember that although many of the skills you have from grad school can transfer over to the workplace, it's always good to have real work experience to pique a potential employer's interest -- and trust.

"I really find that I think the best thing a grad student can do to explore careers and get hired is test the waters," Debelius said. "Do temp work, volunteer. I think when [potential employers] see a résumé with only grad work, they are understandably skeptical. But if they see PhD plus work experience, that can be a feather in someone's cap."

Basalla did temporary work for three summers. Then, the day after she defended her dissertation, she called the temp agency and said that she needed a real job. "Put me somewhere where I have a future," she told them. "They were glad to help me and I went to work right away at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a researcher. That basically started my career."

Basalla is a big advocate of taking time off. She said that some students will turn in a chapter of their thesis and not hear from their adviser until a year later. Use that time to do something part time, she suggests, or spend a summer doing something completely different from academic work.

"See yourself in a different context," she said. "We interviewed a PhD in chemistry who went to work for a law firm without a great passion for law, but she discovered she loved to write. . . . You just have to test-drive some experience."

Research a Career

The skills students obtain in graduate school can very easily transfer over into "real-world" work.

"They should realize that they've acquired knowledge in their PhD studies and skills that can be valuable outside," said David Drew, chairman of the school of education at Claremont Graduate University in California. For example, he said, they have developed analytical reasoning skills, they question assumptions and they constantly work on communication skills.

And they obviously have great research skills, which Drew suggests they use in the job search. "All these students have learned how to do research and . . . how to do detailed study," he said. "They need to do the same for finding a job."

Wendy Martin, a professor of American literature at Claremont who often speaks on this topic, said she always tells her students to really pay attention to what they enjoy. "What would you like to do even if you weren't getting paid to do it? Which aspects do you like the best? Where else can I use this skill?"

Those students who like to teach and explain things, as professors are wont to do, can look to corporations and organizations that need that sort of skill. And many do.

"Those are highly prized skills," Martin said. "People in the humanities can think quite clearly and their communications skills are outstanding. It's not a gift everyone has, and many don't realize how unusual their ability to articulate really is."

She added that if she knew then what she knows now . . . well, let's just say she may not have been a professor for the last two decades. "I never even thought of anything beyond teaching and writing when I was a new PhD," she said. "The real world was like a huge frightening place that I had no knowledge of. . . . It wasn't even in anyone's mind to explain there are other options."

Now she shares her learned wisdom with her own students. "Take a chance" is her most popular mantra. "What kept me back as much as anything else is not being sufficiently adventurous," she said. She suggests students just go talk to the personnel office at a company they are interested in and see what opportunities there are.

Why a PhD?

There's even a foundation set up, at least partially, to help students find work outside of academia.

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton, N.J., helps students, especially those in liberal arts, connect with the outside world so they can discover that having a PhD with a concentration in 18th-century female poets can translate into many things other than professorship.

Robert Weisbuch, president of the foundation and former English Department chairman at the University of Michigan, said he was "sick of seeing my great students get lousy jobs."

For the last several decades, "we've not been creative enough about thinking about what these grads can do," he said. "I now say to grad students when I talk to them that four months from now you could end up with one offer of a part-time temporary instructor position at a mediocre college, or you could have an offer from AT&T, A.T. Kearney, the Wall Street Journal."

So how do students learn how to take the plunge into that other world? Talk to as many people as you can. Network. Check out the Wilson Web site (www.woodrow.org). "Only three or four universities in the country have figured out they need to put their career offices together at the graduate level. So even if a student says, 'I figured out that I want to look more broadly out there,' you can't expect faculty to understand that."

But, he adds, students should take advantage of the "incredible network" of people who have done something with the PhD beyond academia.

So why PhD it at all? Because you want to, and that can be enough.

"We asked almost everyone if you had to do it all over again, would you go to grad school," Debelius said. "I think all of them said yes. It's a wonderful thing to be able to spend five, seven years spending time with something you're passionate about. It sharpens your mind. You don't need a PhD to be an online editor, but it's who I am. I feel like I'm a better manager because I have so much teaching experience. I feel like a lot of that came from spending so much time in classroom."

Join Amy Joyce tomorrow for Career Track Live at washingtonpost.com. Share your stories, questions and your own advice from 11 to 12.

© 2001 The Washington Post