Exploring Career Options:
Myths & Realities 

Kimberly Roberson:

Let me tell you first of all the briefest bit of what I do at the Mott Foundation because it distinguishes me a bit from other foundation folks doing foundation work and other grant workers. The Mott Foundation has four program areas. One is the local grantmaking area, the team I work with; Pathways Out of Poverty, a national program; an environmental program nationally; international focus with offices in Johannesburg and Prague, with a focus on emerging democracies.

The fact that I work on local issues changes a bit some of the dynamics of the grant making process, partly because I go to the church and the grocery store and the school with the same people I both fund and deny, and that makes the work a little bit different. And also because it means I have to be more of a generalist and less of an expert; a lot of grant makers have a portfolio and an expertise — micro enterprise or teen pregnancy, for example. In my capacity I have to work on a number of different issues because what we fund is based on the local community, and it’s a geographic split instead of an issue split. That’s a little bit about the kind of work that I do.

I never planned an academic career, so I might have stereotypes about what an academic career might have meant. I thought I might like to teach at some point, but I never expected to do a tenure track job after my degree. Prior to coming back to graduate school I worked for the Salvation Army in Flint as Director of Social Services, which was a little more of an “in-the-trenches” kind of job. In that job I also felt very strongly and very good about what we did. But I was also frustrated that we had a lot of good information that I didn’t know how to collect and think about critically in the ways that I wanted to, and I also didn’t know how to connect that to larger bodies of research. I felt like I was operating in a vacuum and there was a lot more to know to bring to bear on the work that I was trying to do than I knew how to access.

That’s kind of the bridge that took me back to graduate school to get some research skills and more critical thinking skills and writing skills, and I didn’t really know what the next step would be for me. My comparison to the academic world for me would be my graduate school process which I found very frustrating, because for me many times it didn’t relate strongly enough to what I thought of as the real world, in the trenches, from which I had just come. And although I didn’t know if I wanted to go back to that work, I know I didn’t want to stay in academic work permanently. It didn’t feel to me like what I was drawn to do.

One of the things that the Foundation did for me, probably the primary thing it did for me, was to bridge those two places. It allows me to work in ways that I see direct impacts in the community but it also allows me to connect some of those other resources and to bring together for our grantees the combination of financial resources and broader resources, meaning consultant work, suggestions about research and learning projects that can help them grow and expand the kind of work that they do, and think about those things in ways that I wouldn’t be able to think about them if I hadn’t had the academic background that I did.

In terms of specific skills that made me marketable related to the PhD, certainly the knowledge base was one reason the foundation was interested in me. The political science and social work combination fit with accessing information, thinking about things at a policy level but also the social work side of that brought it back to pragmatic issues such as how does this really work in our community and what does this mean for people who live here. The research skills were very important, continue to be important. We don’t have a lot of people in the Foundation with these skills, and that’s something I feel I’m able to bring to the team I work with that not everyone is able to — people bring different sets of skills. That’s something that I can help other people think more about. I also am able to connect people to other people. Because I’m still local, because I worked with a lot of Michigan professors, and have PhD colleagues who are out doing different work. I’ve hired some of these folks as consultants that I went to school with because of their issue areas.

And finally, I don’t know if this is the greatest reason to do a PhD, but there’s a way in which it feels like a union card to me. I wanted very much to sit at the table with PhDs and not be discounted. I wanted that credential, and that continues to be important to me. The Foundation world is a world that has a fair amount of snobbery and elitism to it, and it helps me in that slightly intangible way to do the work that I want to do.

One of the questions asked here related to whether students considering a career outside academe should finish the PhD. I thought that was an interesting question because I didn’t struggle with it so much myself because closure is so important to me and I just knew I wasn’t going to feel good personally if I didn’t finish that off. But I will share with you that the Foundation contacted me when I was writing my dissertation because they had an immediate need and I wasn’t quite back into the job market yet. It was important to me that I be able to start part time so that I had time to finish writing my dissertation. And I said to the human resources person something to the effect (and I thought this was a really cool win-win thing I was saying in my interviews) that I thought if I was going to be with the Foundation long-term that it was in both their best interests and my best interests to finish my PhD. And he said, “well, honestly, we don’t really care.” And I was surprised by that. And then he backed off and said that they did care because it mattered to me personally, and they wanted me to be a happy employee, but they didn’t really think that the PhD, the three letters behind my name, mattered in terms of what I could do for them.

