Sigaba

The purpose of this thread is to discuss how aspiring and new graduate students might select fields and courses that may help them to position for jobs outside of the Ivory Tower down the road. For starters, the following link is to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment projections for 2019-2029 <<LINK>>. An initial question is: As an aspiring or new graduate student, how can you leverage your program's requirements so that you can also acquire skills that may help you land work in one of the ten fastest growing occupational fields? For STEM types and professional types, there are areas of clear overlap. But what about for those working in the social sciences and the humanities? For those occupations that seem to require vocational training, are there areas of overlap that can be explored in a graduate program centered around the humanities or social sciences?

Just spitballing here... Widen your search for secondary works related to your primary fields of interest. Maybe you'll come across some works that expand the way you think about the societies and languages you've studied in a way that you can understand. I think it's going to be something "big picture" that you may not necessarily be able to put in a cover letter on a resume or talk about in a job interview, but the insight itself may inspire confidence and that confidence may help push you over the top and or allow you to add value to your team.

If you go this route, do not be surprised if your program and school is reluctant to accept the work you did at law school when it comes to fulfilling course requirements. I had a classmate with a law degree and he was increasingly not happy that he could not transfer credits from law school.

Alt ac training can be gained by picking fields and outside fields that have skill sets that are cross transferable. A challenge right now is that some skills (like data visualization) are in very high demand in today's job market but won't be for much longer because of technology. Another challenge is that skills that will likely remain in demand may not be as relevant to as many disciplines unless a graduate student unless she is very smart in how she picks her fields and dissertation topic.

Hi, @SuzytheExplorer If you have the opportunity to dig, you will find many threads that discuss non responses from potential PIs. Some posts will give reasons why a professor may not reply. Others will indicate that one should not be deterred by not receiving a reply.

I think that what I'm trying to say is that discussions of retooling among business / finance types are drastically different than conversations in an academic department. One of the key reason for the difference is that the relationships between revenue and expenses are much more complicated than academics generally realize. Metaphorically, you're calling for a discussion for managing a forest in a manner that is more sustainable: how can the trees be planted, groomed, and harvested better for the benefit of the forest. Elsewhere, conversations about sustainability include considerations that may make burning down all or part of the forest not just a possibility but a necessity. An academic department could be part of a profession- wide initiative to right size graduate admissions so that the pool of applicants for TT positions becomes less crowded and more qualified. From there, departments could become more competitive because they can point to placement records and the achievements and accomplishments of its graduates. What I'm saying is that these conversations you and I want departments to have may result in outcomes that benefit professors, undergraduates, and graduate students -- if not also American society but these changes may not matter if the retooling doesn't move the virtual needles on virtual gauges on software generated dashboards that the academics don't know exist. In the short run, though, I would not automatically agree that worker bees in the Ivory Tower are leaching off profit centers. If you let high earners and keep capable worker bees, pile on the work by having them do "more with less," profits will go up.)

I would suggest that the system you describe in your post is setting the stage for AI/ASI in the Ivory Tower is similar to TNCs (transportation network companies like Lyft and Uber) being used to push AVs (autonomous vehicles) into transportation. (The extent to which TNC drivers don't get the connection is chilling, IMO.) By breaking down work into smaller pieces, one can learn which pieces are more important than others, and which ones can be done through software. Along the way, the people participating think in terms of the upside (the convenience of on demand services and a la carte pricing/subscriptions, the perception of lower operational costs because of lower overhead, not having to deal with as many people), and the down side in personal terms without realizing the extent to which they're participating in the commodification of their every day lives. MOO, many members of many professions that seek to leverage technology do not understand that they are actually the prey of technology firms.

