Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization

So You’ve Got a Ph.D. in Anthropology…

Okay, let’s assume the worst. You’ve spent the last 5-10 years focused like a laser on researching and writing your dissertation. You haven’t attended any conferences, let alone presented any of your research. You haven’t taught any courses, and maybe haven’t even served as a teaching assistant. You haven’t published any of your research. When you’ve talked to your committee members about preparing for the job market, they’ve dismissed your concerns telling you that “everything will work out” and “you don’t need to worry about it.” And now here you are, Ph.D. in hand, dissertation behind you, and the yawning chasm of adult professional life gaping before you…

Made in Abyss - 09 - Large 12.jpg
That’s a cat abyss.

So, the bad news: unlike during the fantastic world of yesteryear, there are no ready jobs waiting for you now that you’re credentialed. The slightly better news: there’s a lot you can do to make yourself appealing to potential employers, in and out of the academy. And the best news? There are many possible professional paths your Ph.D. has prepared you for, but it will take a lot of work to prepare for applying to those jobs.

Now, hopefully you already know all of this, and you’ve spent the last several years preparing yourself for the kind of job you are interested in, whether in the university system or outside of it (or maybe both). One of the best things you can do as you prepare to go on the job market — say a year or two out — is to start paying attention to job advertisements. Ads list the kinds of qualifications that they’re looking for, from specializations (teaching methods and intro, especially, as well as courses in your area) to the kinds of documents that they require (graduate transcripts, teaching statements, CVs or resumes, writing samples, syllabuses, and more).

If you’re looking at jobs outside of the university system, they’ll likely be looking for other kinds of documentation: white papers, policy documents, portfolios, etc. The best preparation for these paths is to complete coursework in relevant areas, if not actually achieve accreditation (like getting a Master’s degree in Public Administration, Public Health, or Museum Studies, for example). Beyond helping acquaint you with professional genres, they should also help to develop professional networks in the right areas. If you’re really on the ball, you can complete these degrees alongside your coursework for your Ph.D., using whatever tuition waiver you might have to cover the cost of enrolling in these complementary courses. But you might also have to go back to school to get these credentials and develop new professional networks.

In 2015 I ran a professionalization workshop with current graduate students and alumni who had moved into non-academic careers. The collected professionals painted a relatively positive picture of moving into careers outside of the university. One of them pointed out that in the university system, almost everyone has a Ph.D., making it a rather banal credential; outside of the university, a Ph.d. is treated totally differently, and coworkers respect the expertise that it represents. They also pointed out how a lot of Ph.D. students think that they’ve been deskilled, but that the kinds of skills one learns as a graduate student can be translated into desirable workplace competencies. “Teaching” is “Public Speaking,” “Writing a Dissertation” is “Copyediting” and “Research-based Writing,” and “Finishing a Dissertation” is “Research Management.” Then there are skills like grant writing and data management (all that data sorting and labeling) that you might have picked up along the way. After spending thousands of hours researching and writing a dissertation, you have more skills than you might think; but, as these professionals helped to make clear, academics don’t tend to think of all of the skills they have as marketable proficiencies.

That said, there might need to be an intermediary step to hone those proficiencies into actual skills that produce deliverables that employers can do something with. And there are opportunities like Congressional Graduate Recruitment Program that seek to do just that. There are also organizations, like RAND, that hire qualitative researchers — as do many of the think tanks and policy organizations in Washington D.C. (you just have to be cool with doing research on topics that other people determine, and, potentially, stomach their politics as well).

Over the last several years — thanks to the Great Recession and the blogosphere — there has been growing attention to the exploitative and demoralizing political economy of adjunct labor in the university system. If you’re not aware of what people have been saying, it boils down to this: there are fewer full time, tenure line jobs than there were before, and to meet enrollment demands, more part-time laborers are being hired to offer courses. These adjuncts tend to teach on limited contracts (one semester or one year), lots of courses, and for little pay — often a fraction of what faculty are paid for the same course. Sometimes, rather than adjunct labor that looks like this, it can come in the form of a Visiting Assistant Professorship or even a postdoctoral position, both of which may be better, since they likely offer benefits on top of the salary. Beyond the obvious bummer of being low paid for the same job, and having lots of work to do — which often is very intro-level focused — adjuncting can create a lot of anxiety as people struggle to secure future employment, and there’s not a lot of time to produce the stuff that would make one appealing for full-time positions (which is sometimes referred to the “adjunct trap”). If you find yourself in the adjunct trap, you’ll need to engineer a way out, which may mean refusing work in the short term in order to prepare yourself for a long term career (which may mean going back to school to get another degree).