At that point I had the research skills that were helpful, I had the critical thinking skills that were helpful. In terms of the actual skills, they believed they were already there; the PhD was just something that was important to me. So that would suggest that I could have stopped the program without serious impact on my career path as it was currently being planned out. I also have a number of friends who did clearly make very good career decisions to stop at the point that they were at because something good was being offered. What I can’t speak to is what that felt like personally, and if there were personal regrets, and I’m sure that across the board… I’m sure some folks have personal regrets and some folks don’t. I think some of that is just an internal “How is that going to feel to me if I put more time into something I’m not enjoying all that much or I cut myself off here and go in other directions?”

Another of the questions was how students can prepare throughout their academic career to prepare for the broadest range of career options. One of the things I thought about a lot and worried about a little as I was doing my PhD was that I wasn’t doing enough research assistantships as some of my friends, I wasn’t doing as much TA’ing as others were. I took a pretty direct path to get my PhD and get on my way. I had a lot of colleagues who got a lot more depth of experience doing academic work as part of their PhD. I think that is a place to think about what you are aiming for. If you’re going into a tenure track position it could be worth taking an extra year or two for some of those extra experiences within the academic world that increase your marketability in that world. If that’s not where you’re going, I’m not sure it is worth that time, and in retrospect I’m fairly glad I didn’t spend the extra time to do those additional things because it wasn’t going to be all that relevant to where I was going.

One last thing relevant to career decisions. One thing that I knew at the time, but I couldn’t quite believe and continue to struggle with, is that during the dissertation process I wanted to write a really good academic dissertation. I didn’t want to close off any options, so that I could do the tenure track thing that I really didn’t want to do just because I wanted all the options. I wanted to be perceived as really good at what I was doing, and that’s what people wanted in this environment. At the same time I wanted to get the thing over with so that I could go on with the job I wanted. I really struggled with that, and with the knowledge that many of my peers who were writing different kinds of dissertations and taking different amounts of time to do it were looking better in this environment that I still didn’t really want to be in but I really wanted to look good because I always want to look good. In the end I wrote a dissertation that was ok, not a masterpiece. My father also has a PhD and he takes this slightly further than I do. Ever since he got his degree he has said it doesn’t matter to him if his was the worst one they accepted, so long as they accepted it. That was an internal struggle for me, but for me to get it done and get on with the rest of my life was the right decision. And to not agonize quite so much as to whether my dissertation fit everyone else’s needs. I wish I cold have come to closure on that a little more easily.

James Hart:

Why don’t I start with a story. About 15 years ago I’m in a bar in the lower east side in New York City called Slugs. It was a jazz club, very small, lots of sawdust on the floor, nefarious doing taking place in all the dark corners, and some of the finest players in the world on stage. So I’m sitting there and I’m by myself — I’m in New York on business for the National Endowment for the Arts, I was examining a theater. I’m really sort of unwinding at the bar. Somebody taps me on the shoulder, and it’s one of my old professors, a guy named Joe Riddle.

We sit and we listen to the music for a while, then Joe turns to me and says: “what’s the relationship between this, that stupid theater that you saw today, and Martin Heidigger? “For those of you that don’t know, Heidigger was a famous or infamous German scientist who has had a very interesting (despite his Nazi past) influence on critical thinking in Western intellectual thought, particularly and curiously in a branch of Western thought call Western Marxism. So I look at Joe and this is the first sort of odd question that anybody’s asked me in months. And when I say odd I mean a question that is coming from absolutely nowhere that I recognize. And I turn to him and I start to explain what the relationship is between those three things, and he stops me midway through the first paragraph and says, “It’s a good thing we haven’t lost you.” And then he gets up and leaves me at the bar and he didn’t come back, he just sort of left. So I’m sitting there and I’m puzzling over what he meant by “we haven’t lost you.” What he meant, I think, is that I was this person who went through this entire process, who crammed my head with, in practical terms, all sorts of useless things, and I was in a world in which the application of those useless things was if anything only indirect. But I was still, at a moment’s notice, able to flip a switch and be back into the deep, dark recesses of the issues of what is present and what is absent in any kind of discourse.

