Preparing Early

Questions

Question about the extent to which a student’s research is entirely self-initiated.

Robert Owen: I can answer more specifically for the sciences. And the answer is "Not much." You can sometimes get major national fellowships which will fund a particular line of research that you yourself have identified. And even in that case you need a faculty member, or more, to raise their hand and say, "I’m willing to serve as your adviser." In fact, many of the students in the sciences – I think in the engineering field as well – come in and they become incorporated into an ongoing research problem. Now, they certainly have the opportunity to give it their own spin, to go off in their own directions, and often that happens. But it’s unusual for a student – in the technical fields at least – to come in and say, "This is what I intend to do for my thesis work." If there is not funding available for it – for example, to support the student – or if there are no faculty who are working on that particular problem. In the humanities, it’s a bit different, because you can explore a particular poet or author, and a lot of times if there’s a faculty member who may not be expert in that, it’s close enough to their field, they’ll say, "OK, I’m willing to supervise you." So you have a bit more latitude there. That’s what my experience has been.

Leslie Hollingsworth: Some people make that decision in making the choice of working with a professor before even applying to a university. So that might be the basis on which you would apply and on which you would go to one university over another. Because you were interested, you’ve already decided the research line that you’re interested in and then you hook up with someone who’s doing research in that area. But it’s your research because you’ve already developed that passion and you’re just following that. Another thing is – mine was sort of developmental, and when the issue came up of choosing your adviser early, that really needs to be a part of it. It’s not just a matter of choosing an adviser but choosing an adviser whose work really coincides with what you’re interested in. And a lot of times that has to do with knowing yourself. You know, just kind of paying attention to what really excites me about this area. It really helps to have that once you get into an academic position because you’ve got something to go forward with and it carries you. You know, I still feel excited about the work that I do. 

Question about getting published.

Cathleen Connell: Certainly, publications are important but you raise a very important point. Some publications take years to create. In my field, it wouldn’t necessarily be detrimental to choose a journal that’s not the most prestigious, but peer review is the critical thing in my discipline. I wouldn’t recommend that students pursue types of journals that aren’t peer reviewed yet. And I know that’s sort of a conflict, because if that’s your only alternative, what are you to do? But I would encourage you to pursue those peer reviewed journals that would publish what you’re working on. And I don’t know if that’s similar in other areas, but peer review is just the thing. I mean, I hear it over and over again. And ideally it’s peer reviewed in the best journals, the top journals in your field. But I have noticed that there is some flexibility when you’re critiquing someone who is just starting out, and that it is terrific to have some publications period, but if some of those aren’t in the top journals that isn’t a fatal flaw.

Gary Herrin: There’s nothing wrong with having a "submitted" paper either. I echo the point about peer review, that’s obviously your first choice. Even the conferences that I was mentioning before are peer reviewed. This issue of archival journals or not is one that differs by profession. And with electronic media these days and so many journals that are trying to save trees, I think the fact that it’s published on the web is probably not as important as was mentioned. Make sure that someone is reviewing the work and it’s not just where you can publish without any review.  

Question about ways you can distinguish yourself through interdisciplinarity.

Cathleen Connell: I think it is more challenging when you’re not in a traditional program because you don’t have as many models in terms of what steps led to the career you ended up with. I would certainly suggest making close colleagues of those people who have done similar things to what you want to do at other universities or here at this university. I don’t know if this would be helpful in all cases, but for students who have approached me with a similar dilemma, I have suggested that they make sure they are meeting the criteria for success in one field and then they promote how this other related field adds to their potential in terms of offering something unique to a academic department. And I think the word "unique" was mentioned in your short list of things. What could this person bring that is different from what everybody else has? Well, if you are combining two fields, you are very likely to be different but if you try to fulfill all requirements or all the short list of things that are essential for both fields, you might find yourself pulled in so many directions that you’re really not that attractive to either one. And I don’t know that that applies to your specific case, but maybe be a little bit more mainstream or conservative in terms of what you’re doing for one field and then bring the other one on and educate or be an advocate for why it’s so important to combine those two areas and you might have some people very interested in what you are doing if you approach it that way.  

Question about the utility of academic and nonacademic postdocs.

