Career Advice Archive

News from Jenny Furlong, Director, Office of Career Planning and Professional Development

By
Marilyn Weber
 – February 25, 2013Posted in: Career Advice, Job Opportunities, Professional Development

Dear GC Students,

I am very pleased to join the Graduate Center as the director of the Office of Career Planning and Professional Development.  I look forward to helping GC graduate students achieve their career goals.  As a first step in this process, I will begin to offer both walk-in and small group meetings; the details (and some additional announcements) are below.

Best,

Jenny Furlong

Director, Office of Career Planning and Professional Development

 

Opportunities listed in this email:

- “Meet McKinsey” – Invitation to Destination EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) event on Monday, April 15, 2013

- ACLS Public Fellows Program

- Two Paid Summer Internships in the Digital Humanities, Philadelphia

 

Walk-in Meetings

Walk-in meetings are fifteen-minute appointments offered on a first-come, first-served basis. You do not have to schedule a meeting in advance; you can just drop in and ask any career-related question you may have.  Beginning on the week of March 4, we will offer walk-ins during the following times:

Mondays, 12:00-2:00 p.m.

Wednesdays, 4:00-6:00 p.m.

The office is currently located in Student Services and is office number 7201.19, located within the office suite of Room 7206.

Small Group Meetings

If you are interested in having someone come and speak with students in your department, please do not hesitate to contact our office.  We would be happy to speak with your group about any career-related topic, including the following:

-        CV, resume, and cover letter writing

-        Interviewing skills

-        Preparing for an academic job search

-        Thinking about careers outside of academe

-        Networking

We welcome your suggestions for additional topics.  To schedule a small group meeting, please send an email to careerplan@gc.cuny.edu (or call 212-817-7416) and include two or three dates and times that would work for your group.

 

Versatile Ph.D.

The Graduate Center subscribes to the Versatile Ph.D., a terrific website for doctoral students considering careers outside of the traditional tenure-track path:

“The Versatile PhD mission is to help humanities and social science (and STEM as of July 2013) graduate students identify and prepare for possible non-academic careers. We want them to be informed about academic employment realities, educated about non-academic career options, and supported towards a wide range of careers, so that in the end, they have choices.  The key concept here is versatility:  the ability to apply their skills and interests in a wide variety of fields.” – From the Versatile Ph.D. website

The site includes an email discussion list where you can post your questions about working outside academe.  In the premium content section, you will find profiles of Ph.D.’s who have put their skills to use in a wide range of sectors, discussion content about specific careers, job listings, and sample cover letters and resumes (as well as the CV’s they were converted from) from Ph.D.’s who have found non-academic positions.    It is a very useful resource and can be accessed here: http://library.gc.cuny.edu/11/2011/versatile-phd-online-community/

 

Jobs, Fellowships, Internships, Information Sessions (updated Feb. 25, 2013)

“Meet McKinsey” – Invitation to Destination EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) event on Monday, April 15, 2013

We kindly invite you to an evening with McKinsey to find out more about career opportunities in our EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) offices.

McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm with over 9,000 consultants who work in more than 100 offices located in over 55 countries. Since 1926, we have been the trusted advisors to leaders of companies, governments, and institutions around the world on issues of strategy, organization, technology, and operations. Our consultants come from a wide range of disciplines. Indeed, more than 46% of our colleagues hold MDs, PhDs, JDs or other non-MBA advanced degrees.

Our Destination EMEA event is designed to give you an overview of who we are, our work, our people, and whether a career with McKinsey might be right for you. We want to provide you a first hand opportunity of what it’s like to work here directly from colleagues who are based in a wide range of our EMEA offices.

If you are interested in a career at McKinsey, you have a strong connection to EMEA (e.g. language skills, interest) and you are considering working in the region, we kindly invite you to our ‘Destination EMEA’ evening in New York City. The event will start with a presentation, followed by a case workshop and Q &A session, where you can meet representatives from our EMEA offices and functional practices. We will end the evening with a cocktail reception where you will have the chance to mingle with consultants in a less formal setting.