Now, I share this story for a couple of reasons. Number one, to say that I would not ever trade my intellectual, academic experience for any other kind of experience. Number 2, I have managed to maintain not only interest but some activity in my former academic profession, either through teaching, writing, research or publishing. But number 3, I have managed to bridge the relationship between those really arcane fields of knowledge and my everyday work with the government. And it takes a curious kind of application every day. For example, those of you who have worked for a large, cumbersome institution of any kind, you know that there is such a thing as a corporate culture. You know, for example, that there are unstated policies, unstated rules. You know, for example, that there are policies and procedures by which the institution pretends to exist. But coming into a situation like that, if you have a background like I do in critical thinking, your main task is to try to make that system do things it’s not supposed to do. In my case, the task of applying critical theory is to try to make the city do things it’s not supposed to do, such as serve the people it’s supposed to serve. And to do that, one not only has to engage in critical analysis of organizational structure, you also have to figure out how to do something differently to make the structure respond as it will respond in a conditioned response so you can work around that response and get what you need done.

That was all one big roman Numeral I. Roman Number II is that the academic background and keeping abreast of that, and being interdisciplinary in focus, means that when I deal with clients in the arts and culture I can speak in the dialect of every arts and cultural discipline known to man. I can speak to musicians, to anthropologists, to poets, because I understand the world in which they work. And also because I understand the physical, psychological and economic conditions under which artists and cultural workers exist not only in my city but around the country.

The upshot of it is (and this is related to the question of did my academic career prepare me for the job I’m doing now) yes, but in ways that when I started the job I never imagined. And again, I would not trade the experience or the degree for anything.

One of the things in terms of comparison between the academic world and the regular work world is that I’ve discovered that increasingly there’s not that much difference. My lifestyle is a little different, I would spend my time doing different things, but there is less and less of a gap between them. And this is more true as colleges and universities have become more “customer centered,” more student related. Just as municipalities and corporations have become more customer centered, universities have also. That sets up a really interesting rubric in terms of relationships between people in authority (teachers, or in my cases a high level bureaucrat) and the people you are serving. What it literally means in my case is that to do a good job I have to intimately understand who I’m working with, who I’m serving.

Bob Schoeni:

I’ll be more list oriented, and a word about my background. I graduated here in 1992 with a PhD in Economics, and like most folks went straight through from undergraduate. As with many people I was influenced by my mentors, so an academic career is what I had in front of me. I ended up not taking an academic job. I went to a large nonprofit think tank called RAND Corporation in Los Angeles, about 1,200 employers, and worked there pretty much continuously until about a week ago. I moved to Ann Arbor and now work at ISR, so I’m more like an academic I guess. In between I took a year off and worked for the federal government.

Let me go down the list of questions here and give you my perspective. One is how academics is different from other places where PhDs might find their jobs. Clearly, there’s no teaching, no formal teaching of traditional undergraduates and graduates. But I would qualify that and say there’s lots of opportunities to teach in a less formal way, that is, teaching your colleagues, running seminars, instructional types of settings in almost any workplace.

How else is it different? There are skills that are appreciated more outside of academics. Those skills are interpersonal skills, management skills, entrepreneurial skills, are more rewarded outside the university setting is my guess. If you enjoy those things, they’re important to you, it’s not that you can’t get them at the college or university setting, I just think they’re more rewarded outside.

Also, post-tenure there’s less independence outside academia. So if you’re tenured you have a tremendous amount of freedom, more than most other options. There’s probably only a handful of jobs where you have the independence that you have as an academic. You need to understand the full ramification of that for good or bad.

Depending on the job nonacademic jobs and environments can be very similar to academic jobs. I can show up to work in shorts and a t-shirt, or jeans, so if you have a preference for nor wearing a suit and tie there are lots of nonacademic jobs where you don’t have to do that. With flexible schedules, those types of attractions to academic jobs are there in many nonacademic jobs as well.