Gary Herrin: What we’re probably agreeing to is that’s very discipline specific. I think you mentioned engineering and you’re right, that it’s a real challenge, because when you’re out in industry, have you abandoned your research? Because you’ve got this momentum going as a graduate student that you might lose, I think would be my first concern with that. On the other hand, people who go into industry in engineering and come back are very common. Just don’t stay too long. And the postdocs I don’t think are as common in engineering maybe as some of the other fields because there are lots of assistant professor jobs. If there weren’t so many sometimes the postdocs are positions people take to hone their thought a year or two to take the time to find the jobs that are maybe not quite as plentiful. So I don’t think in engineering there are quite as many of those, but I may be not speaking correctly there.

Cathleen Connell: I think postdocs are a wonderful opportunity because they allow you the time to publish from your dissertation, to develop a whole new set of colleagues, especially if the setting is a little bit different than your academic department, so then you might be appealing to two different camps when you’re on the job market and I can’t emphasize enough how wonderful it is in a postdoc to have the flexibility to just do research. Oh my goodness, it’s just the fantasy experience. I mean, you get to wake up, plan your day, and publish. And if that’s something important to getting a job, it really, really is a lovely opportunity, because when you start your faculty position, certainly you’re expected to publish but all of a sudden you’re teaching, you have advisees, you have new faculty colleagues, you have a new place to move to, you have to figure out your new computer. I mean, you have so many things all at one time, so in some fields a postdoc is absolutely the way to go, but it’s very individual. And if you’re offered the fantastic, perfect job right out of your graduate program, in some ways you’d be crazy not to take it. But if that doesn’t happen, I really don’t think it’s a second choice to do a postdoc. It might actually be an excellent choice, and you might not even realize it until you’re done.

As I mentioned before, I would never be here if I didn’t do that postdoc. I would be in a much more mainstream human development and family studies program, and for me that would be particularly problematic because that’s the same degree that my husband has and what are the odds of having two faculty positions open at one place at one time when we were both on the job market together? And so that’s a whole different set of issues and a whole different topic of dual-career, commuter marriages, and I can comment on that separately if anyone wants to ask questions but I do think a postdoc can really help you make yourself that much more distinct from a very broad market. In Human Development/Family Studies, jobs don’t come up that often so that allowed me to have some options that didn’t compete with my husband, and the good news is we eventually were able to live together but it took four years.

Question about dual academic couples.

Cathleen Connell: Yes, my first comment is please don’t fall in love with someone who is in an academic profession if that’s what you are considering. But if it’s too late already, as I mentioned, try to make your profiles as distinct as possible. Sometimes that’s not a problem, because you meet someone from a very, very different discipline, but I think having a sense of humor and flexibility are really, really important because we never dreamed what situations we would have faced.

I’ll make it very brief, but we got married and then started living apart two months later where I accepted the postdoc. My husband was a faculty member. He got tenure there and I kept moving driving distance from him, so we could visit each other on weekends and we did this for four years. So, I was in St. Louis when he was in West LaFayette, Indiana for two years. And then I moved to Kentucky and we commuted a different direction, but two and a half hours. And that was for an extra year and then I moved to Ann Arbor and then it took an extra year for him to find a position here. He left a position with tenure, to a position at Michigan without tenure.

But it all worked out in the long run, but it really, really is a struggle and I know many of you will face something along that line and there is no one answer. I think everybody needs to work it out a little differently. Other people have sort of switched in terms of whose career comes first, and that works well for some people. Where one person will be on the job market and the other person will follow and maybe have a job that isn’t the job of their dreams but they’ll be perfectly fine for a few years and then maybe it’ll be time to switch. That didn’t work in my case, because the position I was offered when my husband got his faculty position was in solid waste management – and I’m not kidding – and because my degree is in Human Development and Family Studies I knew nothing of this area and I didn’t really want to broaden my horizons and so that’s why I thought, "I’m out of here. I really need to accept the postdoc" and that’s what choice we made, but it is a very individual thing, and I shouldn’t say that would work for everyone. It surely wasn’t easy to live apart for four years.

Question about using the degree in nonacademic contexts.

Robert Owen: I think that a lot of the things that were said even though they were aimed specifically at academic jobs would in no way hurt you as far as if you are going to go to work for industry, for the government, something like that. Internship experience, that kind of thing certainly would be attractive. But an employer whether it’s another university or a government job – IBM, whatever it happens to be – are also going to be looking at may of the things that I think the panel has stressed. So it’s not a fork in the road where you can only go one way and not the other. I think that if you follow the advice that I’ve heard here today, you’ll be in good stead wherever you’re headed.

Question about presenting material in nonacademic contexts.

Leslie Hollingsworth: Are they still in areas that you’re interested in now, that you’re still pursuing? It’s just more professional rather than research-oriented? Well, I guess I would suggest if there’s any possibility of combining. I don’t think there’s a problem with the particular conference or organization that sponsors the conference. For me, it’s more a matter of what you do with that and so if you present something in such a way that you can use it on your vita, that it’s going to be relevant and especially that you can turn into something that’s publishable, I think it’s the best of two worlds. So I don’t think it excludes that area, but I think you always need to keep thinking about what’s going to help from an academic standpoint.

Cathleen Connell: But if you only had time or resources to go to one conference a year, I guess I would suggest going to the academic one, that is the one that will expose you to the professionals in your field that will ultimately be the ones to hire you.

Leslie Hollingsworth: I also wanted to mention…I don’t think anyone has mentioned volunteerism at these conferences, but there are a lot of opportunities to get known just by roles that you take. There are a lot of volunteer positions at conferences. They are always looking for that and you can even volunteer to be a discussant or a presider at sessions so that you’re not necessarily always presenting and I’d really encourage that as well.

Cathleen Connell: There are also student organizations within most national conferences, too, and sometimes because people don’t know about them you can rise fast to a high level of leadership if you’re willing to sign your name. And I’d really encourage you to do that because sometimes you can really build your network quite quickly that way.

Question about sexism in the academy.

Leslie Hollingsworth: One of the things that I’ve found is that I get help in a lot of different ways from a lot of different people. And I think that what I tend to do – and I guess I’m not thinking about anything that would be blatantly sexist – but people just give information in different ways. I always use the example of a man who’s retired from our school now, but I got some real helpful tips from him, but he never says it directly. He will act like he’s talking about something else or he’ll just kind of introduce this topic that’s not really relevant to either one of us, but afterwards I realize that he was really trying to let me know something. You know, he was really trying to let me know something about tenure or he’ll mention something that happened some time ago that was great or he didn’t think was too great. And that’s his way and it just caused me to realize that I’m going to get that different kind of help from different people. It’s not a blatantly sexist thing but it speaks to the difference in the way people come across.

Cathleen Connell: And for one of the first times in my life, I’m drawing a blank. I don’t have much to say on that topic and I think the reason is because I’m in a very female-dominated discipline and so I really haven’t considered that issue much. If you have a more specific question you would like to ask, or send me an e-mail message about, I’d be happy to answer it. But I haven’t experienced sexism, at least in the way I perceive that issue and so I don’t really know what to say there. I think it’s certainly a much greater issue in areas where women are definitely the minority and certainly there are many of those. Health Behavior and Health Education is not one of them. Just as an example, our incoming class of masters students usually numbers between 60 and 70 and some years there have been one or two males, and so that’s my frame of reference. So it’s not quite the issue.

Question about the different kinds of relationships that could exist between professors and students of different sexes.

Cathleen Connell: I don’t know. I always thought I was equally chummy with the students that I work with – male and female – but I’m not able to really be very helpful. I hate to end there, though.

Leslie Hollingsworth: One thing I would say is that I have – just in my short experience in an academic situation – I have found that schools and departments seem to have personalities, and that one department or school may be more chummy than another. I haven’t seen it – I mean, I’ve seen differences between men and women – but I haven’t seen that in terms of gender. I’ve seen it more in terms of the personality of the program or department. Because I’ve talked to people in other universities and institutions in the Schools of Social Work, and their experience is real different in terms of the personality of their program.

Question about whether competitiveness can exist between professors and students.

Gary Herrin: Absolutely. That’s the problem with academia. The better you do, the worse it is. Because after you get a number of students out there and they actually produce students – PhDs – themselves, you actually create your own competition. That’s right. Though I’m very proud, quite frankly, of that whole achievement so I’m getting to the point where I don’t compete quite as hard with them, maybe. But it is a fact. Probably the first grant you write will be right in your adviser’s area. Maybe it’ll be peripheral enough so you can be the reviewer. I’ve had that happen a few times where I was asked by the granting agency to review and I don’t think the agency realized it was my former student. But you’re right, you do go head to head sometimes.