Date: Monday, April 15, 2013 in NYC

Time: 6:00 pm – Arrival and presentation

6.30 pm – Case workshop and  Q & A session

8:00 pm – Cocktail reception

RSVP: Please RSVP by March 26, 2013 via www.destination-emea.mckinsey.com attaching a copy of your CV (including grades).

Please note that unfortunately we may not be able to accommodate everybody as spaces are limited.

If you have any questions about the event, please email us at destination-emea@mckinsey.com. For further information on McKinsey, please visit our website www.apd.mckinsey.com.

PS: Please feel free to forward this e-mail to others in the NYC area who might be interested in learning about career opportunities with McKinsey in EMEA. Similar events will take place in Boston on April 16, 2013.

 

ACLS Public Fellows Program

Student in the humanities and social sciences should be aware of the Public Fellows program sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies.

“ACLS invites applications for the third competition of the Public Fellows program. The program will place 20 recent Ph.D.’s from the humanities and humanistic social sciences in two-year staff positions at partnering organizations in government and the nonprofit sector. Fellows will participate in the substantive work of these organizations and receive professional mentoring. The fellowship provides a stipend of $65,000 per year as well as individual health insurance.”

The deadline to apply is March 27, 2013 at 6:00 p.m. EDT.  More information (and a list of the organizations participating) can be found at https://www.acls.org/programs/publicfellows/

 

Two Paid Summer Internships in the Digital Humanities, Philadelphia

1)  Summer 2013 Digital Humanities Internship

Philadelphia-based design studio Night Kitchen Interactive is looking for two talented interns with a strong background or interest in American history and cultural institutions for the summer of 2013. Night Kitchen is working with a large historical organization to create an interactive website dedicated to the history of the United States Postal Service, featuring several online exhibits on special topics. The intern will play a key role in facilitating the integration of content into the new website.

The candidates should have strong writing, communication, organizational, and critical thinking skills, as well as demonstrated enthusiasm for American history and interest in web-based projects and the digital humanities. This is a great opportunity for college students or recent graduates to contribute to an exciting digital history project and learn about historical interpretation from a technological perspective. Candidates must possess a willingness to learn basic HTML and the use of an HTML authoring environment (Adobe Dreamweaver). Please note: this position requires no design experience.

RESPONSIBILITIES - Primary tasks will involve gathering, organizing, and preparing historical content for migration to websites based on input from clients’ curators, educators and staff. Interns will gain experience using Dreamweaver, graphics programs, and project management software Gemini. The interns will also be expected to do a range of general administrative tasks, including but not limited to: archiving files, research, mailings, data and word processing.

QUALIFICATIONS - Demonstrated enthusiasm for history and/or the digital humanities. Successful candidates should have, at minimum, 1-2 years towards a degree in history, American studies, or related fields. Strong writing, communication, and organizational skills a must. Some knowledge of HTML preferred. Experience working with cultural institutions a plus.

TIMEFRAME - 40 hours a week for 12 weeks between June 2013 and August 2013

STIPEND - $3,500 paid in 3 installments or school credit.

CONTACT - Interested applicants should send a cover letter and resume (Word or PDF) by Friday, March 15th, 2013 to internship@whatscookin.com with the subject line: “Summer 2013 Digital Humanities Internship”. No calls please.

(2)  Summer 2013 HTML Internship

Philadelphia-based design studio Night Kitchen Interactive is looking for two talented interns to work on the development of an HTML-based website this summer. Ideal candidates will have at least basic familiarity with HTML and the use of an HTML authoring environment (e.g. Adobe Dreamweaver), as well as graphics programs for preparing images for publication, such as Photoshop. Please note: this position requires no design experience.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Primary tasks will involve gathering, organizing historical content for migration to websites based on input from clients’ curators, educators and staff. Interns will gain experience using HTML, the web development application Dreamweaver, graphics programs and project management software Gemini. The interns will also be expected to do a range of general administrative tasks, including but not limited to: archiving files, research, mailings, data and word processing.

QUALIFICATIONS -Familiarity with HTML, Dreamweaver, or other online content management systems. candidates should have, at minimum, 1-2 years towards a degree in liberal arts or design. Strong writing, communication, and organizational skills a must. Knowledge or experience with American History and/or cultural institutions a plus.

