On Track for Success: PhDs Working Off the Tenure Track (Week 1)

Picture this: You’re a PhD student. For whatever reason, you’ve decided to look for a career outside the academy, or at least off the tenure track. But while your PhD program gave you a lot of preparation for a tenure-track job, veering off this prepared path isn’t something you’ve been trained for. What do you do next?

This month, we’re interviewing people with humanities PhDs who once found themselves in this very position, asking similar questions regarding their future. All are now working full-time off the tenure track. Their answers to how do I get a job? are as diverse as the career options available to PhD students. But one of the most important strategies to finding out how to get a job you want is to interview people who are already working in the field.

To start, we interviewed Dan Moseson, an alumni of the Religion PhD program at Syracuse University, where in 2018 he defended his dissertation on how the concept of “religion” functions in the field of contemplative studies, a close cousin of the mindfulness movement. Now, he holds the position of Graduate Career Coach in the Career and Professional Development Center at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City.

What is your job?

My main responsibilities are providing one-on-one career guidance to graduate students, presenting to classes and other gatherings, and designing campus programs to further graduate students’ degree completion and entry into the career of their choice. I’m assigned to the Colleges of Humanities, Fine Arts, and Architecture and Planning, and also serve two graduate programs in the College of Education. Our office serves most of the university, with the exception of a few colleges, so we have a large number of career coaches with different specialties, some of whom are also in Assistant Director roles over coaching, programming, and marketing.

What made you want to look for a career off the tenure track?

Partially the job market, partially the realization that my best and most gratifying work was in creating programming for graduate students, some of it focused on career development. Another important factor is what happens when a city boy like me is left to set his own schedule for nine years outside a major metro area. I got very into hiking, outdoor photography, and generally moving and doing things outside while I lived in Syracuse, and had great opportunities to be involved in radio broadcasting and political advocacy as well.

I think I just have too many interests to devote my life to research 24/7. On a recent Saturday, I helped reroute part of a hiking trail way up in the Rockies above Salt Lake City, and it was just the best. I’m hoping I can continue to conduct and present research, though I don’t yet have a concrete plan for striking that balance. 

How did you get your job?

By applying on the internet, cold, which is the wrong way. The way to get a job is networking and informational interviewing, which I didn’t do very much of. I do not think I would have gotten my current job without the experience I gained creating programs and serving in student government at Syracuse University, and the concrete accomplishments I was able to point to on both of those fronts. Especially for humanists, if you want a career outside the classroom after graduation, you have to be involved outside the classroom before graduation.

For example, I assume most folks reading this have been passionate about social justice since roughly the moment of their conception, and a city like Syracuse has plenty of need for people willing to get their hands dirty and change some things. If you hang around long enough, you’ll also gain a variety of useful experiences in communication and organization, which act as evidence of what your skills in speaking, writing, project planning, and critical thinking can accomplish on the ground. Plus, you’ll likely enrich your own scholarship and actually help some people, too.

For folks at Syracuse University, I would look for opportunities to get involved through the Office of Engagement Programs at Hendricks Chapel, the Syracuse Center for Peace and Social Justice, and whatever else you know about. I hear there’s an election of some importance coming up, as well. All these experiences count, if you know how to talk about them. Your university’s own career development center can show you how.  

What kind of job advice did you seek out?

I worked extensively with Dan Olson-Bang, Director of Professional and Career Development in the Graduate School at Syracuse University. I consulted with him on every aspect of career exploration and the job search. In the process, I learned many of the skills I now teach to graduate students at the University of Utah. I was also lucky enough to have a very transparent, collaborative relationship with my dissertation advisor, who was very supportive of my using my PhD training to build a career that works for me. 

What does your average day look like? What kind of decisions do you make?

There isn’t an average day. Sometimes I’m meeting with students and planning grad events. And sometimes I’m taking photos for undergrads’ LinkedIn pages, slinging snow-cones like nobody’s business, or trying to get four cornhole boards and assorted other lawn paraphernalia to stay in the back of a moving golf cart. That’s another way of saying my job offers opportunities to be involved in a lot of different endeavors, from professional development retreats to career fairs, networking events, and community partnerships.

I’ve had a lot of autonomy (after some basic training) in how I approach my meetings with students, set my appointment hours, and design programs for groups of students.  I review most of what I do with my supervisor, but in that process, my ideas usually get refined, rather than vetoed. 

What skills do you use in your job?

I think the graduate students and the faculty in my program taught me how to be a good collaborator and mentor. I need those skills to get students to trust me enough to listen to what I have to say. The PhD-specific skill I use most is close, critical reading, and attention to how a piece of writing is working at different scales of focus. Sometimes I’m making small tweaks to a resume or cover letter, and sometimes I’m reworking the whole document in a short timeframe, hopefully in a collaborative process with a student. It’s delightful. 

It also probably also helps (as Chris M. Golde of Stanford’s graduate career center argues) that I have some idea how universities work and empathy for how grad students and faculty experience things.  Maybe there’s an attitude there, too. My grad program encouraged creative, interdisciplinary thinking and gave me the space to try it, in research and in student programming. I think some of that has carried over to this role where, fortunately, I also have a lot of autonomy to try new kinds of programming for graduate students. So, there is a kind of experimental attitude I work from. I’ve always been that way, but my graduate program definitely encouraged it. 

What, if anything, might you have done differently during your PhD career to set yourself up to transition into a career off the tenure track?

I would have done more informational interviews. This is the first thing I encourage in nearly every student meeting and presentation I conduct. You can get a solid primer from Harvard Business Review, a little more nuance in the New York Times, and some strategies and common pitfalls from Inside Higher Ed’s Carpe Careers blog.

How do you see your job and field changing in the future?

My guess is that it will expand. A byproduct of the demand for concrete career outcomes is a focus on professional development and internships. (Employers generally value hands-on experience above education, despite the baseline necessity for a bachelor’s to gain access to any halfway desirable job.) I think this is especially true for graduate education, which doesn’t appear to be slowing down, at least anecdotally, despite the ever-increasing uncertainty of the career outcomes. Of course, if the economy really tanks or Congress follows through on taxing tuition credits, all bets are off.  

What advice would you give someone considering a career off the tenure track?

To quote from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ “poppy” but excellent career development book Designing Your Life: “try stuff.” You’re almost certainly getting to try teaching — do you like it? Probably. Can you make a career doing it at the university level? Hard to say. You may want to explore other possibilities for doing the things you like doing in graduate school — through informational interviews, job shadowing, internships, volunteering, or even part-time work. My colleague Rob Pearson at UT Dallas has a great article about that.  I also recommend reading Inside Higher Ed’s “Carpe Careers” blog on the regular. It’s written by members of the Graduate Career Consortium, the professional organization for people who do what I do, and it’s filled with excellent practical advice for building the career you want.

What do you like most about your job?

The one-on-one conversations with students are just great.  I’ve always loved working collaboratively to improve communication, especially written communication.  It’s funny — here I am, the person I considered least likely to be working with grad students at an R1, doing just that in a staff position. An ironic and excellent turn of events. Also, I have some really superb colleagues in the Career and Professional Development Center and across The U. They’re as smart and collaborative and unassuming as the folks I went to grad school with. When I got here, there was also an immediate effort to help me feel included, socially as well as professionally.

In general, don’t underestimate the admin side of the university. I get to watch the leadership in my office tackle dauntingly complex problems of communication and organization, like managing huge career fairs and leading a highly competent, critical, and independent staff of higher ed professionals.  See if you can arrange an internship, volunteer gig, or just a few days of shadowing with someone in a director or assistant director role in a campus office, and hold onto your socks.