If you’re interested in pursuing alternative to academic careers (sometimes shortened to “alt-ac”) there are growing resources to help Ph.D. recipients to navigate the divide between the university and other career possibilities. One of the challenges that job seekers face is confronting assumptions about what policy jobs or market research look like on an everyday basis. If you’ve spent the last however-many-years essentially being your own boss and working alone, many professional careers mean being managed and working with actual coworkers. Friends who have made the jump into these kinds of jobs report being surrounded by great, creative people — just as smart as any academic, but skilled differently.

So, hopefully you’re reading this as an early graduate student (or before enrolling in graduate school) and can take the time to plan appropriately. A recent conversation hosted by the Society for Cultural Anthropology on academic precarity got me thinking that it was about time for a post like this, since the initial foray on the topic made it seem as if it was a real shock that getting academic jobs is hard and that there are very few out there. I had also heard from a friend that she had witnessed a group of recent Ph.D.s openly fret about the prospects of going on a bleak academic job market since they hadn’t been prepared for the reality of it, and thought they might just jump into some alternative career — which is sure to be a rude awakening.

You might beat the odds and get one of the few academic jobs available in any given year. If so, remember that just as much as it’s about your hard work, it’s also about contingency, and that it’s important to make sure that the world of the university is more open to promoting diversity and fair hiring practices — as opposed to yesteryear (which largely favored white men from elite institutions). For everyone who works in the university system — faculty, staff, administrators, adjuncts, students — we need more attention to what makes desirable job candidates and support for creating more full time employment opportunities.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Dissertations

The Best Advice I Have to Give About Writing Dissertations

Reading other people’s dissertations as an adviser and committee member has familiarized me with some common oversights that writers make, which basically fall into two camps: being too ambitious and overlooking the obvious. Now, this might all seem a little straightforward, but, honestly, that’s what a dissertation should be, and yet they often aren’t. These are recommendations based on cultural anthropology dissertations, but they probably translate to a lot of the more humanistic social sciences and humanities — and there are always exceptions to be made. So these are recommendations to get people started on conceptualizing what they’re doing when they tackle writing up a dissertation project. As usual, what your specific committee, adviser, and institution expects may be different from what I lay out here — but this might still be a decent place to start a conversation.

1d832f33a195493337538be3d2f32181.jpg
That’s R. Crumb’s Kafka struggling with something akin to a dissertation…

1) Start with a chapter that lays out the people, places, and things that you’re going to be talking about for the rest of the dissertation. This is not your introduction, which is much more conceptual (see below) — this is really just what it sounds like: who are these people, where do they live and work, and why are you writing a dissertation about them? These are all questions you should have answers for, and their obviousness might lead you to not write this chapter (I’ll admit: I didn’t) because you’ve been working on the project for so long that these things are just assumed. But they aren’t for your dissertation committee, nor will they be for any potential future reader of the dissertation and the eventual book. It doesn’t need to be high concept — in fact, it should be the opposite in the sense that all you’re doing is giving your reader a deep sense of context so that as you discuss these people, places, things, and events later in the dissertation, your reader has this background information in mind.

Now, you might have some reservations — say, you don’t have a specific place, because the project is multi-sited — but, let me assure you, there is a chapter to write that gives your reader context for the rest of the dissertation, whether it’s about individual people, a set of institutions, or a concept, thing, or event that the rest of the dissertation is tracking. If you think you covered this in your dissertation’s introduction, your introduction might be too long or you might be doing too much in your introduction. A solid contextual chapter can go a long way to making sure your dissertation is legible to your committee.

2) Pick a set of theory to work with. One of the nice things about graduate school can be that it introduces you to a wide variety of theorists and theoretical approaches — but when it comes time to write a dissertation, you really have to pick what you want to work with. One of the problems a lot of students seem to have is that their conceptual tool kit becomes overfull when it comes time to write a dissertation — there are so many possible conceptual explanations that it can be difficult to choose just one. But, choosing one explanation is at least pragmatically necessary: a chapter needs to come to some kind of conclusion. Knowing that Marxism is on the table, and psychoanalysis is not means that you can focus on one set of possibilities and ignore others.

A former adviser, Hai Ren, once recommended that you need three theorists to write a dissertation, and over time I’ve really come to see the wisdom in that approach. As I advise students, I’ve come to realize that limiting your conceptual concerns in this way provides you with a strong body of language to draw from and a delimited set of ideas to explore. This combination of theorists and ideas can be complementary or antagonistic — that is, you can draw from three staunch Marxists, or pit Lacanism versus Latourianism — but the most important thing is identifying what’s on and off the table for the purpose of theoretical explanation. And you might commit to this physically: box up all the books you won’t be using and put them out of sight for the duration of dissertation writing.

When I was writing my dissertation, one of my committee members, Bruce Braun, suggested that I come up with a list of terms I didn’t want to use as well as a corresponding list of replacement concepts derived from the theoretical interests I have. So, I drew up a list of problematic Cartesian concepts and a list of Spinozist replacements. Just doing that — coming up with the list — profoundly shaped my vocabulary and meant that I wasn’t inadvertently wading into troublesome terrain or mixing terms that didn’t fit together. Once you know who your pet theorists are and what theories you’re working with, coming up with such a list can be very helpful in identifying key ideas to explain and how to structure what you’re doing.