The way you feel is the way you feel. Your feelings are an issue if and only if they prevent you from living the life you want to live. Also, how do you know that those who seem to have their shit together aren't as conflicted as you are? The point here is that one can get wrapped up in how one should feel that one starts to get in one's own way. If you're really bothered by the way about you feel about growing older, about developing as a person, you can do several things. One, you can attempt to find someone who will mentor you. Two, you can attempt to find someone who will teach/train you. Three, you can talk to people who are going through the same set of life experiences and help each other. (This option includes studying/reading up on people who have done the kinds of things you want to do. Biographical works, journalistic profiles, interviews, published diaries and letters are great but so are the right podcasts and videos on YouTube.) Four, you can talk to a mental health professional. What I think that you should stop doing is turning the issues over in your head time and again in the manner that you're doing on this BB. At one level, I think I get what you're doing. I think that you're trying to find a way to phrase your issues and concerns so you can put handles on them and carry them. The challenge you're encountering is that (if this is in fact what you're doing) you're doing it in a way that makes it increasingly difficult to support you. What you're currently doing is that you're repeating yourself in a way that is a bit too off putting. You push back on decent guidance without much reflection. You point to examples that are not well developed and not relevant. Candidly, you're current tactics are especially challenging because you've not put in much time here at the GradCafe to develop a "body of work" that allows people to have any sense of what you're about. If you look at the post history of members who have asked questions similar to yours, you will find that some get more feedback from others and some of this has to do with the way they put themselves out there. And you may also see that those who keep asking version after version of the same question end up getting less and less feedback. For better and for worse, the personal professional development that one goes through as a graduate student is hard, and at times, more than a little scary. The task before you is to figure out how to figure it out without unduly freaking out. The freaking out gets in the way of the figuring out how to figure it out. #HTH

This may be happening. Some of the chatter among those on the business side of the Ivory Tower is about running schools somewhat more like private sector companies. Missions, strategies, and metrics (KPIs) to evaluate how well the moving pieces are performing. The most surprising thing I've heard so far is the idea that the "we're all in this together" approach that's fashionable in many quarters of the Ivory Tower when it comes to COVID-19 related layoffs needs to go. People who under perform, regardless of rank and status, need to be sent away. And even if somehow a magic wand were to get waved and COVID-19 goes away and there's a miraculous V shaped recovery, the impending crisis of decades of deferred maintenance is going to up end the Ivory Tower in unimaginable ways. Ultimately, gravity wins every argument. On the other hand, the arrival of deep learning ASIs may limit greatly the need for graduate students to perform the work of TAs and RAs.

If it's not been done already, someone could make a point by making a graph of some sort that compares the likelihood of highly skilled high school football athletes making it to D1 teams and from there to pro teams. And then compare the rates by which UG majors and non majors in various fields go on to get graduate degrees and then TT jobs. Heck. On the same graph, put the success rate of aspiring astronauts and SOF types.

@PhantomThief, how ever you feel about the waning days of your youth, I think it is incumbent upon you to understand that you are in a pivotal phase of your personal professional development. At this moment, right now, while you're thinking about such matters, members of your affiliation are building the skills and relationships that will make them competitive in the coming years. Competitive for jobs, for loans, for relationships, and other opportunities, many of which will be accessible to them because they're ready. So I think questions for you to add to the mix include: What are you doing today to be ready for the rest of your life given the likelihood that the years and decades ahead are going to be exceptionally hard? Is shooting the breeze with undergraduates going to help you get ready for interviews with people making hiring decisions? Is being in a relationship, platonic or romantic, with younger people going to expose you to circumstances in which people hold you accountable so that you will work harder and to be a better person?

