Mention non-academic employment in SoP?

[socio aspirant]

Hi All -

I am an aspiring sociology or communications PhD student. After working for several years, I've become far more sensitive to the realities of earning a living and I am obviously quite concerned about the likely difficulties of finding an academic job after graduation.

I've thought a lot about being prepared to leverage my PhD for non-academic employment if necessary, but I have been warned that some admissions committees may be turned off by applicants who state they may not wish to become academics. Does anyone have any experience with or thoughts about this? On one hand, I think it's important to show that you are self-critical and realistic in your statement of purpose, but on the other hand I understand that many professors are interested in training PhDs who earn prestigious appointments after graduation. Most programs mention that some graduates find work in think tank, government, and nonprofit settings but I'm aware that this may not be the ideal result for the department.

Thanks for your thoughts!

[barilicious]

If you are applying to research I institutes, they want to hear that you want to be a researcher at a research I institute.

[mandarin.orange]

One suggestion would be to identify those professors you'd like to work with, and see what his/her recently-graduated students are up to - i.e. where did they land jobs, are they finishing in a timely manner, etc.

Adcoms operate differently, depending on the discipline, internal factors, politics, number of spaces available, wind direction, etc. etc. Do some back-searching on this site and googling, and you'll find stories of how different adcoms process applications. Here's one example:

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,45917.0.html

I read a thread on here last year, started by a professor who sat on the adcom and wanted to share what the process was like. For the life of me, I can't find it now. Anyway, one thing that struck me was that for his/her particular program, the bottom line was that they 1) had to do a minimum GRE requirement just to trim down the number of applications before even beginning to review them, and 2) they looked in particular to see who had the best chance of landing tenure-track jobs.

My dept.'s approach is to distribute applications to those professors who match research interests listed in their SOP, then they meet, discuss, and advocate for who they want. Here, tenure-track aspirations may not come into play so much as the applicant who has a certain background or skill set the professor desires to bring on board.

I definitely mentioned non-academic work in my SOP, since that's what I'd been doing for 7 years and the experience shaped my future goals (it was largely teaching and grant-writing however, so somewhat related). Two of my three references were not from professors, but supervisors for these jobs. As far as career goals in my SOP, I mentioned that I wanted to be involved in research and some form of teaching or outreach in the public sector, but was not gung-ho that I MUST land a professorship.