TIMEFRAME -40 hours a week for 12 weeks between June 2013 and August 2013

STIPEND -$3,500 paid in 3 installments or school credit.

CONTACT

Interested applicants should send a cover letter and resume (Word or PDF) by Friday, March 15th, 2013 to internship@whatscookin.com with the subject line: “Summer 2013 HTML Internship”. No calls please.

Mimi Cheng

mimi@whatscookin.com

215.629.9962

Night Kitchen Interactive

 

Professional Development: Interviewing at a Teaching College via InsideHigherEd

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – January 3, 2013Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development

John Fea offers advice on interviewing at a teaching college at InsideHigherEd.com.  Among his suggestions:

There will be some interviews in which the members of a search committee do not even ask you about your research. Don’t be offended by this or assume that it means that you will not be able to do scholarly work at this place. The search committee members probably looked at the description of your research in your cover letter and thought it was fine. They just want to use the 45 minutes of interview time to hear about what you will do for them in the classroom.
If you have not figured it out by now, you will be asked a lot of questions about teaching. The search committee is going to be very interested in learning about how you will plug in to both the department’s AND the college’s curriculum. In history, you may be asked if you feel prepared to teach general education courses in subjects such as Western Civilization or World Civilization (even if you are an American historian). You may be asked if you would be interested in teaching interdisciplinary courses in something like a first-year core curriculum. Think in advance about how you might respond to these questions. To get a sense of what the teaching load might look like for the average member of the history department, go to the college’s website and see if you can access the course listings from recent semesters. See what each professor in the department is teaching.

To read the full article click here.

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Professional Development: Perspectives Forum on “The Future of the Discipline”

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – December 19, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development

History Program doctoral candidate Paul Schweigert recommends the forum on “The Future of the Discipline” (guest edited by Lynn Hunt) in this month’s issue of the American Historical Association’s Perspectives magazine.

The articles include:

Many thanks to Paul for suggesting this.  If you have suggestions of other important articles related to professional development or doctoral education, please let us know in the comments; we would love to share them here on the blog.

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Professional Development: Tips for Phone Interviews from Lifehacker

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – December 14, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development, Uncategorized

Interviews for tenure-track faculty jobs usually take place at the American Historical Association meeting just after New Year’s, on the telephone, or on Skype.  A telephone interview can be nerve-wracking due to the complete lack of body language cues from the committee, but according to History Program faculty members and a Lifehacker blog post, you can make the phone interview work for you with some preparation.

Molly Ford recommends taking advantage of your “invisibility” and using notes to help move through your answers and questions for the committee:

Use notes to your advantage: The best part about a phone interview is that you can have your notes in front of you (and the interviewer can’t see them). So have a copy of your resume, extensive bullet points about the experiences or skills you want to mention, and full list of questions written out ahead of time for use during the interview. You have the gift of invisibility-use it to your advantage!

She also recommends dressing up and using your normal conversation gestures to make the experience less awkward:

Use your hands: It’s okay to gesture while talking, even if no one can see you. Gesturing will make the call feel more like a regular conversation, which will normalize the situation and help to calm your nerves.

For more information about the academic job market check out our professional development blog series here on the blog.

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Professional Development: Blog Post about Impostor Syndrome on TPII

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – December 12, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development

Dr. Karen Kelsky’s blog has a fantastic new guest post by Phyllis L. F. Rippeyoung, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Ottawa, on the lasting feelings of being an impostor in academia.  She discusses her own feeling of being an impostor, even after winning tenure and national recognition for her work, and shares an insight about impostor syndrome that she was given by a colleague:

In talking to a wise colleague, similarly afflicted with this syndrome, she had the most amazing insight that these feelings are a result of our loving what we do. If we didn’t love it, we wouldn’t be afraid to lose it. I also think that suffering from the syndrome speaks to the respect that we hold for the enterprise. Ethically, I don’t want to publish something that might be wrong.