About finishing the degree, obviously you can make your own decisions, but there is what economists call sheepskin effect. Getting the degree matters. It keeps doors open. If you try a nonacademic job and you want to get back into the academic setting, that is at times difficult but having the degree allows you, in principle, the opportunity to do that. If you’re at all wavering, my advice is to get it done. Maybe you have to give up a bit in terms of quality, but get it done.

Lastly, one piece of advice I would have is that I wish I had been more proactive in seeking out nonacademic options, explicitly looking for internships. The reason you’re here, some of you, is that you have some vision of a nonacademic option. In that case, whether it’s a specific industry or a specific type of job, I would say contact the firms, institutions, organizations in those areas and say: “I’d like to come in and test-drive your organization for a summer.” There’s no substitute for practical experience. I’d have felt more comfortable with a nonacademic route if I’d have that experience.

I should mention one more thing. Since I’m the economist, no one has mentioned compensation as a difference. My sense is that two equally skilled PhDs, one pursuing jobs in academe and one outside, they would probably make more in wages outside academe. But, they may be giving up other kinds of things like tenure and life style.

Dunrie Greiling:

I’m going to start with my story. I got my PhD a year and a half ago, and I now work for two companies that are related: they’re housed in the same building and they’re run by two brothers. Biomedware develops spatial statistical software to analyze environmental and health data. Biomedware is the company that has its feel much more in the academic world. We do a lot of grantwriting to develop the software, we do analysis of cancer clusters, relationships between cancer and the environment. I had no idea that Biomedware existed until a colleague in graduate school left to do progrramming there. And so my story will have a couple different themes. One is networking and the other is just going out and trying different things on.

When I started graduate school I had no clear long-term goal. I thought I either wanted to be a scientist or I wanted to be someone who wrote about scientists, and the only way I could figure it out was to try. And I think I learned that I really liked science but I didn’t want to be the long gunslinger scientist out in the world. And so the writing attracted me more so that at the end of my graduate career, by the time I finally figured out that I wasn’t going to go on and do the professor thing, I didn’t know what kind of writing I could do, what kind of writing I could be paid for. Technical writing is something that interested me but wasn’t anything I had any formal background in. I’d never been a technical writer, I only had the idea that technical writers wrote about science and maybe that was good. And I had a friend who left my graduate program and went to this company, and he needed someone for a short term job. He had some writing to do as part of his job, didn’t have the time for it, thought that maybe I could do it, and test out whether I liked writing in that format. And I really did, I liked it a lot. It was part-time, I did it while I was finishing my dissertation. If you can find the time for something practical like that, it’s really helpful. I know it’s hard to find time in your schedule.

So we both sort of test-drove each other. I figured out whether I liked the work; they figured out whether they liked me. It turned out they wanted to offer me a permanent position after I finished.

I can talk a bit about similarities and differences between academe and the job I have now. It is a very informal environment where I work. It’s a bunch of ex-graduate students, some of whom got their degrees and some of whom didn’t. It’s not particularly hierarchical, we come in casually dressed, we work whenever we want. The boss ignores me sometimes when he’s really busy, so I do a lot of what I want to do; I’m very independent. The one thing that makes the biggest difference for me is that I have much more positive reinforcement than I had as a graduate student. The work is much more collaborative. My contribution is much more highly valued. And I’ve actually co-authored more papers with my current boss than I did with my graduate advisor. So, I’m still doing academic kinds of things as part of my job, so you can seek out an environment in the nonacademic world that’s pretty close to the academic environment if that’s what you want or that’s what you value.

The Biomedware part of my job is pretty similar to academe. Terraseer does the communication and marketing of the software that Biomedware develops, so that’s more like business, and I’m learning a lot of that on the job. The environment that I’m in acknowledges that a PhD is important, knows that I’m a smart person, knows I can figure things out. So I guess I’m living proof that you can have a fun, exciting, challenging job where you’re learning all the time. That does exist outside academe. The important strategies for me for finding a job were networking and then just trying things out, taking the time to do that. If I think I want to do technical writing, maybe I should find out if I like it, and in finding out if I like it I was able to get the experience that made me more marketable.

