Loleen Berdahl - Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD

Its the first week of your PhD program. Youre on your way to being a scholar! You will at last meet Professor A, whose work youve always loved. You now have student peers who are just as into intellectual pursuits as you are. Youll be a teaching assistant for a class and finally have a chance to start strutting your stuff. The list of upcoming seminars and visitors for the fall excites you. Your courses have long reading lists, but its like a smorgasbord menueverything looks so interesting. Your biggest dilemma is choosing between all these great ideas and potential supervisors and coming up with a dissertation topic. And that dissertation is going to be a bang-up job, rocketing you into your dream academic position where you can cultivate new, enthusiastic young minds.

Fast forward to Year 6 of your PhD program. You know every inch of the floor your department is on and far too much about the strengths and flaws of both the faculty and your fellow students. Youre now a course instructor, for the third time, not for experience but because you need the money. No matter what youre doing, you always have a gnawing feeling that you should be working on your dissertation right now, but you secretly hope that something (such as a sinkhole swallowing up the university campus) will force you to abandon it all. You have no publications because you wanted to put all effort into getting the dissertation done last year. Most of all, you have no idea what the future holds. You still hope for an academic job, but youre also buying lottery tickets because the odds are probably the same. But theres no time to muse. You should be writing

Or consider this alternative future: You finished your program in Year 5 with a strong, tight dissertation that is now in press with a publisher. Two of the dissertation chapters came out as separate journal articles last year. Not that academic publishing is really your priority, with your new position at a national market research firm, a job you picked up through your network and where youll be applying the research and project management skills you developed in grad school. You are teaching on the side, because you enjoy it, and are getting invitations from departments to apply to their tenure-track positions. Your future possibilities seem endless. And its all because of how you managed your time and energy during grad school.

Your graduate school experience can end in a number of ways. Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD is all about moving from that promising start to a satisfying finish and avoiding the middle outcomeor, if youre currently in that outcome, how to transition out of it. Your definition of satisfaction might not be working in market research, which is fine. The task of this book is to help you identify and reach whatever your particular definition of career satisfaction is.

Individuals who are either considering or enroled in doctoral programs are typically smart and motivated. However, many are unsure about how to prepare for their future careers and are unaware of the importance of being strategic in their choices from the earliest moment possible. Work Your Career provides you with motivation and strategies to guide you as you seek to proactively work your career. Rather than moving through your doctoral program with your eyes solely on the next step, we will push you to maximize your personal agency and strategically position that next step into the larger context of your career trajectory. What those steps and trajectory are is ultimately up to you; this book is oriented toward helping you decide what is best for you.