Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration.
Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success. They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options.
Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers.
Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including:
-When, where, and what to publish
-Writing a foolproof grant application
-Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV
-Acing the job talk and campus interview
-Avoiding the adjunct trap
-Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right
The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.
Karen Kelsky has run The Professor Is In blog and business since 2010, and today, she is the most widely recognized expert in the highly engaged world of Ph.D.’s attempting to navigate the transition to the job market. A former tenured professor and department head at two major research institutions, she knows (and shares) the insider knowledge of academic hiring.
- "And, lastly, attend to your handshake. If you do nothing else from this chapter, please, I beg you, do this. Get up from your chair, go find a human, and shake their hand. Shake it firmly. Really squeeze! Outstretch your arm, grip their hand with all your fingers and thumb, look them firmly in the e"
- "You are the expert. You are in command. Perhaps you haven’t taught the intro course before—that matters not. You prepare, so that you can speak about how you will. When speaking of your research, reject the temptation to harp on what you “still need to address. Focus exclusively on what it does achi"
- "Beware of collective grad student paranoia. Other graduate students can be valuable as friends and allies, but don’t become enmeshed in drama, and don’t make the mistake of turning to them for professional advice. That is called the blind leading the blind."
- "The majority of good jobs are advertised in late summer and fall, with interviews in winter and offers in spring. Therefore, in the pursuit of unbroken affiliation/income after the Ph.D., you must apply for jobs in fall term of the year you plan to defend, and then ideally get offered a job in March"
- "The key was to keep my CV prominently in mind. When I had to make choices about how to spend my time, which requests to accept, and when to say no, I thought about my CV. Did I want the line? Did I need the line? Was it a good line? Was there a better line? It was an amazingly clarifying exercise."
- "Look forward to what you will do, not backward to what you have not done."
- "2. Have a Clear One-Paragraph Intro that lays out the topic and sketches the basic plan of the talk. “Thank you for having me. Today I’ll be speaking about X. In the talk, I’ll be exploring X from the perspective of Y and will be relating it to Z. I will show that X derives from/causes/represents/si"
- "The department may assign you a topic, or they may ask you to choose one. In either case, do not use the teaching demo as an opportunity to beat the dead horse of your research for the umpteenth time. That is what the job talk is for. Faculty must spend a great deal of time teaching outside their co"
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