Bob Schoeni: The trend is toward more flex time generally regardless of the job, and I think employers realize that to attract good talent they need to be able to offer flexibility. My job was completely flex. I could never show up at the office, and work at home all time if I wanted to. Now no one did, people enjoyed the environment, it was a fun place to work. If you’re in the habit of working from 1:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. it could be accommodated. The bottom line was getting the work done. It’s going to vary job to job, but that is the trend. And for me, with two young kids and a wife who works, that flexibility is crucial to be able to raise my kids the way I want to.

Kimberly Roberson: I also started at the Mott Foundation before I finished my degree, and I actually started as a consultant, a capacity where we could sort of test each other out. They would have kept me in that capacity if that was what I wanted, and that would have given me the ultimate flexibility because I could have chosen which types of jobs I wanted to work on. In the end I was hired but as a three-day-a-week employee because I also have two small children. For family purposes I really wanted to maintain a part-time schedule. I can switch days around. I’m the only part-time employee that Mott has, and I don’t see a lot of part-time options in the foundation world. Being hired made more sense to me rather than staying as a contract worker, in part because the foundation offers great benefits. But the consultant/contract role works very well for some people, and it’s often more manageable as a second income.

James Hart: Working for a public agency, whether it’s city, state or federal, there is, on the fact of it, not much flexible time. However, in my position I have worked it out so that whoever I work for understands that I will serve the client, and if the clients get up at noon and go to bed at 4:00 a.m., then in order to serve the clients I will follow the same schedule.

Question: How can I get experience while still in graduate school that can help set me apart when I search for jobs outside academe?

Dunrie Greiling: Volunteering helps because you can set your own schedule. It’s a way for you to try something on to see if it fits. This can be difficult to try to wring time out of your schedule, but if it’s going to help you figure out where you want to go and what you want to do and help you get there, you have to prioritize.

Kimberly Roberson: Another smaller piece is just talking to people who are doing what you want to do. The difference is between someone who comes to a foundation and just thinks it’s about giving out money and someone who’s talked to people in different parts of philanthropy and has thought about some of the pros and cons and some of the issues and understands some of the language of the philanthropic world. So you can distinguish yourself through research. Find out what really goes on in a job instead of just the superficial.

Bob Schoeni: Think about what you can do even as a part of your graduate work that might translate well to employers. So, for example, managing a research project. So not only doing the research work but also more the management function: managing a team of researchers, or managing a budget. These are skills that could translate into another job.

Question: Is a PhD ever a liability, especially in terms of perceptions or misperceptions people may have about PhDs?

Kimberly Roberson: I’ve never really experienced that, but I am very conscious in the local grant-making role that I have that I work with some very grass-roots kinds of folks. There are times when it’s not only not relevant, it’s just unhelpful to make any distinction of that type between me and the people I’m working with. If it becomes something that you lead with, it can be a barrier to my ability to work with people because it looks snobby, and it looks like something that makes me think that I’m better at things that I’m not necessarily better at.

James Hart: There is less and less of that odd kind of prejudice today than there was 20 years ago. When I first went out on the job market there was an awful lot of prejudice against PhDs. But as there are more PhDs, for better or worse, and as people become more accustomed to working with people with advanced degrees, there is less and less of that.

Question: How do I broach these kinds of issues with my advisor?

Bob Schoeni: That is a good question. The job I took was quite academic in nature. All my advisors knew of this place, so I didn’t have a problem with it. But one of my roles in that job was to recruit, and I had organized a meeting of graduate students at MIT and Harvard during a conference in Cambridge and sent out the announcement. I was going to hold the meeting at lunch while students’ advisors were there, and one of the students wrote back to me asking if we could hold this lunch outside the building. They didn’t want their advisors to know about it. How to handle it I’m not sure, but it is a reality.

Kimberly Roberson: I had a little less of a struggle because of my dual degree. And yet even though I was clear from the beginning about who I was and what I was about, I still felt the academic pressures. Faculty can be disappointed when they think that being your advisor won’t yield some of the things they expect and hope for.

Dunrie Greiling: My advisor was very supportive, but there was someone on my committee who very much valued the academic route, and I think she did invest in me less as soon as she knew. But that’s a matter of her managing her time. She was stretched thin and she invested in the people she could help more. On another level, while on a personal level it may be difficult, the people who are going to be able to help you get a job outside academia aren’t the people who are in academia. So, if they invest in you less it may not be quite as disastrous as it might feel.

