When I first started running a professionalization series for graduate students in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, my plan was to create a curriculum that could be revisited annually (or biannually, in some cases), and could be arranged modularly. On the quarter system, it meant that we had 10 weeks for each term, and I hosted a professionalization seminar every other week (usually four each fall, and three each winter and spring). The idea was to develop the content and then rearrange it as student demand dictated.
In its earliest version, it roughly followed the job market, starting with a session about looking for jobs in anthropology, then writing job letters, a day spent talking about academic CVs, and then a section devoted to practicing conference presentations (since that lined up with the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association). The winter term was generally focused on teaching, and we had seminars on writing syllabuses, developing assignments, and dealing with problem students. The spring term was devoted to academic writing, and I broke a discussion of writing academic articles into two meetings, the first on the content and form of journal articles, and the second on identifying the right journal to submit an article to. The spring term was a little more of a wild card, and over the years it had sessions on alt-ac careers, translating a dissertation into a book, and preparing for campus visits. What I didn’t cover — and this was because we had a dedicated course for it — was grant writing.
After the first couple of iterations, the students asked that we move some of the job preparation sessions to the spring, so that they could have some more time to prepare for the fall job market. The only challenge was that there weren’t many — if any — job advertisements that we could talk about, so I had to rely on ads I had saved over the years (most of which were quirky, which is why I saved them).
If you know this blog, then you know that most of the posts originated in the conversations that I had with students, and that, over time, I worked to summarize those conversations in the blog posts (or at least my side of the conversation). Once the posts had been written, I asked students to read them in preparation for our meetings, so that we could start with a shared basis for the conversation. That helped to move from meetings where I spent a lot of time seeing what I thought (following E.M. Forster’s “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” dictum) to meetings where we could have more of a free-flowing conversation about the topic.
Over the years, I started to invite faculty to attend the sessions as well, usually trying to identify either a foil to my perspective (someone from a different generation or subfield or both), or someone who I knew had a special interest in whatever the topic was. I also made sure to advertise the topics in advance and invite the faculty to attend, which often related to their specific professionalization interests. If you’re inviting faculty, it’s really helpful to identify people that have been on the job market recently as well as people who have served on hiring or promotion committees. Those two perspectives — what the job search is like from the applicant and reviewer positions — is really demystifying. Because what hiring committees are looking for has been changing, it’s helpful to have people who are also familiar with promotion requirements, since they have a trickle down effect on search committees.
The one thing I tried to do and was never successful at was getting the faculty who taught the first year foundations seminars to build the stuff we were doing in the professionalization seminar into their courses (e.g. having students turn in a CV after we talked about them in the seminar). I couldn’t even swing it when I was teaching in that sequence, so I don’t blame anyone for that failure — but it would take an extra level of coordination. I think it’s a good idea, but difficult to manage with the changing content of the professionalization seminar and a changing cast of faculty teaching the foundations sequence. My hope was that getting students into the professionalization seminar early would serve to socialize them to the need for professionalization (instead of waiting until they were going on the job market).
So, here’s a plan, boiled down:
Come up with a curriculum. You can follow my Professionalization Materials checklist or come up with one of your own.
Schedule the series. It’s helpful to plan a whole term or semester at a time and to send out the calendar as early as you can. I found that 1.5 hour meetings worked well, although there were times that we could have talked for hours. And planning meetings over lunch made it possible for most people to attend. Please don’t schedule meetings to interfere with people having to take care of their children or after the 9-5 workday (stop academic self-exploitation!).
Invite faculty guests to share their experiences. Try for two for each seminar, and at least one if the convener of the seminars is a faculty member with no more than three faculty in the room (who were specifically asked to be there). Too many faculty perspectives can be confusing. And make sure that faculty know that they don’t have to prepare anything for their visit — they can just show up and answer questions.
Collect relevant materials. It’s helpful to get faculty to contribute CVs, job letters, teaching and research statements, syllabuses, grant applications, etc., to a common folder that graduate students have access to through the university or department. Some faculty can be a little squeamish about this, and in those cases I asked for paper copies that I copied and distributed.
Find some good websites to help guide the conversation. There’s no shortage of people chiming in on these concerns, and toggling between disciplinary and generational perspectives can be really helpful. And since you’re already here, this doesn’t count as self-promotion.
Keep it going. Sometimes there’s a lot of anxiety in a department and that translates into momentum for this kind of thing. But the triage model doesn’t actually help the problem of the continued need to professionalize students for the job market. Just having a regular space and time where students can talk about this stuff is really helpful and can improve morale while demystifying the job market. If you can also provide cookies, then even better.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer 