Considering Alt-Ac: Ideas for Rhet/Comp Grad

[MidCenturyModernist]

I'm in my second year of my Rhet/Comp Phd Program and I'm starting to consider alt-ac positions (for various reasons from job market to just general burnout). Anyone out there pursue jobs outside of academia with a humanities degree?

Obviously writing and research are key skills. I work in a digital center on campus and some programming skills, I could always go digital humanities though I'm not sure outside of library work what that would look like. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Sigaba]

On 1/6/2020 at 1:31 AM, MidCenturyModernist said:

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I recommend looking into opportunities to work in an industry that is trying to navigate the increasing rate of technological innovation. IME, public and private clients are often eager to procure and to deploy technologies that are not quite ready for prime time or, more importantly, are not going to serve well the interests of end users.

[juilletmercredi]

On 3/30/2020 at 2:38 PM, Sigaba said:

I recommend looking into opportunities to work in an industry that is trying to navigate the increasing rate of technological innovation. IME, public and private clients are often eager to procure and to deploy technologies that are not quite ready for prime time or, more importantly, are not going to serve well the interests of end users.

I work in this field. It's called human-computer interaction, or user experience research.

A rhet/comp degree would be an unusual background; most people who come into this field have social sciences graduate degrees (psychology is common) or computer science-related graduate degrees (you can actually get a PhD in HCI). That's because the research techniques are social sciences methods, and are actually applied versions of psychological methods.

However, with some programming skills, you might make a good UX designer. There are also design-adjacent roles like design strategist or technical architect that may work at some firms/companies.

[Sigaba]

On 4/24/2020 at 8:17 PM, juilletmercredi said:

I work in this field. It's called human-computer interaction, or user experience research.

A rhet/comp degree would be an unusual background; most people who come into this field have social sciences graduate degrees (psychology is common) or computer science-related graduate degrees (you can actually get a PhD in HCI). That's because the research techniques are social sciences methods, and are actually applied versions of psychological methods.

However, with some programming skills, you might make a good UX designer. There are also design-adjacent roles like design strategist or technical architect that may work at some firms/companies.

I had in mind an adjacent field that requires less technical expertise but enough to  "translate" the technology/science/social science to a more general audience.

IME, decision makers are laying down serious amounts of money for "gee whiz" solutions without asking all the right questions. As an example, "How well will this system operate on the eastern seaboard in the dead of winter?" has proven to be a showstopping question we've posed to technology firms who want to put themselves on our radar.