Content area
Full text
In a recent survey of the "alt-ac" community, 74 percent of respon- dents stated that when they initially started their graduate work, they planned to become a professor and "of that 74%, 80% report[ed] feeling fairly certain or completely certain that professorship was the career they would pursue" (Rogers).1 These statistics match my personal experience and my conversations with other grad students. I am one of those grad stu- dents who originally planned-and continues to plan-a career in a tenure- track position. Yet because of the sheer relentless, nigh apocalyptic nature of job market forecasts, I'm now in the position of considering careers beyond academia. For the past year I've been attending workshops at my university's Centre for Career Action, talking with my supervisor, other professors, and career counselors, meeting with mitacs representatives, conducting informational interviews with people in the private sector, and trying to immerse myself in the extremely active online discussions about the academic job market and the alt-ac path. So with that said, I'd like to present some of my concerns and ideas from the perspective of a grad student. What I'd like to suggest is an open, curious, iterative, versatile, non-teleological, or even "antifragile," approach to career preparation for humanities PhDs.
In the survey quoted above, the respondents, in their postacademic careers, did not end up in any specific sector. When humanities scholars move beyond academia, there is no set path. According to Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius, in "So What Are You Going to Do With That?": Finding Careers Outside Academia, many alt-ac career paths only have a "logical continuity to them in retrospect" (34); Basalla and Debelius there- fore suggest "be[ing] open to unexpected possibilities" (74). Similarly, in Geoffrey Moore's presentation, "Crossing the Chasm from Academia to Business," at Stanford University's Bibliotech conference (a conference for "Connecting Liberal Arts PhDs with Forward-Thinking Companies"), he claims that humanities PhDs have skills to offer every sector of business, provided we're willing to learn a totally new vocabulary. The vocabulary we currently use ("semiotics," "John Donne," and so on) won't translate, but what we can do with...