For more information on impostor syndrome please see our professional development series here on the blog or check out the Graduate Center’s Counseling Services for graduate students; Counseling Services has offered workshops on Impostor Syndrome in the past, and they continually offer free short-term individual and group therapy to help work through issues exactly like this.

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Professional Development: Brief Recap of the “How to Win Grants and Fellowships” Discussion

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – December 10, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development

On Monday, December 3rd, Professor Timothy Alborn, Professor Dagmar Herzog, and Professor Michael Rawson shared their experiences and insights as both grant applicants and evaluators for a History Program professional development event entitled “How to Win Grants and Fellowships.”  I’ve written a brief recap of the discussion for those who were unable to attend, or for students who wish to supplement their notes from the event.

 

Recap

Professors Alborn and Rawson encouraged doctoral students and new faculty members to apply early and often for funding because rejection is common.  Professor Rawson mentioned that only 8% of projects receive funding, which makes coping skills and persistence particularly important for grant-seekers.

Professor Rawson also discussed the need to look at the proposal more as a marketing document with history included (rather than a history document with marketing included), although scholars sometimes feel uncomfortable with the idea of marketing or selling.  To communicate the goals and implications of your project to the members of the evaluation committee, it is useful to think about how to “sell” the project to non-specialists in particular.  Since the evaluation committee members are not likely to be specialists in your particular field, Professor Alborn recommended citing major works with which scholars are familiar, even if those books do not inform your project as directly as lesser-known articles and monographs.  Positioning your project and arguments vis-à-vis a well-known book can help the non-specialists on the evaluation committee understand what makes your work special and groundbreaking.

To increase your chances of receiving funding, Professor Herzog suggested finding and using models of successful grant or fellowship proposals from several different fields to see how others structured their documents, and especially their abstracts.  Colleagues, one’s future Dean and college grant office, and the funding agency itself serve as good sources of feedback for proposal drafts prior to submission according to Professor Alborn.  Following rejection, agencies can often provide detailed feedback on the assessment of the proposal, which can help with revisions to your standard proposal.

The panel agreed that articulating the “So what?” question of why the research is important serves as the most critical component of the proposal.  Since funding committees tend to be composed of scholars from a variety of disciplines, Professor Alborn recommended that historians should not base the value of the project on simply using a new or interesting archive; the non-historians who serve on the committee will want to know how one intends to use the archive and read the sources.  Nor does filling a gap in the scholarly literature automatically make the project competitive.

Professor Herzog said that the argument in favor of the project should be passionate and should discuss how the proposed research will change our thinking about big issues.  One way to demonstrate your project’s importance is to link your work to questions and conflicts that interest people more generally such as how power works, what justice is, why human beings do what they do, and how change happens.  Problems or puzzles can serve as good ways to open your proposal and get readers thinking along with you about how your project will answer important questions.  Not only should your proposal address larger issues, but each chapter should also have a surprise, puzzle, or argument that can help make it interesting to the committee, recommended Professor Herzog.

Professor Alborn talked about the proposal as a document demonstrating how your mind works, and not a research prison sentence.  The proposal shows how you approach problems and texts, your methodological influences, and how you solve problems—grant committees expect that if you can write a convincing grant proposal, the scholarship they fund based on the proposal will be interesting and well-done, even if the finished project does not match the proposal precisely.  In fact, the committee agreed that elements of one’s work should change over the course of research due to immersion in the sources and further thinking about the topic.

Accuracy and professionalism are critical for successful proposals.  Professor Rawson emphasized that attention to detail and adhering to the rules of grammar are considered marks of professionalism that strongly influence the decisions of the committee.  Professor Alborn highlighted the bibliography as an element of the proposal that committees use to assess the carefulness of the applicant, which is thought to suggest the carefulness and quality of the scholar’s overall work.

 

Many Thanks!

We would like to thank Professor Timothy Alborn, Professor Dagmar Herzog, and Professor Michael Rawson for their participation and thoughtful advice.

For more information about how to win grants and fellowships, please see the career advice heading under the professional development menu at the top of this page.