Cathleen Connell: I do think it’s in your best interest – I mean, in terms of any graduate student – to develop friendships and collegial relationships with your fellow students. You never know who might hire you. It might be someone you’re sitting next to in class right now. My doctoral program was quite competitive and fairly large and everyone seemed to need to position themselves and to a certain extent that might have been helpful because people always put their best foot forward, but to a certain extent it was quite painful for some people. But despite that many of the students I went to doctoral school with have stayed in touch and have remained some of my very, very closest friends. And sometimes we have nothing in common academically but lots in common just personally, because you do end up spending a lot of time and have very, very shared experiences.

So I encourage you not to think of all of your fellow students as competitors but rather as friends and colleagues, because it really can be beneficial down the line and really add to your quality of life. You were thinking of later? My advice would still be similar. Develop some friendships even though there are scarce resources and you are in a competitive position. Acknowledge that and go forward because when do you need friends more in your own department than when you’re just starting out and some of the other junior faculty are the ones that are sharing similar experiences. It’s great to be able to go out to dinner, to have a beer, just to talk about issues and try to get beyond that competitiveness, but I know it’s very difficult and in some situations it’s probably not going to be tenable but it’s certainly in your best interests if you can make that happen.

Question about how careful you should be about discussing your research with people.

Robert Owen: I think you’re right. I mean, you have to be cautious. Usually, when grad students go to conferences – the early conferences – they’re usually relatively quiet and listening. They’re there whatever the context. And if you’re talking about your research, that means that you have at least had a paper or an abstract associated with the conferences and hopefully a polished draft ready to submit. And I think you learn over the course of a few years that some people you can trust more than others, frankly. There’s not a lot of honor among some people, so you have to play that one by ear.

Cathleen Connell: Another tip might be to move quickly on the work that you are doing, especially if it’s very cutting edge. I experienced a situation in which I was sort of dragging my feet, not able to publish something that I had presented at a conference, and indeed someone did do something quite similar that had been at my poster session, and I couldn’t help but think maybe I had inspired a wonderful idea, but I had to take some of the responsibility for not moving more quickly on publishing that. Not that that justifies someone borrowing an idea. On the other hand, it’s very hard to be sure that that indeed happened and so I guess one piece of advice if you do have a cutting edge area: try to devote a lot of energy to that as opposed to being spread maybe a little too thin, where you’re trying to balance too many things and all of them move very, very slowly. Maybe on that one area you would try to move much more quickly on getting something out.

Leslie Hollingsworth: I really agree with what’s been said in this area. I appreciate that question. The other thing that I would say is that you don’t always have to talk about your research. That might be something that you reserve to talk with someone with whom you feel more comfortable with or more trusting. When I talked about having passion, I’m very passionate about my research and I get so passionate that I just want to talk about it all the time and it becomes sort of my main area of conversation and you don’t have to do that, you know. You can intentionally think about other things to talk about, especially if it’s someone that you aren’t sure about what you want to share.

Question about mistakes candidates can make during the job search.

Gary Herrin: One that irritates me is when people are being interviewed and they don’t know the answer to the question, and yet they keep answering. My recommendation is just because you have a Ph.D. and you’re interviewing doesn’t mean you’re supposed to know the answers to these questions. Be real honest in that process with people. Tell them what you did. If they ask you about something you didn’t do, then admit that. That’s even true in your final defense, but more importantly it’s important when you’re interviewing.

Robert Owen: I certainly don’t want to get into some of the horror stories I’ve seen, but one point that a number of the panelists have made is about the array of academic jobs. So there are very front line research universities – such as Michigan – all the way down to community colleges, very small liberal arts colleges. One thing you don’t want to do is to set yourself up for an obvious mismatch. I have had experiences where a small, good liberal arts college will be somewhat afraid, I’d say, of hiring a student from Michigan. Now, you’re in an excellent position to be considered, but at the same time you are viewed as coming out of a major research university and the thinking throughout the nation, no matter what size college it is, is that that’s where you’re headed. Not all students decide to follow that pathway. Maybe the jobs aren’t there. Maybe they’ve seen what our faculty do and they think they’re nuts. They don’t want to go into that rat race or whatever. But you don’t want to make applications to a small liberals arts college in the same way that you would to a Berkeley or a Michigan or someplace like that. Tailor it a bit. Be realistic about your expectations, not show up at a small place saying, “Well, I’m going to need about a million to start up my lab, a mass spec…” and all this. You’re talking about three times the college budget, maybe, in some of these places. So, be aware of that.