A challenge that is hard to overcome when making the adjustment from undergraduate work to graduate work is that the former is generally a "lean back" activity in which direction, expectations, and support are provided while the latter is ever more a "lean forward" experience in which one learns by doing and support is increasingly elusive and subtle. Yes, COVID-19 and remote learning pose a different (if not unique) set of challenges to a first year graduate student but as @drunkenduckpoints out, the expectation is that graduate students are going to do almost all of their own heavy lifting. Now, if you agree with the recommendation that you change your mindset, the question is then what kinds of changes should you make? IMO, the first is to understand that a major source of the fun of being a graduate student comes through independent discovery. How much can you knowledge can you find on your own using the course syllabi and materials as your basic road map, compass, and rucksack? If you find yourself a bit lost, how can you find your way back so you can move forward? Meanwhile, given that you are not happy with level of support you've received so far, how can you change the circumstances? You've indicated that classmates are having similar experiences -- can you form groups that provide opportunities to build relationships via social activities (virtual coffee house visits, maybe watch parties) and share knowledge (study groups)? Can you figure out how to interact with your professors in ways that are appropriate? As you think about your options, I would keep in mind that COVID-10 and remote learning pose different challenges to professors than to students. I want to be careful about how I phrase this because it can be taken the wrong way easily. A person further along the journey of life, an established professional, is going to have more "stuff" in her life than she did when she was a graduate student. And also if she's at the point where she understands that she has more days behind her than ahead of her, if she understands her mortality, COVID-19 can be orders of magnitude more terrifying and traumatic. There's something paradoxical here -- a person with resources (like a home and a 401k) is almost certainly in a better position than a young person trying to make ends meet on a TAship or on loans. But that thought may not inspire confidence -- it may actually add fuel to the firepit of fear. So I am suggesting that you try to have empathy (not sympathy) for your professors.

I would add that mentioning a SO might be especially risky this application season. A lot of couples are spending an incredible amount of time each other because of COVID-19--the strongest relationships can be experiencing bone crushing pressure. I can easily imagine a member of and admissions committee reading a comment about a SO or partner and peering up to see the love of one's life now turned to one's most hated foe. If the experience is an essential element of who are and want to be as a professional academic, consider the benefits of focusing on the lessons learned while minimizing the narrative elements to a bare minimum.

As you make your calculations for a potential pivot, please keep in mind that AI and ASI will be used to fill ever more positions. So the quest is not just for transferable skills, but transferable skills that cannot be done for less by a robot. Please also keep in mind that even in the face of increasing odds against getting an academic job, you may end up in a department with a lot of true believers. Right or wrong, they may not be pleased to find that you're thinking about alternatives.

Questions that follow include how high are the hurdles to getting approval for pursuing dual degrees, what do professors actually think about such opportunities, what is the rate of success, and how well do recipients of dual degrees do in the job market?

Double post. Don't post while uncaffeinated.

I am not qualified to answer your question. My recommendation was based upon the experiences of a friend who supports non profits but does not have a degree directly to those organization's core services. Have you considered the benefits of using a resource like Linkedin to study the educational background of people who currently have the kinds of jobs you would want down the line?

FWIW, this is why I find your posts credible, especially when I disagree with you.

It is important to have a high level of investment in one's interests. It is also important to understand that what is right for you may not be right for the gate keepers of an academic profession who make decisions on admissions, hiring, publishing, and so forth. What kinds of works are practioners of historical archeology writing? Can you see yourself contributing or expanding the debates their works address? Are these academics getting jobs? Are they getting promotions? Also, a lesson I have learned / am learning the hard way -- sometimes the leading edge of a new trajectory of scholarly inquiry is the bleeding edge. Is the work you're thinking about now a project you'd be better off addressing in thirty years instead of three, four, or five? Something to keep in mind -- the past isn't going anywhere. Recommendations. Discontinue for the time being the focus on your stats. Curtail asking how schools / departments / academics "fit" into your plans. Focus on defining how the work you want to do fits into existing fields of scholarship. This focus can take the shape of writing down on a few pages of paper the kinds of questions your fields seek to answer and how your approach can move the needle in getting them answered. This exercise can be performed during or after you take a deep dive into materials that will help you understand the state of art in your fields of interest. You can plow through, cover to cover, ten years' worth of three or more prominent journals in your fields. (I recommend physical copies, if it is possible to do so safely.) You can "read selectively" the key prize winning books in your fields/areas of interest. If you do this for history, you should probably also look at general prizes as well. Figure out how hard you're willing to push when you start hearing "no" from scholars -- especially those you think "fit" in your interests. Study how trail blazers in history and anthropology shifted the boundaries of scholarship.

