Post-PhD PathwaysOR: You’ve done the thing, so what’s next?

Brady Robards University of Tasmania

brady.robards@utas.edu.au@bradyjay

Griffith Centre for Cultural Research HDR Summer School – November, 2015

PLAN• Help frame the day

• Conferences• Publishing• Social media + the ‘public intellectual’

• Share my own experiences as a Griffith graduate + ECR

• Applying for academic jobs

• Developing a post-PhD research agenda

• Challenges and opportunities around contemporary academic labour

1. Telling children you’re in the 25th grade.

As curated by Buzzfeed’s Jessica Misener:25 Deeply Painful PhD Student Problems (Besides Your Thesis)

3. Realizing your vocabulary is permanently scattered with words like “problematic” and “ontological” and “hegemony.”

5. Going to parties and everyone’s just standing around talking about their research.

8. When someone claims that being in a doctoral program isn’t “the same thing as having a real job”:

11. …and feeling ultra-guilty anytime you try to relax.

12. Finding an old paper you wrote your first year of grad school:

17. Feeling some degree of “impostor syndrome” at least once a day.

21. Grading your undergrads’ papers:

22. When someone asks how “writing” is going:

25. When ANYONE asks you what your plan is after you graduate:

WHAT DO PHD STUDENTS DO WHEN THEY GRADUATE?

(Mewburn 2013 – http://thesiswhisperer.com/2013/07/17/whats-your-edge/)

• Perpetual and ongoing state of crisis? (Kendall 2002)

• Oversupply • Elite vs ‘non-elite’ institutions• The PhD as a pathway to

research and/or teaching but not much else

• 2003: 8% of research degree graduates were ‘unemployed’, although 23% were seeking other work (Mewburn 2013)

• My pathway is (mostly) an academic one, but this is not the only post-PhD pathway…

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MY PATHWAY

PhD/Level A Professional Level B

• 2008 – 2012 (4 years FTE)

• Tutoring• RA work• Guest lectures• Acting convenor• 2011: Level A

contract (FT)• QIBT

• 2012 – 2013• Student Advisor• Non-academic, but

paid the bills• Retained position

and affiliation with Griffith

• Continued to work on publications/projects in spare time

• Excellent mentors

• 2013 – current • 40/40/20;

continuing/tenurable• RPEs

• 1 HERDC point/yr• HDR supervision• $7k/yr

• 3 unit teaching rotation• 25 EFTSU/sem

Griffith Griffith UTas

POST-PHD RESEARCH AGENDA

POST-PHD RESEARCH AGENDA

Undergraduate

Honours/Masters

PhD

Post-PhD

POST-PHD RESEARCH AGENDA

STEPPING BACK: DURING THE PHDOn saying yes to (almost) everything…

• Publishing

• Four journal articles + one article and one chapter on the way• Contributed to a textbook, Think Sociology• Co-edited a special issue and a book• Book reviews• Peer reviewing• Blogging

• Teaching

• Taught into ten different courses (all levels)• + guest lectures (mostly paid)• Applied for teaching awards

• Service: Committees (HDR rep, symposia, professional associations, reviewing)

• Conferences networking

• Mentors

• Web presence

SELECTION CRITERIA

+ An emerging track record of applications for external research funds (grants, fellowships, project funding)

Find the selection criteria for the kind of jobs you want to apply for and start thinking about how you could respond to them. Ask people for their job applications.

‘RESEARCH PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS’

Assessed in 3-5 year windows

GRANT CULTURE• Australian Research Council (ARC)

• Discovery• Linkage• DECRA

• 5 years post-PhD• 2 shots

• Find alternate funding bodies

• Get advice from research office/research support staff• Internal grants to ‘build capacity’• Proactively partner with senior colleagues and mentors

2016 1220 200 16.4%

MEASURING SUCCESS?• Completion time

• Done is better than perfect• The PhD as a licence to apply for jobs• BUT ALSO a time to be protected and relished as one of the few times

you will have to focus on your own research for a sustained period of time

• Publications

• Quantity + quality• Downloads/views• Citations• Impact (methodological, theoretical, etc.)• Altmetrics (tweets, shares, etc.)

• Developing networks (peers, mentors, collaborators, co-authors)

• Engaging with the media (radio/newspaper/TV interviews)

• Teaching might represent the biggest and most important ‘impact’ most academics can hope to have

MY ‘SHADOW CV’• What my CV says: 9 journal articles over the past 5

years, with 2 under review, and another 6 in preparation.

• Shadow CV: A string of rejections, failed collaborations, and half-written articles

• What my CV says: 4 books

• Shadow CV: My institution doesn’t ‘count’ any of them as they are edited books (x2) or classified as textbooks (x2 – I’m appealing one!)

• What my CV says: A continuing, full-time Level B academic job at a solid mid-range university with a strong sociology program, straight out of my PhD.• Shadow CV: 10 failed job applications, short-listed for two; moving away

from my friends and family to a place where I knew no-one, and had to build a new life.

• What my CV says: $560k of external + $15k of internal research funding over the past 2.5 years• Shadow CV: The bulk of it was by chance, and part of it involves evaluation

work that is very time intensive.

Inspired by Devoney Looser (2015) in The Chronicle of Higher Ed

CROWD-SOURCING ADVICE

BUT not a pushover

THE CHALLENGE• Academic pathways appear to be increasingly fraught, non-linear

and involve at least some ‘treading water’

• Exploitation, casualisation, and short-term contracts

• Four essential elements to address these challenges:

• Planning, resilience, tenacity, and kindness

PREPARE FOR VERSATILITYTake stock of the skills you develop during a PhD, and learn to translate them into different position descriptions and selection criteria:

• Research

• Literature reviews - translating complex existing research into accessible language

• Methods (qual, quant, recruitment, ethics)• Project management

• Writing and editing

• Grant/tender applications

• Identifying funding organisations

• Writing persuasively

• Responding to criteria

BUT: It’s a PhD, not a Nobel Prize (Mullins & Kiley 2002)

FORGING NEW PATHWAYS• While we must continue to confront a range of challenges in

negotiating what comes after the PhD (personal, institutional, structural) there is cause for optimism…

• Develop your own measures of success • An academic career can be incredibly rewarding, but those

rewards do not always have to be found in conventional academic positions

• In the Humanities and Social Sciences, we are uniquely positioned to contribute to a range of discussions and industries outside academia

• Other pathways today and tomorrow: Jodi, Catherine, David, Indigo

FURTHER READING• www.thesiswhisperer.com - Inger Mewburn (ANU)

• http://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com - Tseen Khoo + Jonathan O’Donnell (RMIT) +

• ‘It’s a PhD, not a Nobel Prize’ (Mullins & Kiley 2002)

• ‘Me and my Shadow CV’ (Looser 2015) - http://chronicle.com/article/MeMy-Shadow-CV/233801

QUESTIONS/DISCUSSION• Please be open/honest with your

own uncertainties/anxieties/frustrations