3) Structure chapters around an idea. It was once the case that anthropologists could legitimately write a chapter each about kinship, economy, religion, political structure, subsistence patterns, etc., but the discrete nature of these distinctions has been largely abandoned — as least as comprehensive rubrics for chapter-length description and analysis. That said, there should be a set of key ideas that you’re working with and that you can arrange your evidence to support. These might be ideas that arise from the project itself — i.e. you might structure chapters around ideas that the people in your field site find important — or they might be ideas that derive from the theoretical questions that you’re concerned with. In either case, structuring a chapter around an idea helps to delimit what goes into that chapter.

Alternatively, you might think about structuring chapters around specific cases — whether they be people, places, or events — and even when that’s the case, it’s important to identify what the case is a case of. Having some kind of identified structure can lead you to ask whether or not any particular set of evidence needs to be in the chapter (which is to say that it’s absolutely okay to leave evidence out of a chapter when it doesn’t fit — better to be short and persuasive than long and unmoored).

The other vital thing here is that when it comes time to write articles based on your dissertation, they too will need to be organized around an idea (or maybe two coming into contact with one another), and starting with this kind of framework can lead you to have a more modular dissertation that you can mix and match to produce articles, and, later, more complex book chapters (but they needn’t!).

4) Make sure all those chapter ideas and pet theories appear in the introduction. Dissertation writers are sometimes motivated to write their introduction before they write the chapters of the dissertation, but it’s usually best to start with the chapters and work back to the introduction, if for no other reason that there tends to be a lot of drift when people work the other way (which is to say that what you think your dissertation is going to be about before you start writing it is probably not what it will actually be about). Once you have the ideas in place for each of the chapters, and you’ve written most of those chapters, it’s worth sketching out the introduction to see how all the ideas fit together as some kind of conceptual package. And then you have to explain why they fit together for the sake of your committee…

Again, if you have a delimited set of theories that you’re working with, writing an introduction around a set of ideas can be pretty straightforward: you can explain the ideas, where they come from, and what your contributions will be. That way as you work through the ideas in the dissertation itself, your committee has something to fall back on as to why your interests are as they are.

Introductions also benefit from a taste of the empirical content of the dissertation — which is different than the contextual chapter mentioned above. Give your readers a sense of the kinds of situations, quandaries, or events that are of interest throughout the dissertation, and use an example or two to motivate your engagement with the set of theory and ideas you’re employing. This helps stop an introduction from being too abstract and can compel your committee to engage with your readings of a set of shared theoretical texts in a new way.

5) Go easy on yourself. Dissertation writers often get hung up on identifying the ‘big idea’ of the dissertation before they actually write it — but, it took me three years after submitting my dissertation to really have a sense of what the big idea behind it was (and that had a lot to do with teaching and realizing where what I was doing fit into the field more generally). I had a passable big idea — sleep and its relationship to industrial capitalism — but as far as how that idea could travel, it took a long time to flesh that out.

And, no dissertation is perfect: it won’t feel that way when you turn it in, and it won’t feel that way years later. The best that a dissertation can be is an archive of evidence, ideas, and experiments that you can use for years to come — for conference presentations, articles, and eventually a book. If it’s also coherent and persuasive, consider it a victory.

 

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization, Teaching

Designing a Syllabus

It’s easy to underestimate how much time and thought a syllabus absorbs, but they demand a lot of attention, especially because they’re one of the most direct mechanisms to communicate with students. People sometimes dismiss that long syllabus, but I’m definitely on the other side of the divide: I try and make my syllabuses as comprehensive as I possibly can — in part to make sure that I have a place to point to when students have questions, but, more importantly, to head those questions off altogether. I also find that the more I teach a class, the more I refine and scaffold the syllabus, the closer it gets to inspiring new courses and scholarship.

rosetta_ston_19491_lg.gif

After I figure out what the class is topically concerned with, I tend to start by thinking about what kinds of assessments are being used, and that usually depends on the level of the course. If it’s a lower division course or an introductory course, I tend to use exams, and schedule one every 4-5 weeks in a term. If it’s an upper division course, I still use exams — but I space them out more and offer students other options for assessment. So, for my upper division students, I usually allow them — by petition — to write a research paper or write periodic precis of the course content. This allows more advanced, specialized students to focus their attention on a more meaningful project — but, like students taking the exams, they still have scheduled deadlines for various part of the project. You can see exams of an introductory syllabus here (Intro to Cultural Anthropology: ANTH 166 2016) and a more advanced syllabus here (Medical Anthropology: ANTH 134 2014). The one exception to this upper division structure is when it’s a required course, and in those cases I still stick with exams, which tend to be more essay oriented (like this upper division survey of anthropological theory, ANTH 152 2015). In any case, when I use exams, they tend to have short, take home essays (like 2-3 pages) as well as short answer portions — in my attempt to meet every students’ test-taking strengths and weaknesses.

