“Now I don’t mean to point fingers,” began a Stanford University Career Center Coach in the audience of a Q&A held after a panel at MLA 2018, “But humanities PhD students historically under-participate every time we hold professional career workshops for paths both inside and outside academia and we don’t really know why.”

The panel in question, titled “What Graduate Students Want,” was sponsored by MLA’s Connected Academics program: a multi-year initiative which identifies career paths for doctoral students in a broad range of occupations, compiles data on the career paths of recent PhD graduates in languages and literature (especially those employed in nontraditional or diverse fields outside academia), and develops tool kits for doctoral students, faculty mentors, and graduate program directors in order to ease the transition from graduate school to professional employment. “States of Insecurity,” the theme of MLA this year, describes well the plight of graduate students in the humanities who are very much aware of the shrinking amount of tenure track jobs available to them.

Humanities PhD Employment Percentages for those who earned their PhDs between 1996-2011 (Click on image for larger view, source: MLA)

The students participating on the panel were all advanced PhD students in either English or Rhetoric and Composition. Their perspectives on why we need to alter traditional ways of educating graduate students in the humanities to include career paths that are alternatives to the quest towards a tenure track position (or, more colloquially, “alt-ac” options) stemmed from their experiences in coursework and dissertation writing and research on the one hand, and from obtaining fellowships and internships on the other. Laura De Vos (University of Washington, Seattle) advocated for having “advisors” and mentors for PhD students who do not themselves hold PhDs, as sometimes the “experts” a student needs are outside of the traditional academic community.

De Vos, whose dissertation focuses on the Shinnecock tribe, noted how she often must travel to speak with elders of the tribe–who are so essential to her research that two of them are co-authoring one of her chapters–but that her university doesn’t offer any coursework or employ any experts on indigenous studies.  Next, Sarah Hildebrand (CUNY Graduate Center) focused on the integral role that departments play in helping to shape and manage PhD students’ expectations about how and where to go about finding employment after they complete their degrees. Both Hildebrand and co-panelist Jessica Holmes (University of Washington) stressed the need for transparency about the statistics for landing that coveted tenure track job as early as the application process for potential PhDs, and a reiteration of these figures during new student orientation. Both women stressed that knowledge is power–while we cannot change the abysmal job market landscape, we can help students prepare themselves as early as possible to combat and circumvent that challenge. Lastly, Jacqui Pratt (University of Washington, Seattle) noted how the best way for graduate students to anticipate what kinds of jobs they might like is to “try on” different career paths in a variety of ways–informational interviews and job shadowing to increase your network is one way, while obtaining a fellowship or internship to complete prolonged research and obtain real-world experience is another. “Most people focus on where the field is at now,” she told the audience, “but successful grad students focus instead on where the field is going.”

Types of positions those who earn their degree in the humanities hold (Click on image for larger view, source: MLA)

Yet, the question remains: What can graduate programs like ours at Stony Brook do now to help their grad students identify careers that will allow them to use their humanistic training in fulfilling ways?

According to both panel and audience members, the answer lies in revamping the pedagogical structures that have come to define graduate training in the humanities. Most notably, almost all panel members discussed the “Intro to Graduate Studies” course mandated by most PhD granting institutions- what here at Stony Brook we refer to as “Prosem.” Our course description for the Proseminar at Stony Brook details a course that “surveys various approaches to literary study in sections concerned with textual criticism, the history of the book, reader-response theory, new criticism, psychoanalysis” and so on. At neighboring schools like CUNY Graduate Center and Fordham University such courses are titled “Introduction to Doctoral Studies in English” and “Research Methods,” and aim to “address…aspects of graduate studies in English [such as] English as a discipline, the function of the university, research questions and practices, and the construction of intellectual communities” and “introduce English studies at the graduate level emphasizing scholarly writing and critical intervention,” respectively. What the panelists stressed (and audience members agreed with) was that this approach to introduce humanities PhDs to the profession is undoubtedly useful, but that it is not the only way to prepare students for careers beyond the PhD. The women on the panel suggested the following ways for reformatting the first- year intro course:

• Dividing the course in half: The first half of the course would focus on “traditional” preparation for research, critical approaches, conferencing, and publishing, while the second half of the course would focus on exploring “non-traditional” career paths of the students’ choosing
• Inviting guest speakers with PhDs in English who work in fields both inside and outside of academia to narrate their stories of the steps they took to begin the career they currently have
• Using first-year intro courses to highlight the program’s vast alumni network. Many universities tend to keep excellent records of those who have graduated and landed tenure track positions, but staying connected with those who have not (but who are still surely happily employed doing something else) can be equally useful and inspiring for graduate students
• Discussing the foreign language requirement that is often mandated by PhD programs to include newer and less traditional “languages” like forms of computer coding, which can help give PhDs an advantage if/when looking for employment both within and outside of academia
• Setting up more formal mentorship between incoming and advanced PhD students and having this mentoring extend into the first-year intro to English studies classroom. This can help new PhDs see how the critical techniques and methods learned in Prosem factor into the later stages of the degree (such as general exam preparation, prospectus research, and dissertation writing), and also provide guidance for how to balance finishing their degree and applying for jobs

Reimagining “Intro to English Studies” in this way allows students to prepare and professionalize themselves for a multitude of careers outside of the academic job market. Moreover, these suggestions do not overly privilege alt-ac careers over academic ones, but work to strike a balance between the two of them. MLA, in partnership with the Connected Academics initiative, has created tool kits for both PhD students and faculty members in order to help implement such changes. Their Faculty Tool Kit includes different modules on topics such as engaging alumni, starting the alt-ac conversation within one’s department, priming students for both the academic and non-academic job market, and changing curriculum beyond the first-year course with example assignments and a step-by-step guide. They also provide a thirty-three page Doctoral Student Career Planning Guide which addresses many of the same issues as the modules in more depth.

While securing a fellowship to participate in MLA’s Connected Academics year-long Proseminar is highly competitive, here at Stony Brook there are readily available programs that work to achieve many of the same goals. Stony Brook’s PhD Career Ladder Program (PCLP) is a free resource available to all PhD (and Masters students) at Stony Brook who are interested in exploring alt-ac careers. Meeting roughly once a month, PCLP allows PhD students to complete an initial diagnostic to help them identify their skills, interests, experiences, and qualifications, and then explore career paths that align with them. “Assignments” include things like completing informational interviews, creating a LinkedIn profile and expanding one’s network, and working on long-term and short-term goal setting. Although started by a group of Molecular and Cellular Biology students, PCLP has grown to include PhDs from all disciplines; just this year it created its first group exclusively devoted to Fine Arts, Humanities, and Lettered Social Science PhDs—led by me!

Rethinking the way we educate graduate students in the humanities is essential to ensuring their success long after they complete their degrees. While it may seem to many that positions within academia should function as “Plan A” and alt-ac options should remain a distant “Plan B,” when we devalue alt-ac career paths, we devalue the students who are interested in pursuing them, and, by extension, devalue the humanities as a whole. It is in a department’s best interests to help their students get hired in positions where they can produce meaningful work. “Professionalizing” PhD students means showing them that they can put their PhD to use both inside and outside of the academy—that is how we increase the value of the humanities.