When Sydney Glassman started her Ph.D. in ecology at the University of California here, she was sure she wanted to be a professor. But many factors, she says, make her less certain of that today.
“The academic job market is intimidating,” Ms. Glassman says. “The lack of funding is horrible. That Ted Cruz and James Inhofe are in positions of power for science is very depressing. The fact that people I know who are very good at what they do but are not getting grants is also very depressing.”
So Ms. Glassman found herself this week at Beyond Academia, a conference created by Berkeley doctoral students for current and recent Ph.D.’s who want to explore careers outside the professoriate. The students cobbled together $40,000 from the university, individual departments, and other sources for the event, which they hope will help change an American university culture that they say often devalues nonacademic careers.
Winning the financial blessing of an elite institution like Berkeley for such a conference, now in its third year, is proof to some that academe is becoming more supportive of Ph.D.’s who work outside university walls. Indeed, universities are acknowledging some tough numbers: Each year they produce more and more Ph.D.’s, even as the share of tenure-track jobs shrinks. As a result, administrators are creating more career services for graduate students and making greater efforts to track where their Ph.D.’s land.
But such steps by administrators are relatively easy compared with changing a culture. While progress has been made in recent years, the conference made clear that a stigma persists for students who don’t pursue academic jobs. “The most depressing thing about the conference is that every session I was in,” people were saying they couldn’t tell their principal investigator, “I’m looking at a nonacademic career,” says Douglas I. Kalish, a consultant who spoke at the conference.
Like seminarians afraid to say they don’t hear a religious calling, several students at the conference said they feared that being honest with their advisers could cause that delicate relationship to deteriorate, leading to longer email-response times or more attention focused on peers who are dead-set on the tenure track. Some who spoke with The Chronicle asked that their full names not be used so they couldn’t be identified by faculty members.
Mr. Kalish, who has a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University, now guides professors on how to support their graduate students who are considering leaving academe. “Many faculty are living in the dark ages,” he says.
Looking for Options
Some 400 people attended the two-day conference. It was mostly for current and recent Berkeley doctoral students, but participants came from other California universities and even outside the state. Sessions ranged from the practical to the esoteric, with titles like “The Enjoyment of Employment,” “The Job Hunt Process,” and “Branding Your Brain.” Attendees came from all disciplines, but mostly from the sciences.
Many students were like Ms. Glassman, not sure they even want academic jobs. But there seemed to be just as many who had tried to land on the tenure track until it became financially infeasible. Such was the case for Karl Erhard, who began his Ph.D. program in plant biology at Berkeley in 2006, before the economic collapse.
Mr. Erhard stood at the back of a room packed with more than 70 people and jotted notes as a panel that included recruiters for industry and nonprofits gave tips on how to land a nonacademic job. Much of the advice seemed basic: Not keeping your LinkedIn profile current is bad. Knowing someone inside the company you’re applying to is good. Recruiters spend as few as five seconds on a résumé, so be clear and concise.
Mr. Erhard, who earned his Ph.D. in 2012 and is a postdoctoral researcher at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, says his wife recently started a cake business, making him, temporarily at least, the household’s primary earner. Finding a tenure-track job is uncertain, and trying to support a family as an adjunct in a high-cost location like the Bay Area would be financially irresponsible.
“I just don’t see any way out of adjuncting,” he says. “The job market for professorships is just not what it used to be.”
A conference like Beyond Academia, organizers say, helps students think about their careers before going down the uncertain, financially straining adjunct path. Many attendees, however, were several months or even several years removed from their Ph.D.’s or postdoctoral positions, seeking transferable skills they wished their programs had taught them.
“Long-term forced free time is awful,” says Sven Chilton, who earned a doctorate in nuclear engineering from Berkeley in 2013. He attended Beyond Academia to focus his job search.
Mr. Chilton suspected early in his Ph.D. program that he wasn’t interested in academic research, but he suppressed those thoughts. “I hung on to that possibility for several years,” he says. “I think students, largely in STEM fields but perhaps the humanities as well, socialize that the academy is the pinnacle of society.”
Like many of those present, Mr. Chilton doesn’t fault his adviser for lacking knowledge about the nonacademic job market. Faculty mentors, many of whom never had to cut a path through industry, can provide only basic support and guide students toward general resources. Of his own adviser, Mr. Chilton says, “The universities and national labs are what he knows about.”
Professional Development
Change at Berkeley and in academe may be slow, but it is afoot, says Rosemary Joyce, an associate dean of Berkeley’s Graduate Division. “I’m not going to deny that there are individual faculty members who dismiss their students who explore careers outside academia,” she says. “But they’re not the majority anymore.”
Ms. Joyce says Berkeley plans to create a center on the campus this fall for graduate-student professional development. It will have one full-time staff member, she says. The university will also provide a website where graduate students can create individual development plans and learn about the range of careers in their field.
“We need to shift the national dialogue from the overproduction of Ph.D.’s to the underutilization of Ph.D.’s,” Ms. Joyce says, echoing a key theme expressed in recent years by groups like the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association.
Ph.D. recipients, even at an elite institution like Berkeley, Ms. Joyce says, have always left for careers outside the university. The Graduate Division conducted a survey of Berkeley doctoral recipients across all disciplines from 1968 to 2008, and found that 44 percent of respondents held tenured or tenure-track appointments, 42 percent had nonacademic careers, and 14 percent had other employment in higher education, including as adjuncts and administrators.
Ms. Glassman, who says she feels let down by the career education she received at Berkeley, applauds the recent commitments.
“They’re starting to see that we need support,” she says. “They’re starting to realize that our mental health is important and us finding jobs is important.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