Question: Do you find it easier to leave your job at the end of the day than you might with an academic career?

Bob Schoeni: I found on the University’s directory that the default information they include on the web is your home address, so in that way you know that you can never escape the students. I think it depends to a large degree on the individual and the job. I don’t see much of a distinction in that way.

Kimberly Roberson: I work far more than my part-time schedule technically would demand. I do it partly on the theory that my colleagues are there in the evening and on weekends when they have full-time jobs. I really struggle with the boundaries, but I do think it’s more about personality styles and not the job.

Question: What might an employer be looking for from someone with a PhD as opposed to someone with a master’s degree?

Kimberly Roberson: It would not have been different for me, I could have gotten the same job with a master’s degree. They wanted someone with a graduate degree who could demonstrate critical thinking skills and good writing skills. They do a writing test when you go in to interview. Whether I can do my job differently as a result of my doctoral work is I think a different question, but I would have been hired the same way. I don’t think I would have been as happy with my work because the things I learned in those years really do impact how I do my job. I don’t think compensation would have been different either. There are times, though, that it might be the foot in the door for the interview because you stand apart a little more.

Dunrie Greiling: Where I work, my boss is a PhD, there’s another PhD there. The PhD is valued where I work. I think that the role that I take having a PhD is that I’m asked more to participate in papers, asked more to participate in grant writing, than I would be if I weren’t a PhD. I think that in general for technical writing you don’t need a PhD, but for technical writing where I work it’s of great value. It depends on your situation and the company itself.

Question: Someone mentioned entrepreneurial skills. Can you give me an example of how you can be entrepreneurial on the job?

Bob Schoeni: There’s the stereotypical faculty position where you teach four or five classes and you write papers and you can do that independently, you just sort of do that. Now there certainly are professors that are entrepreneurs in the sense that they’re writing grants to fund their projects. A lot of the professors at top research schools do that, but a lot at other types of schools do not. Outside academe I think it’s more common, selling your ideas.

Question: In general, how would you describe the job market when you came out and how does it compare to today’s market? Is the pool of academic jobs always smaller?

James Hart: In the late 70s and early 80s, there was no market. It was gone. So I had to be entrepreneurial, and the way that I was, and I still continue to be, is by consulting. I have developed skills and ways of dealing with nonprofit organizations that can put me any place in the United States. And it’s also using the public sector job as a base and a laboratory for developing these skills.

Question: When you talk about finishing your dissertation or not, the implication seems to be that standards outside academe are much lower, that they won’t really care how good your work is. Is that the case?

Bob Schoeni: I’m really glad you raised this because we really were coming off as “just get the dang thing done,” and that’s not the case. But the reality is there’s the n^th year student who will never finish it. And many of us are also perfectionists. I was suggesting that if you’re on the borderline of finishing, I would just encourage you to get it done. Science is a process, and we’d love to write the Nobel Prize-winning dissertation, but that rarely happens, so we contribute to the science and go on.

Kimberly Roberson: For me, writing a really high-quality dissertation didn’t relate to doing all the other things in my life very well that I wanted to do. There are lots of things to do really well, and that’s not one I’m ever going to repeat again, and I’d already learned the things I needed to learn from the process. I thought I’d made some contribution, but I could have gone on forever making it better; it can always get better. And that wasn’t going to be helpful to me, and contributing to the body of knowledge was not my highest priority in terms of how I wanted to use those skills. I want to do what I want to do very well, but writing a dissertation is not what I want to do.

James Hart: My dissertation won a prize, but it was in an area that was not immediately applicable to anything that was available to me. But the doing of the dissertation and making it the best I could possibly make it was absolutely the finest kind of training I could have in terms of application of some of the same processes — the need for precision, the need for integrity, etc.

Dunrie Greiling: I want to respond to the issue of standards. I don’t think the standards outside academe are lower, but I do think different things are valued. If you go to a place that is more research-oriented, then perhaps the quality of your thesis is more important. But for me, working a little bit extra on the fine details of plant/herbivore interactions wasn’t going to get me the next step. It would be gilding the lily on the dissertation and not getting me where I wanted to go. So it depends on how much you love what you’re doing right now and whether doing more of that is going to get you where you want to go next, and that’s the secret.