“Sarah, you are doing so well—excellent progress this year. However, the committee recommends that you do considerably less service next year.” That’s the message I heard in every annual evaluation during my Ph.D. program. Even when I received accolades for my research and teaching, I was reminded that service is a third-class citizen in graduate-student training and that I would be better off focusing my energies elsewhere.
If mentorship on teaching often takes a back seat to research training in a doctoral program, service mentorship does not even have a place in the vehicle. It’s a bumper sticker to put on the end of your CV. Yet service duties, when strategically chosen, can be an asset for doctoral students—both those who intend to work in academe and those who hope to secure a nonacademic job. And strong faculty mentors are needed to help students make good choices for the best use of their service time.
For graduate students, service can take many forms. It can be professionally focused (reviewing papers and poster submissions for a conference), university-focused (serving on student government or campus committees), or community-focused (organizing a local blood drive, or volunteering at a homeless shelter). Service can also be a continuing commitment (monthly board or committee meetings), or one-time events (helping to plan a student-research forum). The challenge is deciphering which forms of service provide you with the largest current and future “payoff"—one that can be professional, personal, or both.
As a graduate student facing multiple pressures on your time, you may still need convincing to make time for service. So, what’s in it for you?
Insights into how academe works. In searching for an academic job, it helps to know how to play the game. Participating in service can help you develop a larger understanding of how academia functions, as well as academia’s place in the wider world. Through service on student government and on the university senate, I’ve learned how to draft resolutions and advocate for policy changes. I’ve learned how institutions grapple with tough decisions on major issues like parental-leave policies and on seemingly minor yet touchy issues like campus parking.
Who has the power? How do you respectfully exercise it? Those are critical insights that graduate students can gather by actively serving at their institutions.
Tips for sharpening your grant proposals. Learn how decision-making happens within academic institutions can help those Ph.D.’s who choose the faculty path to craft stronger grant proposals when the time comes. For example, volunteering on a graduate-student travel-award committee gave me insights into the evaluation process and helped me draft better applications myself in future award cycles.
Networking. We hear it constantly: It’s all about who you know. If you are strategic, you can serve on committees or volunteer for events that involve key people with whom you would like work or network.
For example, I identified several committees that would allow me to develop relationships not only with a broad array of faculty members in my discipline and tangent fields, but also with members of the administration. In addition, I served on the board of a local nonprofit child-care center and volunteered to do practitioner-oriented presentations. As a result, I was able to meet local early-childhood professionals whom I needed to know in order to gain access to research sites for my dissertation.
Job skills that transfer well outside academe. It is sometimes dismaying for faculty members to acknowledge that their graduate students may want to pursue careers outside of academe (or worse yet, outside of research entirely). But we all know the tenure-track job numbers mean many Ph.D.’s will need to find nonacademic employment.
Doctoral training should prepare students for a variety of post-Ph.D. options, and an emphasis on—and commitment to—service is one way to produce a well-rounded graduate student. Depending on the kind of service, you could learn project management, event planning, fund raising, and more. In my service work I learned how to lead and conduct a performance review in a nonprofit setting, how to manage and report budgets for different events, and how to communicate in a variety of ways with people outside my discipline. That sort of service can build your confidence and give you additional marketable skills, not to mention ease the anxiety of what will happen when this whole Ph.D. “ride” is over.
Personal fulfillment. In speaking with other graduate students about why they seek out service obligations when they’ve got so much else to do, the common thread that emerged was that serving helped them “get out of the lab” or the cubicle. It allowed them to meet people in other fields (in an era increasingly concerned with interdisciplinary work). It kept them “sane” and allowed them to “give back.”
Service may offer a sense of purpose, perhaps sustaining graduate students, who, like myself, may sometimes struggle with understanding the larger impact of our day-to-day academic activities.
Sure, some professors and advisers will argue that service is a distraction from the true focus of graduate training: developing strong scholars. And I imagine that for some graduate students that may be true.
However, I have actually seen many of my fellow doctoral students become not only excellent scholars, but also strong participants in their institutions. For example, a colleague from my department has one of the longest publication records I have seen for a graduate student, but she has also taken a leadership role in coordinating our college’s annual research forum and an interdisciplinary speaker series. Several of the most active students on the service front in our department have gone on to accept prestigious academic or research jobs.
So what is the right portfolio of service for each graduate student?
That’s between students and their advisers, and should be the result of open conversations about each student’s context and long-term goals to understand what service activities might work best. As graduate students, we must play our part, too: Come to meetings prepared, ask questions, pay careful attention to the faculty mentors around the table, and offer to take on leadership roles. Smart graduate students will look for ways to integrate their research, teaching and service.
The point is: Service can be more than a pleasant footnote on your CV. Wouldn’t institutions gain more from their graduate students, and wouldn’t graduate students gain more from their education, if we gave service a real role in doctoral training?