I find that having the schedule of the assessments helps to provide an outline for the content of the course — so if an exam happens every 4 weeks, within the preceding 4 weeks, I’ll try and cover 2, 2-week units, or 4 1-week units. If we have a big conceptual unit, I work to consolidate it all on one side of an assessment. I work with the assumption that students can bomb an assessment (if they take a month off, say), but they should be able to get back on track with the next assessment if they get back in the saddle. So my assessments tend to be non-comprehensive — they only include the material since the last assessment, with the exception of the final exam. Generally speaking, these assessments make up about half of a student’s final grade, and I structure the grade so that even if the student scores only 50% on all of this material, he or she can still pass with a C — as long as they complete all of the other work in the class.

The rest of the grade in most of my classes is based on attendance (usually no more than 10%, and typically only for attending section, not lecture — unless it’s a seminar and I can take attendance), with the lion’s share being some form of reading comprehension assignment. In lower division classes, I tend to use a single reading question for each reading, which students answer through an online portal (like Blackboard or Sakai) — it tends to be a question to help the student focus on a key point in the reading, and to integrate it with things that we’ve discussed in class or that he or she has encountered in other readings. So, for example, it might ask a student to define a theory in the present reading and compare it to a concept from another reading; or the question might ask the student to define a concept from another reading and support it with evidence from the present reading. If it’s an upper division course, I tend to use reading guides, which ask the students to identify the author’s thesis, discuss the evidence used and how it relates to the thesis, attempt to identify the debates the author is engaging in and with whom, and, ultimately, to articulate whether they find the piece compelling. In both cases, I find that these kinds of assignments prepare students for coming to class ready to discuss the content at a level appropriate to the class, and they also serve to create an ongoing study guide for the class. By the end of the term, if the student has completed these reading assignments, she or he has a large body of notes they can draw from to prepare for any final exam or final project.

I’ve discussed elsewhere how I choose readings for a class, so I won’t go into that much here. Basically, at the lower division, I tend to choose an article or book chapter for each day (about 25-30 pages); less than that, and I find it hard to have much to lecture on or discuss with students. At the upper division, I tend to assign about 5 readings per week, with more of them being due early in the week. So, for example, if it’s a Tuesday and Thursday class, I’ll ask students to read 3 readings for Tuesday, with 2 for Thursday (assuming they have more time on the weekend to do schoolwork, which isn’t always true). If the reading is especially dense or theoretical, I tend to use about 20-25 pages worth, and have it be the sole reading for the day — or I might pair it with an illustrative example that’s easy to read and see the application of the theory in. One thing I try and avoid is reading a whole book with students over 2-3 weeks of the class.  I find that after a day or two talking about the book, they stop reading it, and only get back into it at the very end of the section. Instead, I use chapters from throughout a book over the course of the term — so selections from the books will be paired with other readings thereby — maybe — illuminating the relationships between the books and other existing scholarship. The exceptions to this are when we’re reading a whole book over 1 or 2 weeks in class, and the contents of the book are such that they give us a lot to discuss on a daily basis.

I usually fill 2 single-spaced pages with various policies for the class, from discussions of academic misconduct and learning services on campus, to proper citational practices, my work expectations for students, and rules about when and how students can contact me. The most important of these is the last: I have a window for answering emails, usually first thing in the morning, Monday through Friday. Emails received after the window are responded to the following day, and emails received on Friday are responded to on Monday. I also tell students that I don’t respond to student emails if the information they’re seeking is in the syllabus. Since implementing that policy, the amount of student email I’ve received has been reduced by 90%. Some students erroneously think I don’t want to communicate with them, but I try and make clear to them that I do — just only during certain times, since answering student email is a very small part of my overall professional responsibilities.

One policy I’ve tried in the past, and may very well revisit in the future, is a Good Faith grade. The idea is this: if a student turns in all of the assignments on time and minimally complete, she or he can receive no lower than a C in the course. The couple of times I’ve used this policy, no one who was failing the class had turned in all of the assignments on time, so they were ineligible for the Good Faith grade. But I did find that students seemed to like me more when there was a very straight forward policy on how to do a minimal amount of work and still pass the class.

Ultimately, I take a ‘no surprises’ approach to the syllabus: I try and get as much into it as possible so that students aren’t taken off guard by assignments, expectations, policies, or the schedule. Making the syllabus as clear as I can — which can sometimes mean 15 page syllabuses — helps save me time over the course of the term (and maybe does the same for students).

Other tips or questions? Post them in the comments below.