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Professional Development: Feeling Like an Impostor in Graduate School and on the Job Market

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – December 5, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development

Steven J. Corbett and Teagan E. Decker write about feeling like an impostor in graduate school and on the job market for a two-part series on InsideHigherEd.com.  According to researchers, Impostor Syndrome is most common among women and people from working-class backgrounds:

In 1978 psychology professor Pauline Clance and psychologist Suzanne Imes wrote in The Impostor Phenomenon Among High Achieving Women that “Despite outstanding academic and professional accomplishments, women who experience the imposter phenomenon persist in believing that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise.” The Impostor Phenomenon (also called The Impostor Syndrome) has been documented as a continuing problem for women and people from working-class backgrounds ever since.

On her website, Valerie Young, author of The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women, gives readers an opportunity to consider whether or not they are suffering from Impostor Syndrome by taking this short quiz:

  • Do you chalk your success up to luck, timing, or computer error?
  • Do you believe “If I can do it, anybody can?”
  • Do you agonize over even the smallest flaws in your work?
  • Are you crushed by even constructive criticism, seeing it as evidence of your “ineptness?”
  • When you do succeed, do you secretly feel like you fooled them again?
  • Do you worry that it’s just a matter of time before you’re “found out?”

For more information, read the two-part series and check out the Graduate Center’s Counseling Services for graduate students; Counseling Services has offered workshops on Impostor Syndrome in the past, and they continually offer free short-term individual and group therapy to help work through issues exactly like this.

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Professional Development: Telling a Wider Story in Your Grant Application

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – December 5, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development

Dr. Karen Kelsky blogs about her solution for writing about how one’s proposed grant project fills a gap in the scholarly literature.  She finds that many grant applicants make the mistake of failing to demonstrate why his/her topic is worthy of study:

The majority of clients happily introduce a cool topic, refer to their bodies of lit, and then, with no further ado, lay down the claim, “however, no one to date has discussed [the exact micro-topic of my dissertation.]”

This is an error.  Just because people have not yet discussed topic X does not in and of itself persuade us, the readers, that topic X is in fact worthy of being discussed.

For examples of how to state the implications of the project in the context of gaps in the literature, check out the full post.  For more general information about how to structure grant applications, take a look at “Dr. Karen’s Foolproof Grant Template” on the same site.

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Professional Development: AHA Report on How Historians Earn Tenure

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – December 5, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development

The American Historical Association released a report (available to AHA members) on how historians earn tenure.  In a piece examining the results of the study, Scott Jaschik writes for InsideHigherEd.com that research has become an important factor in tenure deliberations at bachelor’s institutions.  Among the other findings is that although the historical profession has a number of digital scholarship venues, senior faculty members do not tend to value digital journal articles, even those published in peer-reviewed online journals:

The survey also found that senior faculty members are unlikely to believe that their institutions highly value digital journal articles, even with the question specifying that these were peer-reviewed online articles. Compared to the approximately 70 percent of history professors in the survey who said that print articles were highly valued, only about 10 percent said the same for digital articles. At bachelor’s colleges, the figure is about 15 percent. (An Inside Higher Ed poll of faculty members this year found that a majority believe that work published in online-only journals can be equal in quality to work published in print, but only a small minority agreed that online scholarship receives the same respect in tenure decisions as does print scholarship.)

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Professional Development: How to List “In Process” Scholarship

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – December 5, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development

Nate Kreuter writes about “How to Handle ‘In Process’ Work” for InsideHigherEd.com.  In the piece he lays out the problem confronting newer scholars who wish to report important forthcoming work on a c.v.:

Both graduate students entering the job market and junior faculty members undergoing departmental review or applying for tenure often have questions about how to formally and ethically report their progress on unpublished projects. On the one hand, you want to provide an understandable record of the work you have completed, which may not yet be formally published but might also be well into the publication process. On the other hand, you must guard against any perception that you are attempting to inflate your C.V. or represent unfinished work as finished, or as further along in the publication process than it actually is.

Kreuter reiterates the fundamental rules of the c.v. at the end of the piece:

When listing works under review or that are in progress, the rules can be distilled in three very simple precepts: Be consistent. Follow the norms of your discipline. Don’t inflate or overstate anything.

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