Have you considered a degree like Penn's MS in non profit leadership?

In my experience, an academic department is a collection of interconnected and over lapping black boxes, One of the most innermost, inaccessible boxes is how ineffective some professors are when it comes to teaching and mentoring graduate students. For me, it was only after I'd figured things out for myself that the professors I knew best would speak their minds. My guess is that this kind of vital information is held close because professional sensibilities restrict what one can say about colleagues. A part of me gets it -- I am the type of person who typically gets along well with those professors whom graduate students dislike for being too demanding. The other part of me (the one working in the private sector) is like Luke Skywalker, cradling his maimed arm, crying out to Ben Kenobi, Why didn't you tell me? My concern is that by mentioning a department's aesthetic, readers may conclude that an applicant will be the type of student who airs a department's dirty laundry (of which there's probably always plenty), and say "We'll pass on this person..."

@Irvine student, how have you addressed your concerns with your department directly?

I recommend that you find ways to express empathy in a manner that is both appropriate and concise. While you're seeking to embark upon a professional career with energy and enthusiasm, the professors reading your email may be getting crush by the cascading traumatic impacts of COVID-19 on their lives, their livelihood, and their life styles.

@Allbert before changing your topic again, see what you can do to get your GPA up.

The deployment of strategic nuclear weapons is unlikely in the next twenty years. The United States most likely foes in a general war (Russia and the PRC) do not have the technical means to degrade the American armed services' second strike capabilities with the first wave of missiles. (In a nutshell for a first strike to work, the attacker's warheads have to hit all of their targets at the same time --because the impact of the resulting EMPs is unknown-- with a circular error probable sufficient enough to ensure that the target is destroyed. This task is complicated by the assumed need to put two warheads on each target.) When I started graduate school, I had a professor who, incidentally, specialized in the colonial/ early national period, mockingly asked me more than once "Why would anyone study naval history?" Well, this is why. If your current program offers a thesis or report option, consider the benefits and challenges of taking either option relative to an option that does not require you to write tens of thousands of words long. Identify primary sources that have been digitized and are either publicly accessible or available through an institutional affiliation. Get a good understanding of what's available and then start thinking about how you could use those materials to write a dissertation. Start figuring out if you want to explore ways to meld your expertise in anthropology into your practice of academic history. If the answer is "yes" start reading secondary works that will help you craft your intellectual identity. Identify, obtain, and read "state of the art" historiographical essays in your field. From this exploration, you should be able to identify a handful (or two) of must read books. There are many threads in this forum on how to read like a graduate student in history but for works that "one ignores at one's peril," you're going to want to read every word. Work on your language skills while also doing what you can to figure out how stringent the proficiency exams may be. Identify departments where your interests align with several faculty members. It's not how a department fits you, it's how you will fit into a department. Identify professors who may sit on your committees and then start reading their works. When you narrow in on preferred committee chairs, give some thought to reading everything you can get your hands on -- including theses and dissertations. There are a few threads in this forum and in others on what to look for in an advisor, horror stories of things going side ways, and recommendations. Unfortunately, the CHE fora are gone and so the valuable information in the legendary STFU thread are lost to antiquity. (The short version is, when in doubt, STFU. When you're 100% absolutely sure, STFU. Anywhere else, give STFU a try.) But also, given the state of the Ivory Tower, the supremacy of anti-intellectualism, and the ongoing crisis of professional academic history, it's never too soon to start sketching out alternatives. Now, I don't recommend that you let anyone know who has decision making authority know that you have such plans because true believers expect true belief out of others. But alternative plans can help you figure out how to pick an outside field and how to identify skills you can develop that are transferable to the private sector. (Hint: data analysis and visualization that cannot be replicated by AI or ASI; project management; and...HR)